Pressburg attempts to debunk Islam and its founder, Muhammad.
Originally written in German and titled Good Bye Mohammed, (2009) this pseudonymous English translation exemplifies several recent books whose express purpose is to degrade Islam. Pressburg’s book uses linguistics, history and textual analysis to depict Islam as a belief system made from whole cloth. In fact, Pressburg contends that the Prophet Muhammad never even existed. For his linguistic disputation, Pressburg relies on the work of Christoph Luxenberg, who suggests that the Quran was not written in Arabic but in Syro-Aramaic, an early Christian language. From this perspective, Pressburg contends that the 72 virgins promised to male martyrs in paradise are merely a mistranslation of 72 shiny grapes. Using the same translation, Pressburg interprets the word muhamad to be a general honorific referring to Christ, not to a specific man of that name. “There is no doubt,” Pressburg says, “that the term muhamad did not refer to a person but that it was used to denote a title.” Early on, Pressburg also asserts Muslims were in fact only Christians. Such statements do little to establish this work as a piece of objective scholarship; rather, the aim is to erase Muhammad and Islam from history in an argument that, at its core, seems to harbor a deep-seated loathing and rejection of Islam. The warped narrative barely disguises this repugnance behind a facade of reasonable discourse that, despite its less-than-robust nature, actually makes for an intriguing read.
Sparks fly in this fiery attempt to deconstruct Muhammad and erase Islam, if readers believe that fire can burn.