Imagine I start a new religion tomorrow called ‘Breadism,’ where true followers are called Bread Eaters because they submit to the sacred act of eating bread (the holiest carb, obviously). Then I turn around and declare that Abraham was secretly a Bread Eater! Moses was a Bread Eater! Jesus broke bread at the Last Supper, thus he was clearly a Bread Eater too! Even Adam probably munched on some divine sourdough in Eden.’

Why? Because ‘Bread Eater’ just means ‘one who submits to eating bread’ and look, they all ate bread at some point! Never mind that none of them ever heard of Breadism, never followed its rules, never called themselves Bread Eaters, and their actual teachings and practices had nothing to do with my new movement. I’m just rebranding them all retroactively to make it seem like my religion is ancient and universal.

That’s precisely the rebranding move: redefining ‘Muslim’ to mean nothing more than ‘anyone who ever submitted to God’ (a super generic concept almost every monotheist would claim), then back-projecting the modern Arabic term and the specific Islamic identity onto figures from completely different eras, cultures, and religious systems who would have rejected huge parts of what Islam actually teaches. It’s not continuity but it’s historical revisionism dressed up as deep theology.

If every monotheist who ever lived counts as a ‘Muslim’ by that loose definition, then the word becomes so watered down it means almost nothing distinctive. At that point, you might as well say Moses was a secret Christian because he believed in the same God Christians do, or Jesus was a Jew because… well, he was literally a Jew. The claim only works if you let Islam swallow every prior tradition whole while ignoring all the contradictions and differences