The echo chamber

Two methods are at work in this claim, and each refutes itself once it is named.

Confirmation by echo

The sequence described is: read the polemical sites, then read a translation with their claims already in hand, then find the claims “confirmed”. A conclusion carried into the evidence will be found in the evidence. That is what carrying it there accomplishes. Run the same circuit through the classical commentaries and the Muslim scholarship instead, and the circuit “confirms” the opposite. Circularity is indifferent to direction, which is exactly what disqualifies it as a method.

The test of whether a reading was checking or confirming is simple: did the reader ever place the objection next to the tradition’s answer to it? The objections circulating online are old. Nearly all of them are the Orientalist and missionary polemic of a previous century recirculated through newer channels, and the answers have been in print for as long as the objections have. A search that found only one side was not a search.

The anecdote

The second method convicts a billion people on the word of one unnamed man in one room: a husband is reported to have said that Muslims know the religion is nonsense, and the private conviction of the entire ummah is inferred. An anecdote of this kind establishes, at most, what one man said. The claim built on it would require evidence that Muslims generally hold this belief in secret. No such evidence is offered, and the daily, public, costly practice of ordinary Muslims everywhere is evidence in the other direction.

None of this proves the tradition true. It establishes that the reading which felt like discovery was recognition: the reader met an inherited polemic and mistook the meeting for a finding. The honest next step is the one the method skipped, which is to read both shelves.