Why at all Inârah

Why did Inârah or the revisionist school of islamic studies develop at all? What were the reasons for that?

If you wanna know what I’m talking about and how I discovered Inârah, please read my previous article.

Source

In short

It looks like it’s another version of „history is written by the victors“, this time by a cult called Islam. Also very few people on state universities in so-called islamic science bother to critically research. The pay and chair remain safe, if you don’t ask unwelcome questions.

What you will find all over the place - including (English) wikipedia -, is the ‘history’ about Muhammad and the early islamic conquest, told as it is in the traditional literature - meaning islamic literature. This ‘history’ gets then retold by ‘scholars’ and ‘scientists’.
Magical stories inside this very traditional literature(TL) get ignored. Would you grant stories including magic the status of an accurate recount of history? No thinking person would.
Also the small amount of outside accounts for this history via archaeological findings, numismatics or writings get interpreted in favor of Islam, not in favor of truth (the findings often don’t support the TL).

An example (not from Inârah)

Source: Deus concerning the Kaaba in Mekka

[...], followed by Jacob of Edessa around 705 AD who confirmed the emergence of Muslim prayers that were oriented toward the Kaaba in Mecca from the sura The Cow,4 [...]
_{4 Jacob of Edessa (640-708 AD), Letter to John the Stylite (ca. 705 AD) no. 14, fol. 124a, summarized by Wright, Catalogue, 2.604, and translated by Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 173 n. 30: Your question is vain […] for it is not to the south that the Jews pray, nor either do the Muslims (mhaggraye/Muhammadeans)^1. The Jews who live in Egypt, and also the Muslims there, as I saw with my own eyes and will now set out for you, prayed to the east, and still do, both peoples—the Jews toward Jerusalem and the Muslims toward the Ka’ba. And those Jews who are to the south of Jerusalem pray to the north; and those in the land of Babel, in Hira and in Basra^2, pray to the west. And also the Muslims who are there pray to the west, toward the Ka’ba; and those who are to the south of the Ka’ba pray to the north, toward that place. So from all this that has been said, it is clear that it is not to the south that the Jews and Muslims here in the regions of Syria pray, but toward Jerusalem or the Ka’ba, the patriarchal places of their races.}

Emphasis mine.
^1 mhaggraye are to translate Hagarenes as is also shown by the title of the book by Crone and Cook (in the quoted text). Muslim is a description out of our times, mhaggraye are not muslimin; thus all Muslims in the text should be Hagarenes. Something similar you find for Christians in the Quran. Christians are Nazarenes. Better writing would be: Hagarenes (meant are Muslims) and Nazarenes (meant are Christians), not not mentioning those names and giving them the description out of our time instead.
^2 Hira und Basra are in Iraq. From there westward are Jerusalem, Damaskus, Petra, Kairo. Mekka is southwards. Still the (islam-critical!) author - apparently how it is usually - follows the interpretation that with Ka’ba the Kaaba in Mekka has to be meant.

What also may be interesting, names mentioned in the Quran, how often source:

• Abraham (Ibrahim) 79 times, Moses (Musa) 136 times, Aaron (Harun) 20 times
• Jesus (Isa) 24 times, Maria (Maryam) 34 times, Adam (Adam) 25 times, Noah (Nuh) 33 times,
• Muhammad – 4 times
• Pharao (Firàwn) 74times, Prophet(Nabi) 43 times, Messenger / Apostle of Allah(rasul Allah) in different versions > 300 times

Mekka is mentioned 2 times, one of them as Bakka. Medina simply means city/town.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Quran#Origin_according_to_academic_historians

Fred Donner summarized the state of the field as of 2008 in the following terms:[46]
Qur'anic studies, as a field of academic research, appears today to be in a state of disarray. Those of us who study Islam's origins have to admit collectively that we simply do not know some very basic things about the Qur'an – things so basic that the knowledge of them is usually taken for granted by scholars dealing with other texts. They include such questions as: How did the Qur'an originate? Where did it come from, and when did it first appear? How was it first written? In what kind of language was – is – it written? What form did it first take? Who constituted its first audience? How was it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years? When, how, and by whom was it codified? Those familiar with the Qur'an and the scholarship on it will know that to ask even one of these questions immediately plunges us into realms of grave uncertainty and has the potential to spark intense debate. To put it another way, on these basic issues there is little consensus even among the well-trained scholars who work on them.

Please read the above again.
Other critical sources in English wikipedia can be found here (but I couldn’t use the English versions of the German wikipedia articles I used in my German post for this, those (English) nearly lack all criticism and are only retelling of the TL).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Muhammad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Quran

rasm

The earliest versions of Qur'an fragments are written in rasm, meaning without vowels and largely without diacritics/diacritical marks - meaning the points on letters.

The rasm is the oldest part of the Arabic script; it has 18 elements [...]

But out of those 18 letters result 28 letters in the end! (+still lacking vowels).

To summarize

Critical research was long overdue and is still absolutely needed. How we see that part of the 7th and 8th century history will very likely slowly change in the next decades. You could be one of the first to know about it, if you are willing to inform yourself.