110 – EPILEPTIC PROPHET PART 4 | Snorting, Lip-smacking, Amnesia & Personality Changes

This episode is the 4th installment in our series ‘Epileptic Prophet’ in which we tackle the question of Muhammad’s mental health problems and possible epilepsy. Our aim is to provide an alternative explanation of Muhammad’s actions and prophethood from a neurological perspective.  We started off this episode by going through the automatisms that Muhammad experienced while receiving revelation. These include severe convulsions accompanied by face color changes, heavy breathing/ snorting like a camel, excessive sweating as well as trembling/shivering. We also responded to Farid’s ill-informed claim that such experiences never occurred by pointing to various hadith, seerat, and other Islamic literature that show that Muhammad did in fact experience these automatisms. Additionally,  we presented contemporary epilepsy patients who also have similar symptoms during seizures. The conversation then moved on to absence seizures and how they affect epileptic patients. We also presented clips of contemporary patients experiencing absence seizures and we compared their symptoms to the descriptions of Muhammad’s seizures provided in various hadith.  We then discussed dreamy states and religious inspirations that stem from lingering thoughts that epileptic patients experience after seizures. Another topic we touched on was Muhammad’s amnesia and how the people around him erroneously attributed it to black magic attacks. We also discussed how amnesia affected the revelation of the Quran resulting in forgotten verses. We hope you will enjoy this episode and share it with your friends! Support this show: https://abdullahsameer.com/two-abdullahs YouTube version of this series: Part 1: https://youtu.be/WlO4nZUGVf4 Part 2: https://youtu.be/ZI16w6Sl3DE Part 3: https://youtu.be/fD4FyXSN96k Part 4: https://youtu.be/Z-IgOnBCv3U Timestamps: 0:00 Introductions 1:04 Muhammad’s convulsions and shivering, autonomic changes during seizures 6:52 Muhammad snorting like a camel while receiving revelation, moaning like a calf 10:54 Comments from the chat - Does epilepsy make people socially awkward? - personality changes of Muhammad 16:22 Responding to Farid  27:05 Epileptic patients experiencing the snorting sound during seizures 35:53 Muhammad’s face color changes during seizures, contemporary patients with similar symptoms.  38:30 Comments from the chat 46:12 Severe sweating, shaking, and pain while receiving revelation- Responding to Farid  53:53 Dreamy states and religious inspirations from lingering thoughts - Dr. Dede Korkut. 59:15 Channel announcements. 1:00:03 Lip-smacking automatism - responding to Farid 1:08:15 The difficult state of receiving revelation 1:10:20 Epilepsy patient experiencing lip-smacking 1:12:30 Comments from the chat 1:21:00 Absence seizures/ behavioral arrest/ Petit Mal - responding to Farid 1:31:25 Contemporary epilepsy patients experiencing absence seizures 1:33:48 Muhammad’s absence seizures. 1:36:00 Atonic head drop seizures 1:40:20 Comments from the chat 1:44:05 Muhammad’s amnesia and black magic, transient epileptic amnesia.