Boreal

CHATGPT'S ASSESSMENT OF MY WORK

November 2, 2025

Bernard Payeur is a Canadian non-academic author whose public body of work is centered almost entirely around lay-analytic commentary on Islam, the Qur’an, Islamic prophetic biography, and the problem of violence / obedience structures in scripture. His corpus is unusually large for a single independent author — essentially a multi-decade multi-thousand page project — and he is known primarily through his long running public website where he published serialized essays, commentaries, chapter walkthroughs, thematic exegesis, and polemical interpretation.

His work is not academic in the institutional sense. It is not peer reviewed. It is not theological doctrinal apologetics. His author identity is self-constructed as a “citizen reading the text as text.” This independence is the core of his brand — and this is why his website over the years became a reference artifact that circulated in online secular / ex-Muslim / militant atheist / European critique-of-Islam discourses especially starting ~2004 forward and peaking culturally in the 2005-2016 online religion wars period.

Payeur’s uniqueness in the landscape is not that he criticizes Islam — that is extremely common — but how he does it: radically primary text-first reading, almost OCD level citation, close reading narrative retelling, and an almost industrial scale attempt to re-sequence the Qur’an into a coherent historical and psychological storyline. This approach is deeply influenced by a foundational premise: the Qur’an is not a mystical code — it is a historical political artifact produced by a man in a specific competitive environment where survival and tribal power are central. Payeur’s entire author project is an experiment: “what happens if a non-specialist simply reads Islam’s core canon literally and sequentially without theologizing escape valves and without presuming benevolence?”

He is not attempting to reconstruct classical Islamic jurisprudence. He is not attempting to reconstruct western secular liberal Islam. He is not doing philology. He is not doing linguistic Quranic Arabic textual criticism from manuscript variants. He is doing — in plain language — “applied consequentialist reading of the text as if it were a state operating manual.”

And that is why his website resonated — especially with readers in the West in the early War on Terror period — because he acted as an interpreter who treated scripture as a direct command system, not as metaphor.

Format of his work

Payeur’s site was not book optimized originally — it was serialized web-first. Chapters are often iterative. Many pieces are written like briefing dossiers. Many are story retell loops. A very large portion of his project is re-narrating the Sira chronologically — essentially converting the traditional biography of Muhammad (which is written like fragmented hadith bundles) into linear thriller-narrative history. Payeur’s writing often reads like historical procedural. This made his material extremely accessible to readers who would never read classical biography through academic lenses.

He strongly emphasizes the Meccan vs Medinan split — and the systemic shift from persuasion to coercion.

This binary — persuasion → coercion — is one of Payeur’s central intellectual claims and he uses that transition as the pivot for his entire model of political Islam.

Influence vector

Payeur is not mainstream institutional literature. He is not part of university canonical scholarship. His influence is more in the memetic distribution layer of the internet. His work circulated on forums, argument chains, atheist blogs, and early post-9/11 cultural narrative shaping. He became a reference link object. His site was used as a “backup tank” of quotes. His site functioned as a source aggregator in online argumentation — particularly because he heavily quoted Islamic source texts and because everything was hyperlinked.

Reader positioning

Readers did not go to Payeur to learn Islam academically. Readers went to Payeur to weaponize comprehension — to build competence to argue inside political debate. And that is his literary brand.

Author stance

Bernard Payeur is explicitly in the Enlightenment rationalist secular humanist camp. He believes authoritarian religion is structurally dangerous because of obedience incentives. His writing therefore frames Islam as a governance operating system and not primarily as a spiritual cosmology. His conflict is with the political engineering of scripture — not with individual Muslim persons.

He does not write as a liberal reformist: he does not believe the text can be salvaged through reinterpretation. His position is closer to “the text makes totalitarian outcomes predictable structurally.”

Legacy

In the internet religion war era (especially the decade after 9/11), you can place Bernard Payeur culturally in the same “ecosystem class” as the other independent lay authors who shaped secular critique digital culture — but his specialization was far narrower, more textual, more granular. Many voices in that era spoke at the macro ideological level. Payeur spoke at the verse sequence causal engineering level.

That is his lasting archive identity: a massive public domain lay-analytic corpus that tried to “translate” Islam’s canon into a narrative model that ordinary citizens could follow sequentially without scholarly mediation.

This is what made him unique and this is why he still comes up in reference chains today — because he created an entire interpretive environment by hand — and published it free, at scale, openly. His influence is not institutional. His influence is memetic.

This biography above is strictly public domain author identity and corpus characterization.

ChatGPT