The Death of Muhammad’s Islam

Timeline

632 CE — Muhammad’s Death

• No complete Qur’an in bound form; only scattered parchments, bones, and memorized recitations.

• No fixed prayer manual, no codified Sharia, no compiled hadith.

• Islam at this stage is essentially Muhammad’s personal leadership, charisma, and authority holding a tribal coalition together.

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632–661 CE — The Rashidun Period (Caliphs Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali)

• Ridda Wars (Abu Bakr): Islam becomes a military-political entity; dissent is punished as rebellion, not just apostasy.

• ʿUthman’s Qur’an Standardization (~650 CE): Competing Qur’anic readings and dialects destroyed; one official version imposed. Early variants lost forever.
  → Already a departure from Muhammad’s oral, flexible transmission style.

• Ali’s Reign & First Fitna (Civil War): Political factionalism between Muslims emerges — a crack that never closes.

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661–685 CE — The Umayyad Transition

• Muʿawiya establishes dynastic caliphate — political Islam fully replaces prophetic leadership.

• Earliest Islamic inscriptions and coins show minimal Qur’anic content; no mention of the Five Pillars in full.

• Prayer direction (qibla) still varies in some regions — archaeology shows some early mosques not facing Mecca.

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685–705 CE — Abd al-Malik’s Overhaul

• Centralization of Religion:

  • Dome of the Rock built (691 CE) with new Qur’anic-style inscriptions hostile to Christian doctrine.

  • Coins minted with Islamic slogans — first visible state-branding of Islam.

• Qur’anic text begins to resemble the modern version but still not fully standardized; diacritics and vowel marks are later additions.

• Mecca elevated as singular qibla in official policy — earlier diversity erased.

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750–850 CE — Abbasid Consolidation

• Hadith Boom:

  • Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, etc., compile hadith 200+ years after Muhammad.

  • Chains of transmission (isnads) largely unverifiable; massive fabrication to justify sectarian positions.

• Sharia Codification:

  • Four Sunni madhhabs (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali) emerge.

  • Law becomes rigid, formulaic — very different from Muhammad’s ad hoc, situation-based judgments.

• Theology Formalized:

  • Ash’ari and Maturidi schools define orthodoxy; earlier diversity of belief stamped out.

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900–1200 CE — Islam as a Closed Canon

• Qur’an’s consonantal skeleton (rasm) frozen; later vowelization fixed the “canonical” readings (qira’at).

• Anything not matching the official text declared heretical.

• Mystical movements (Sufism) add entirely new spiritual frameworks foreign to early Islam.

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1200 CE → Modern Era

• Islam now functions as a historical reconstruction backed by state orthodoxy and centuries of commentary — not as the living system Muhammad personally led.

• Core claims (“perfect preservation,” “unchanged since Muhammad”) rest entirely on later propaganda, not surviving 7th-century evidence.

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🔍 Logical Summary

1. Premise 1: Muhammad’s Islam can only be what he personally taught, practiced, and enforced in his lifetime.

2. Premise 2: Every surviving source for Islam today is filtered through later political and theological redactions.

3. Premise 3: Core doctrines, texts, and practices were altered, added, or lost entirely in the generations after Muhammad.
   Conclusion: The Islam practiced today is a post-Muhammadan construct — a successor religion wearing the name and symbols of the original.