By Jasu Diaz —
Coins from the earliest “Muslim” leaders suggests they were Christian.
The Sassanians (651 AD) minted coins with crosses, indicating they were Christians. The first caliph of the Umayyads (661 – 680) puts crosses on one side of his coins and Zoroastrian fire on the back.
Then in 692, Islamic consolidator Abd al-Malik mints coins mocking Christianity and including the shahada, provoking a war with the Byzantines, which he wins. In 693, he mints a coin showing the “anointed one” — the MHMD (which Muslims insert vowels to read Mohammad),
In 696, Abd al-Malik mints coins with no images and confronting Trinitarian Christianity: “Say not three for God is one. For God neither begets nor is begotten.” This is language from the sect of Arian, which denied the Trinity.
It Abd al-Malik who erected in 692 AD the Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem, to confront Christians, with the inscription:
O People of the Book! Do not exaggerate in your religion, nor utter anything concerning God except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of God, and His Word which He conveyed unto Mary, and a spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and do not say “Three.” Cease! It is better for you. God is only one God. Far be it from His glory that He should have a son. His is all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth. And God is sufficient as a guardian.
This inscription later becomes Qur’an 4:171, says Dr Jay Smith, a doubter of Islamic history. Muslims say the Qur’anic verse was prior to being inscribed in the Dome of the Rock.
The Arianism doctrines of Abd al-Malik morphed later and crystalized as the doctrines we now associate with Islam under the Abbasids 100 to 200 years later, Smith says.
“All of these coins suggest that there was an internecine clash between different sects within Christianity,” says Smith. “The Trinitarians are headed up by Justinian II versus the anti-Trinitarians headed up by Abd al-Malik in what is today Damascus.”
The word “Islam” was not introduced until 740 AD, and the word “Muslim” was first written in Arabic in 749 AD, Smith says. Previously, the Arabs who fought the Byzantines were known as Saracens, Mahgraye (in Syriac), Magaritai (in Greek), Hagarenes and believers.
“Islam becomes much more of a religion under the Abbasids. — that’s 100 to 200 years later in the 9th and 10th centuries or even later,” Dr. Smith says. “If you just look at the coins, you will see that.
“When you look at all these together, you will see Abd al-Malik introducing and confronting the Trinitarian belief and also the divinity of Jesus,” he says.
Dr. Smith says rock inscriptions say the same things as coins and fit the same time periods.
Dr. Smith’s historical analysis is not universally accepted.
Related content: it was a German who compiled Mohammad’s biography, not Arabs; the Qur’an derived from Syriac Christian influence; did Mohammad even exist? Sources: CIRA, others.
