by Sujit Das
3. How Gabriel could be aggressive towards Muhammad repeatedly, the dearest messenger of Allah? It is recorded in the Qur’an (33.56) that Muhammad was so close to Allah that, even Allah showered praises on Muhammad and the angels saluted him.
None had witnessed the above incident. Later on several times Gabriel visited Muhammad, but nobody else had ever seen this super natural creature. In fact, Muhammad could not give a single proof of the existence of his Allah and Gabriel. If Gabriel existed, at least someone would have seen him or heard him. A real experience can be shared by others, not a hallucinatory experience. But luck favored Muhammad; at least some people around him could not see the fallacy of his story. This is how Muhammad started his divine business of Islam.
This vision in the cave Hira is interpreted differently by various critics. Some believe, it was Satan himself who visited Muhammad in the guise of Gabriel. But leaving aside a superstition-based argument, it might be a command that originated from Muhammad’s own subconscious, as Walker (2002, p. 97) puts forward his argument; possibly, Muhammad’s own subconscious commanded him to read and study the books of Jews and Christians, whose scribes were given pens to write down the truth of God’s dispensation in their scriptures, which the Arabs lacked.
There is another point which is worth mentioning. The first revelation which he received in the cave was a representation of an ancient Semitic tradition of revelation (Shaikh, 1995, p. 6). Moses mediated between God and man and narrated the story of a burning bush which though burnt suffered no consumption at all (Exodus: 3.2). It was the genius of Moses who realized that it was God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob under whose glory such a mysterious event was taking place. Moses did not forget to tell his people that he did not want to be their leader but was acting under duress. Moses told God that he was not willing to be the divine viceroy owing to his stammer and lack of eloquence (Exodus: 4.10). However, he agreed to carry the yoke of authority because his attitude angered the Lord. Thus Moses had no choice but to become God’s viceroy and announced that God had sent him to his people. This way first he found a God for the people, and then appointed himself as God’s messenger to enforce certain commands in the name of his God.
Now let us re-examine Muhammad’s mystic experience and summarize all the facts. In all possibilities; a command originated from his subconscious mind “to read and study”, which mixed up with the amazing story of Hassan and took the model of the Semitic tradition of revelation of Moses. These impressions interacted and commingled with one another, took a strange shape, and surfaced in its manifest form as a vivid hallucination. This resultant impression was so strong that even Muhammad himself could not recognize it. He thought that it was generated from an external supernatural source, Allah.
Hallucinations may occur to normal people in perfectly ordinary circumstances. Various factors like; prolonged fasting, sleeplessness, tumors, sensory deprivation, epileptic seizures, mental fatigue, strong wishful thinking or migraine headaches are the major causes of hallucination. The mechanism within the brain that helps us to distinguish conscious perceptions from internal (often memory-based) perceptions misfires. As a result, hallucinations occur during periods of consciousness and often felt as real experiences. They can appear in the form of visions, voices or sounds, tactile feelings (known as haptic hallucinations), smells, or tastes. They are sought out in many cultures and considered a sign of spiritual enlightenment. There are countless instances in the world’s religions where Patriarchs, Prophets, or Saviors repair themselves in deserts or mountains, and assisted by hunger and sensory deprivation, encounters Gods or demons which are unrelated to outside events. Psychedelic-induced (with hallucinogenic drugs – the yesteryears Hippie culture) religious experiences were a hallmark of the Western youth culture of the 1960s. This experience is often described respectfully by the words such as “transcendent”, “numinous”, “sacred”, “holy” and “out of the world” (Sagan, 1997, p. 105).
There are various signs and symptoms of such complex hallucinations. The most common is rigid muscles – muscle stiffness (rigidity) often occurs in the limbs and neck. Sometimes the stiffness can be so severe that it restricts the size of the movements and causes extreme pain and suffocation (Admin, 2010). In addition, there might be “thought blocking” (a break in the train of thoughts) and “word salad” (an extreme form of incomprehensible speech when one word has no relation to the next) (Compton & Kotwicki, 2007, p. 65). This perfectly explains why his first divine experience was so painful. Muhammad said that the angel caught him (forcefully) and pressed him repeatedly so hard that he could not bear it any more. Actually, Muhammad felt difficulty in breathing which he understood in his hallucination as being chocked by Gabriel. This caused “thought blocking” – the initial confusion between Gabriel and Muhammad that left him terribly shaken. A true God cannot be the author of horrible experience and confusion.
2.4: Traditional Islamic Sources on Muhammad’s Hallucination
“If a delusion is not to be got rid of by reference to reality, no doubt it did not originate from reality either”.
Sigmund Freud
Traditional Islamic sources give us enough evidence that Muhammad regularly hallucinated.
1. Once during the childhood of Muhammad two men in white clothes came to him with a golden basin full of snow. They took him and split open his body, took his heart and split it open and took out from it a black clot which they threw away. Then they washed his heart and his body with that snow until they made them pure (Ishaq: 72).
2. Magic was worked on Muhammad by a Jew and he was bewitched so that he began to imagine doing things which in fact, he had not done. (Bukhari: 7.71.661, 6.60.658; Muslim: 26.5428).
3. Omar asked Muhammad, “Tell me; what is the most amazing saying which your familiar spirit communicated to you?” Muhammad replied, “ He came to me a month before Islam and said: Have you considered the Jinn and the hopelessness and despair of their religion?” (Ishaq: 93).
4. One day two persons came to Muhammad in his dream. One of them asked the other, “What is the ailment of this man?” “ He has been bewitched. He is under the spell of magic.” “Who cast the magic spell?” “A Jew.” “What material did he use? ” “A comb, the hair knotted on it, and the outer skin of the pollen of the male date-palm.” (Bukhari: 4.54.490, 7.71.658).
5. Magic was worked on Muhammad so that he used to think that he had sexual relations with his wives while he actually had not. That is the hardest kind of magic as it has such an effect. (Bukhari: 7.71.660).
6. The stem of a date-palm tree used to cry like a pregnant she-camel, when a pulpit was placed upon it for Muhammad to give a sermon till the time he got down from the pulpit and placed his hand over it (Bukhari: 2.13.41).
7. When Muhammad used to eat, he had seen the foods glorifying Allah (Bukhari: 4.56.779).
8. Muhammad saw Gabriel with six hundred wings. Gabriel can also take the form of a human being (Bukhari: 6.60.380, 4.56.827).
9. Once a tree informed Muhammad that the jinns heard the Qur’an (Bukhari: 5.58.199).
10. When Muhammad was in Mecca, the roof of his house was opened and Gabriel descended, opened his chest, and washed it with zamzam water. Then he brought a golden tray full of wisdom and faith and having poured its contents into his chest he closed it (Bukhari: 1.8.345).
11. Once when Muhammad was offering prayer, Satan came in front of him and tried to interrupt his prayer, but Allah gave Muhammad an upper hand; he choked him. Muhammad thought of tying the Satan to one of the pillars of the mosque until Muslims get up in the morning and see the Satan. But Allah made the Satan return with his head down (humiliated). (Bukhari: 2.22.301).
12. Muhammad had even seen the future. On the Day of Resurrection, the sun will come near (to the people) to such an extent that the sweat will reach up to the middle of the ears, so, when all the people are in that state, they will ask Adam for help, and then Moses, and when everyone is failed, they will come to Muhamm
ad. (Bukhari: 2.24.553).
13. Muhammad could hear the voices of the dead persons in their grave. Once he went through the graveyards of Medina and heard the voices of two humans who were being tortured in their graves. By hearing the conversation between two dead people he said, “ They are being punished, but they are not being punished because of a major sin, yet their sins are great. One of them used not to save himself from (being soiled with) the urine, and the other used to go about with calumnies ”. Then he asked for a green palm tree leaf and split it into two pieces and placed one piece on each grave, saying, “ I hope that their punishment may be abated as long as these pieces of the leaf are not dried”. (Bukhari: 8.73.81).
14. Dead bodies could listen to Muhammad’s words, but they could not answer (Ishaq: 306; Bukhari: 5.59.314-7).
15. Muhammad heard the sound of torture of the Jews in their graves. (Muslim: 40.6861)
16. When Muhammad looked at Allah, he saw Allah as a light (Muslim: 1.341, 342).
17. Muhammad saw the signs of Allah in a green screen covering the horizon. (Bukhari: 6.60.381).
18. Muhammad saw the display of paradise and hell on the wall of a mosque facing the Ka’ba. (Bukhari: 1.12.716).
19. Muhammad could see in front and behind of him. (Muslim: 4.853, 854, 855, 856).
20. Once Gabriel brought a kettle from which Muhammad ate and gained the power of sexual intercourse equal to forty men (Ibn Sa’d: Volume 1).
21. Muhammad heard Bilal’s footsteps in paradise in front of him (Bukhari: 2.21.250).
22. Muhammad saw a man dragging his intestine in paradise (Muslim: 40.6838)
According to Ali Dasti (cited Islam-Watch, 2007), while wandering around the lonely spots near Mecca, Muhammad used to hear voices.
In the days before the appointment, whenever Mohammad walked beyond the houses of Mecca to relieve nature’s demands, and as soon as the houses disappeared behind the bends in the path, a voice saying ‘Peace upon you, O Apostle of God!’ rang out from every rock and tree that he passed. But when the Apostle looked to one side or the other, he did not see anybody. There were only rocks and trees around him.
Muhammad’s hallucinations were both auditory and visual. Probably he was also suffering from schizophrenia. The Arabs used to think that magic had worked upon him. It does not reflect well on Muhammad. If magic could work upon him, it means Allah had failed to protect His messenger. Neither the stem of a palm tree can cry like a she-camel nor can food glorify anyone while being eaten. A creature with six hundred wings is tough to imagine. Such a creature is less divine and more comical. It is impossible to open a heart without surgery. Dead people cannot talk, rocks are of course inanimate, and trees do not have vocal cords. The story is so repugnant to reason that many later theologians disbelieved it and maintained that the voices were voices of angels. All these tales were believed by the seventh century Arabs, but today we know for certain that Muhammad was hallucinating.
On certain occasions Muhammad entertained suicidal thoughts. Once when revelations stopped, Muhammad proceeded to climb a mountain and throw himself down and die. But Gabriel stopped him halfway up to the mountain and proclaimed, “ O Muhammad! You are the Messenger of Allah, and I am Gabriel”. He looked upwards and saw Gabriel in the form of a man putting his legs on the horizon. Gabriel called him again. Muhammad stopped in his place as if he was hypnotized. He tried to shift his eyes away from him, but towards whatever region of the sky he looked, he saw Gabriel as before. If we want to make some sense out of this divine confusion, we have to conclude that the image what Muhammad saw was actually in his own head (Sina, 2008, p. 110). So in whatever direction he turned his head Gabriel appeared in that direction.
Once while walking, Muhammad heard a voice from the sky. When he looked up, he saw Gabriel sitting on a chair between the sky and earth (Bukhari: 6.60.448). But we can find a flaw in this story. Muhammad had seen that Gabriel had 600 wings. Logically, a creature which has wings does not need a chair to sit to float between sky and earth. Furthermore, if the Gabriel can really sit in between sky and earth, why nobody saw him? Hallucinations are deceptive lies, and the worst part of lying is that the liar tends to forget what he had said before.
Muhammad sincerely took all these hallucinations as signs of divinity. By seeing his sincerity, many of the feebleminded followers believed him. But many intelligent Meccans recognized that he was mentally ill. Timely, Allah certified his hallucinations as divine inspiration as in the following two Qur’anic verses.
Certainly he saw of the greatest signs of his Lord. (Q: 53.18).
And your comrade is not mad. Surely he beheld Him on the clear horizon. (Q: 81.22, 23).
Muhammad was not an original thinker. He simply did not know how to have a logical and organized thinking. Bits and pieces he had learnt here and there about Christianity and Judaism, and based on this, his handicapped brain worked overtime and produced those hallucinations. But, once Allah stamped them in the Qur’an, the hallucinations became heavenly. Allah’s authority is so strong that no Muslim is capable of questioning them ever since the birth of Islam. For them the belief comes before the understanding. As Dasti (cited Warraq, 1995, p. 4) lamented, “ Belief can blunt human reason and common sense”. All they have to do is to believe. Logic and understanding have no value at all. It never occurred to their brains that the voice might have been the voice of Muhammad’s own disturbed mind.
2.5: Muhammad’s Famous Night Journey
Muhammad’s famous night journey (al-Isra andal-Mi’raj) with Gabriel to Jerusalem and then to heavens was a dream-hallucination. Buraq, a white animal, half mule, half donkey, with a human head and with wings (some enthusiastic Muslim sources even add the tail of a peacock) carried Muhammad on her back. Muhammad and Gabriel went their way until they arrived at the temple at Jerusalem where he found Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, along with a company of Prophets and acted as their imam in prayer. After prayer, Buraq took him to each of the heavens till the seventh heaven and he received royal treatment in each of the heavens.
Muslims go out of their way to give some credibility to this stupid story. The stupidest part of the story is that when Muhammad allegedly visited the temple in Jerusalem, there was no temple in Jerusalem. About six centuries before al-Buraq took flight, the Romans had already destroyed it. By 70 A.D not a single stone was left on another. According to Bible, the Temple of Solomon was built around tenth century BC. The Dome of the Rock was raised on the foundations of the Roman Temple of Jupiter in 691 and the al-Aqsa mosque was constructed over a Roman basilica on the southern end of the Temple Mount in 710 by the Umayyads (Sina, 2008, p. 120). So if there was no temple then which temple did he visit, unless we conclude that the whole incident was a hallucinatory experience?
And then, what about the divine animal Buraq – the half mule, half donkey white animal with a human head? This divine transportation system of Allah had wings on its sides with which it propelled its feet, putting down each forefoot at the limit of its sight. Buraq does not resemble to any animal known to humankind – half mule, half donkey with a human head – what a poor and idiotic expression. Such a creature, if ever existed, would resemble more to Muhammad himself than anything else. In Islamic scriptures there is no shortage of stupidity. If he had a creative brain, he would have seen something better in his hallucination.
However, Muhammad had seen angels in the heavens. The Egyptian Muslim scholar and historian, Haykal (1976, Chapter 8) describes Muhammad’s heavenly experience as follows,
The first heaven was of pure silver and the stars suspended from its vault by chains of gold; in each one an angel lay awake to prevent the demons from climbing into the holy dwelling places and the spirits from listening indiscreetly to celestial secrets.
This is the height of Islamic stupidity. All these nonsense used to fascinate the seventh century illiterate Arabs, but today, anyone with a little knowledge in astronomy will laugh at these bizarre tales. Ishaq wrote,
After
the completion of my business in Jerusalem, a ladder was brought to me finer than any I have ever seen. An angel was in charge of it and under his command were 12,000 angels each of them having 12,000 angels under his command . (Ishaq: 184)
It is hard to imagine that 144,000,000 angels are holding a ladder. Haykal continued with Muhammad’s divine experience at different levels in the heaven,
There [in the first heaven] Muhammad greeted Adam. And in the six other heavens the Prophet met Noah, Aaron, Moses, Abraham, David, Solomon, Idris (Enoch), Yahya (John the Baptist) and Jesus.
He saw the Angel of Death, Azrail, so huge that his eyes were separated by 70,000 marching days. He commanded 100,000 battalions and passed his time in writing in an immense book the names of those dying or being born.
He saw the Angel of Tears, who wept for the sins of the world; the Angel of Vengeance with brazened face, covered with warts, who presides over the elements of fire and sits on a throne of flames; and another immense angel made up half of snow and half of fire surrounded by a heavenly choir continually crying: `O God, Thou hast united snow and fire, united all Thy servants in obedience to Thy Laws’.
The divine stupidity of al Mi’raj is again at its peak. The angel of death, angel of tears and angel of vengeance were the products of Muhammad’s hallucination. Is it possible to imagine a creature made up half of snow and half of fire? Such distorted thoughts lead to stress to a healthy mind. In the seventh heaven, he saw such a strange creature which cannot be even envisioned. Haykal continues,
In the seventh heaven where the souls of the just resided was an angel larger than the entire world, with 70,000 heads; each head had 70,000 mouths, each mouth had 70,000 tongues and each tongue spoke in 70,000 different idioms singing endlessly the praises of the Most High .
It is not only difficult but also stressful to visualize a creature like this. How did he know that the angel was larger than the world? How did he count the creature’s number of heads, mouths, tongues, etc., when he was believed to be illiterate? Why Allah created such a horrible beast? Why Allah allowed the beast to enter paradise, while it was supposed to be in hell? After seeing the absurdities of Muhammad’s night journey, many of his followers left Islam. To save Muhammad from further humiliation, Allah revealed,