Al Fadi and Jay Smith finally decide to debate the merit of 'oral tradition' concerning the historical sources for Islam's origins.
Jay takes the side of Islam, while Al Fadi takes the side of Christianity, confronting the lack of evidence for any 7th century sources for Islam's prophet Muhammad, or for their book the Qur'an, or for their city Mecca.
Jay's response was to simply say that everything that Al Fadi had to point out against the sources for Islam's origins was based on silence, and "the absence of evidence does not necessarily prove the evidence of absence", suggesting that just because there was no evidence from the seventh century, this didn't necessarily prove anything, because in time that evidence would emerge; we just needed to be patient.
Al Fadi's comeback was to remind Jay that the only evidence he had as a Muslim was based on writings that were 200 to 300 years too late, proving that everything Muslims had to support their book, their man, and their place, came from oral tradition; which is the weakest form of authority.
And the reason is that oral tradition is like a children's game called "Chinese whispers", where one child tells the next child a secret, which was then told to the next child, and so on, until the last child says what he or she has heard, and the group compares the first statement with the last statement, which is always very different.
If these kinds of differences occur in just a period of 15 minutes, imagine how they would change over a period of 200 to 300 years, amongst people who had an enormous incentive to either create or embellish everything they heard from the previous orator, because it had to do with the man who created their religion, and who was their paradigm, or their model. They would only pass on what they felt would help their cause, and filter out anything that was damaging or embarrassing. But no one would know because there was no "paper trail", since none of it was written down to incriminate them.
Jay tried to respond by saying it didn't really matter, because we could trust the list of 'isnads' (i.e. the list of names of those who orated each statement, known as 'matn'), since every one of those names were men of good repute.
Al Fadi's response was to point out that, regardless of how authoritative or moral any of the list of names were, no one knew what any of those men actually said, because they never wrote anything down. All we have today is what people like Ibn Hisham and Al Bukhari wrote down, believing that what they wrote came from those men, though they had not themselves met or heard any of these men.
What's more, there was no reason to depend on oral traditions, because writing was quite common at that time. We have a myriad of examples of writings from that time period, and from that territory, proving that Muslims should possess these written documents. Thus, they can no longer hide behiind oral tradition as an excuse.
By the end of the debate, it was clear that Al Fadi had won the debate, as Jay really had no responses to these accusations.
In conclusion we find that these much later Islamic sources are extremely problematic for the authenticity of the religion of Islam as a whole to stand on; yet as Al Fadi has revealed in this episode and with this debate, Islam is built on nothing more than a foundation of sand.
Because the sources originate far too late after the life of Muhammad, and come from much too far to the north - away from where all these events supposedly took place, should anyone place their faith and salvation in a religion that contains such a lack of evidence?
© Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, Dec.21, 2022
(69,400) Music: "Joy at Work" by Musiclfiles, from filmmusic-io
