Not knowing your enemy

No column in the Guardian today, but I notice that Polly has contributed to the May/June issue of Progress magazine in the form of a column called Any Questions. From that column come this question and answer:

If you were able to spend an hour with one dead, historical figure, who would it be and what would you ask them?

Abraham – Could you be dissuaded from founding three world religions which will cause more bloodshed and despair for more millennia than you could possibly imagine?

Founding? Really? Inspiring, maybe. Being a central figure in the development of, maybe. But founding? Is it really believable that a day or two after his death one could have asked any of his contemporaries what they thought of Christianity or of Islam?

UPDATE: There now appears to be a Polly column on CommentisFree.com, though not on the main Guardian site. Apologies, fact check to follow.