by Sujit Das
During late eighth or early ninth century, a short work was composed probably in southern Spain by an anonymous writer, known as Ystoria de Mahomet where Muhammad was called as “a son of Darkness” who stole some Christian teaching and claimed to be a Prophet. He put together an absurd farrago of doctrine delivered to him by a vulture claiming to be the angel Gabriel. He was a slave to lust and incited his followers to war, which he justified by laws for which he falsely claimed divine inspiration. He foretold his resurrection after his death but in the event his body was fittingly devoured by dogs (Wolf, 1990, pp. 97-9). This anonymous author, like the John of Damascus, was very knowledgeable of Islam. He was well-versed with the Qur’an and often gave fairly recondite references from this book.
In a Christian work named Doctrina Jacobi Nuper Baptizati (the teaching of Jacob the newly-baptized) a tract of anti-Jewish literature written in dialogue form composed probably in Palestine round about the time of the surrender of Jerusalem. At one point the following words were attributed to one of the speakers, Abraham, a Palestinian Jew (Fletcher, 2003, pp. 16-7),
A false Prophet has appeared among the Saracens… They say that the Prophet has appeared coming with the Saracens, and is proclaiming the advent of the anointed one who is to come. I, Abraham referred to the matter to an old man very well-versed with the scriptures. I asked him: ‘What is your view; master and teacher, of the Prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?’ He replied groaning mightily: ‘He is an imposter. Do the Prophets come with sword and chariot? Truly these happenings today are works of disorder… But you go off, Master Abraham, and find out about the Prophet who has appeared.’ So I, Abraham, made enquiries, and was told by those who had met him: ‘There is no truth to be found in the so-called Prophet, only bloodshed; for he says he has the keys of Paradise, which is incredible’.
Muhammad’s prophetic life can be divided into two distinctive periods, the Meccan period and Medinan period. During the first period i.e., Meccan period, he was a simple preacher and warner. But his preaching was clearly, from the worldly point of view, an utter failure, and as a result of thirteen years of propaganda he had won no more than a handful of converts. But the scene completely changed at Medina where he gained in power and his message lost the beauty. Here he was what one might simply call a robber chief. After conquering Mecca, he entered as a political leader rather than a religious leader, and was recognized by Meccans as such. So he was changing his color as situation dictated. Throughout his prophetic mission, he dealt with Jews and Christians keeping strict political aims in mind. At the initial stage, Islam was an absurd truth claim like a practical joke but afterwards it became serious. So while estimating the significance of Muhammad, we should not judge him solely as a mystic or religious reformer, though he may have the elements of both; rather as a ruthless politician and opportunist pressed with peculiar political problems amongst barbarous people and at a critical moment of history.
Therefore the picture that emerges of the Prophet in these traditional accounts is not at all favorable to Muhammad. Muslims cannot complain that this representation of their beloved Prophet was drawn by an enemy. The early Arabs did not believe in his prophetic claim and Muhammad was taken aback when those intellectuals pointed to the weaknesses of the Qur’an. They fell heavily on Muhammad and demanded answers and explanations to the irrationalities they spotted in the Qur’an, but Muhammad stood there wordless and powerless like a fool. By seeing the irrationalities, there was large scale apostasy. Many early Muslims lacked any deep religious sense; they were opportunists and wanted only worldly successes. Many confessed their belief but had no inclination towards Islam and its dogma and ritual. It was not faith in Allah, but the greed and unbridled carnality that led the army of Islam from victory to victory. The Bedouins, who knew nothing but the poverty-stricken life of the desert, were prime targets for anyone who offered an escape from their misery, even if it meant death to attain it. Therefore, they accepted Muhammad’s nonsense as heavenly revelations. If things went wrong, the Bedouins were ready to drop the new faith as quickly as they had adopted it. It is estimated that at the death of Muhammad the number who really converted to Muhammad’s doctrine did not exceed a thousand (Warraq, 2003, p. 41). Present day cult leaders perform much better than Muhammad.
Many people rejoiced hearing the news of Muhammad’s death. In the city of Hadramaut (Yemen) Twenty-six women marked the occasion of Prophet’s demise by staining their hands with henna, a practice associated with festivities, and played on the tambourine (a shallow, handheld drum made of a circular wooden frame with a calfskin or plastic drumhead stretched across the top), thinking that Muhammad’s demise signaled a return to their former spiritual traditions. Historians called them The Harlots of Hadramaut. This embarrassing incident is recorded in Ibn Habib al-Baghdadi’s book, Kitab al-Muhabbar. Two Muslim leaders reported the event to Caliph Abu Bakr. Following his order, those twenty-six women were punished in a gruesome manner and that by having their hands chopped off (Ahmed, 2006, pp. 182-3). This incident linked woman and song with blasphemous behavior.
The Qur’an itself confirms that there were Arab skeptics in Mecca who did not accept the “fables” recounted by Muhammad. Those skeptics certainly had every right to do so. They even accused him of plagiarizing the pagan Arab poets. Some verses were attributed to al-Qays (Imra’ul Qays) a famous pre-Islamic Arabian poet (Warraq, 2003, p. 41). Muhammad stole several poems of this poet and added them to his Qur’an. It was the custom of the orators and the poets to hang up the composition of their literary work upon the Ka’ba. One day, Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad was repeating two passages from Sabaa Mu’allaqat. Suddenly she met the daughter of Imra’ul Qays, who cried out (Warraq, 1998, pp. 235-6), “ O that’s what your father had taken from one of my father’s poems and calls it something that has come down to him out of heaven”. Even today this story is told amongst the Arabs. The Qur’anic plagiarism is so prominent that Muslims cannot deny this. But how can they explain this incident? Did the poems of Imra’ul Qays were also divinely inspired like Qur’an?
1.5: Discrediting Muhammad using the Modern-day Sources
The prime target of the Western censor has been the founder of Islam himself. Michael Hart in his book, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History places Muhammad at the very top of the list (cited Sina, 2008, p. 5), but he did not mention if the influence was positive or negative, as Walker (2002, p. 312) lamented, “[there is] no great figure in history, who is so poorly appreciated and no great religious leader so maligned in Western writings as Muhammad”.
Ernst (2005, p. 11) concluded, “It is safe to say that no religion has such a negative image in Western eyes as Islam”. It is useless to engage in competition between religious stereotypes, but one can certainly see Gandhi and his advocacy of nonviolence as a positive image of Hinduism, and Dalai Lama with his amazing positive and widespread recognition as a representative of Buddhism, and likewise, Mother Teresa or Pope of Christianity. In this respect, Islam certainly lacks any such influential figure though Muslims are the majority population in some fifty countries. Muslims from all over the world are feared as terrorists in the Western world which is neither a propaganda nor misunderstanding; it is simply the truth. And, as Shaikh (1995, p. 4) commented, “The greatness of the leader depends upon the quality of his follower”, surely this poor image of Muslims does not reflect well on Muhammad.
In 1843, a work on the life of Muhammad, based on historical analysis, was published by Gustav Weil. He put forward the idea that Muhammad was suffering from epilepsy. Aloys Sprenger, a German physician, supported Weil. According to Sprenger, he was also a psychopath (Schimmel, 1985, p. 248). Another author, Franz Buhl, described that in his Medinan phase, Muhammad revealed the ugly side of his character – cruelty, dishonesty, untrustworthiness; someone whose leading principle was “the end justifies the means” (Warraq, 1995, pp. 86, 89). Another two prominent scholars, Margoliouth and Macdonald, bel
ieved (cited Walker, 2002, p. 315) that Muhammad’s seizures were artificially produced; those acts were merely a device by which he secured sanction for his revelations.
Muir’s work on Muhammad was based on original Muslim sources, and published between 1856 and ‘61. Muir was specialized in debating Muslim clerics and entertained the suggestion that Muhammad was inspired by the devil. He also adopted the more scientific criticism (originally advanced by the Sprenger) that Muhammad’s prophetic experiences were due to epilepsy (Ernst, 2005, p. 22). In his work, Muir had passed a judgment on Muhammad’s character that was repeated over and over again by subsequent scholars. According to him, Muhammad though religiously motivated during Meccan period, showed his “feet of clay” during Medinan period where he was corrupted by power and worldly ambitions (Warraq, 1995, p. 87). The inconsistencies in Muhammad’s character was specifically pointed out by Muir, “ He justified himself by ‘revelations’ releasing himself in some cases from social proprieties and the commonest obligations of self restraint ”.
It is of course shocking that Muhammad transformed to a bandit chieftain, who was unwilling to earn an honest living after he gained power at Medina, as Caetani (cited Warraq, 1995, p. 88) observed, “ If Muhammad deviated from the path of his early years, that should cause no surprise; he was a man as much as, and in like manner as, his contemporaries, he was a member of a still half-savage society deprived of any true culture, and guided solely by instincts and natural gifts which were decked out by badly understood and half-digested religious doctrines of Judaism and Christianity”.
Perhaps, Margoliouth did the most brilliant study of the life of Muhammad that has yet appeared. According to Margoliouth, Muhammad was a patriot, keenly alive to the opportunities of his time. Islam was created as a method to unite the Arabs and make them a strong military force. In this process the religious appeal played an important part but there was also a complete absence of moral scruple. On the success of Muhammad, Margoliouth commented that Muhammad’s success was not due to the objective truth of the Qur’an but to his skill as an organizer and military leader. Muhammad was thoroughly familiar with the shortcomings of the Arabs and utilized them to the utmost advantage, and he was able to seize opportunities and distrusted loyalty when not backed by interest.
Hume referred to Muhammad as a “pretended Prophet” and commented, “[The Qur’an is a] wild and absurd performance”. Hobbes wrote (cited Hitchens, 2007, p. 17), “… to set up his new religion, [Muhammad] pretended to have conferences with the Holy Ghost in form of a dove ”. Also, Gibbon (1941, p. 240) concluded that Muhammad’s claim that he was the apostle of God was “a necessary fiction”. Will Durant believed that Muhammad was a conscious fraud and concluded (1950, p. 176), “ Muhammad felt that no moral code would win obedience adequate to the order and vigor of a society unless men believed the code to have come from God ”. Carlyle wrote, “His Qur’an has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not believe like him that God wrote that” (Warraq, 1995, pp. 10, 24). Becker, yet another prominent critic, commented (1909, p. 29) that the companions of Muhammad had very little interest in religion and most of them were utterly ignorant about the fundamental tenets of the religion preached by him. For those early Muslims, as Becker commented, “ … the new religion was nothing more than a party cry of unifying power, though there is no reason to suppose that it was not a real moral force in the life of Muhammad and his immediate contemporaries”. Elsewhere Becker (cited Warraq, 2000, p. 554) concluded, “ … bursting of the Arabs beyond their native peninsula was, like earlier irruptions in which the religious element was totally lacking due to economic necessities ”.
Anwar Shaikh completely discredited Muhammad. According to him (1995, p. 24), Muhammad had a strong dominance urge. He was not a Prophet but the builder of an Arab empire and this was an integral part of his supposed to be prophethood. Islam was built around the sanctity and significance of his own person which he had achieved by various means. Islam is an Arab national movement and Muhammad was possibly the greatest national leader born anywhere on earth. Also, Qur’an is highly contradictory. Thus instead of leading, it misleads the people. Prophethood has nothing to do with guidance; it is simply a political doctrine. Shaikh (1995, pp. 6, 12) commented, “ God’s messenger is God’s servant by name only. In practice he is God’s superior… Islam is less a religion and more an Arab national movement ”.
Rodinson, the latest biographer of Muhammad, believed that Muhammad really did experience sensory phenomena translated into words and phrases which he interpreted as messages from God, and subsequently he developed an idea of receiving those messages in a particular way. These experiences were Muhammad’s hallucinations. Muhammad was sincere but sincerity is not a proof. At Medina this inspired visionary transformed into an imposter. Rodinson (1980, pp. 218-9) commented, “ [Muhammad was] driven by necessity to produce a convenient revelation at the appropriate moment and at no other, in the way the mediums have been known to resort to fraud in similar cases ”.
Before last century, there was hardly any Hindu evaluation, neither of the Prophet and his Qur’an nor even of Islamic doctrine in general. The first detailed criticism of Islam, the Prophet and in particular of the Qur’an was done by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Vedic reform movement Arya Samaj, in 1875. Dayananda was a freethinker. In his literary work, he mainly focused on the Qur’anic contradictions, irrational beliefs and inhumane injunctions in the Islamic scriptures. Dayananda (cited Smith, 2009) wrote,
Having thus given a cursory view of the Qur’an I lay it before the sensible persons, with the purpose that they should know what kind of book the Qur’an is. If they ask me, I have no hesitation to say that it cannot be the work either of God or of a learned man, nor it can be a book of knowledge.
The Qur’an is the result of ignorance, the source of animalization of human being, a fruitful cause of destroying peace, an incentive to war, a propagator of hostility amongst men and a promoter of suffering in society.
Dayananda had equally criticized the negative sides of Hinduism; e.g., caste system, untouchability, widow marriage, etc. Later, Arya Samaj criticism of the Prophet typically focused on his dictatorial and immoral personal behavior, like Rangila Rasul (literally, the playboy Prophet) written by Rajpal which highlighted Muhammad’s abnormal sexual preferences. Rajpal was later stabbed to death by a Muslim fanatic. Christian critics, no matter how fiercely criticize Muhammad, usually appreciate at least Prophet’s belief in monotheism which never impressed these Hindu authors.
Swami Vivekananda, a well-known Hindu monk and social reformer, was another original thinker who had questioned the nature of Muhammad’s leadership with the nature of his prophethood. According to him, Muhammad had to be ruthless in imposing adherence to his belief in his own divine mission because this belief could not stand on its own, based as it was on a delusion. He offered one hypothesis of what had happened to Muhammad so as to make him believe in his own selection as God’s sole living spokesman. Muhammad, as Vivekananda (1947, p. 184) believed, used to practice Yoga – an ancient form of Hindu-Buddhist meditation. But he was unaware of the dangers of experimenting with Yoga without competent guidance. As a result his brain was deranged.
Gisbertus Voetius, a seventeenth century Dutch Calvinist theologian cherished the same view of Vivekananda. Voetius believed that Muhammad suffered from mental disturbance which was a result of his improper meditative experiments. The Hindu Yoga manuals emphatically warn against wrongly practicing the techniques of Hatha Yoga. The practices of Yoga produce excellent result if used properly and under efficient guidance and certain precautions. But if the protective measures are neglected then it may cause brain damage. As example; Pranayama (breath control or control of the vital energies), if practiced improperly, can impair the nerve systems, and the very foundation of a healthy body and sound mind is shaken causing much harm to the person (Iyengar, 1976, p. 434). This may cause hallucination. The learner, in a
state of hallucination, may experience some mystic phenomena, which he may think as “certain states of consciousness” or some kind of “enlightenment”. But in reality these are serious delusions – both auditory and visual. The most typical among these is megalomania; witness the self-importance of the religious gurus and messiahs in the modern cult scene. Similarly, Kundalini Yoga is also very ill-reputed. If practiced in proper manner, the person can attain such a state when he can even manipulate the “force” or “energy” of the universe in his favor. In Kundalini Yoga, the person deliberately induces a psychotic state on himself, but for an unstable person this may easily lead to real psychosis. Hindu Yogis and Masters had warned the learners repeatedly on this topic.
In a speech given at London on November 17, 1896, Vivekananda said, “One religion may ordain something very hideous. For instance, the Mohammedan (Islam) religion allows Mohammedans to kill all who are not of their religion. It is clearly stated in the Koran, ‘Kill the infidels if they do not become Mohammedans’. They must be put to fire and sword. Now if we tell a Mohammedan that this is wrong, he will naturally ask, ‘How do you know that? How do you know it is not good? My book says it is’”. In another speech given in the Universalist Church, Pasadena, California, on January 28, 1890, he said, “In this line the Mohammedans were the best off; every step forward was made with the word the Koran in the one hand and the sword in the other. Take the Koran, or you must die; there is no alternative”.
The famous historian of international reputation, author, researcher and an expert of Islamic history of India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870 - 1958) mainly focused on the intolerant attitude of Islam. According to him (1972, pp. 163, 164, 169),
The murder of infidels is counted a merit in a Muslim. It is not necessary for him to grow a rich growth in spirituality. All he needs to do is to slay a certain class of his fellow-beings [infidels] or plunder their lands and wealth and this act itself will raise his soul to heaven. A religion, where followers are taught to regard robbery and murder as religious duty, is incompatible with the progress of mankind or with the peace of the world.