Balancing the Prophet

By Karen Armstrong

Published: April 27 2007 15:43 | Last updated: April 27 2007 15:43

Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet
Muhammad as a sinister figure. During the 12th century, Christians were
fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims, even though Jesus had told his
followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. The scholar
monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who
established the false religion of Islam by the sword. They also, with ill-
concealed envy, berated him as a lecher and sexual pervert at a time
when the popes were attempting to impose celibacy on the reluctant
clergy. Our Islamophobia became entwined with our chronic anti-
Semitism; Jews and Muslims, the victims of the crusaders, became the
shadow self of Europe, the enemies of decent civilisation and the
opposite of ”us”.

Our suspicion of Islam is alive and well. Indeed, understandably perhaps,

it has hardened as a result of terrorist atrocities apparently committed in
its name. Yet despite the religious rhetoric, these terrorists are
motivated by politics rather than religion. Like ”fundamentalists” in other
traditions, their ideology is deliberately and defiantly unorthodox. Until
the 1950s, no major Muslim thinker had made holy war a central pillar of
Islam. The Muslim ideologues Abu ala Mawdudi (1903-79) and Sayyid
Qutb (1906-66), among the first to do so, knew they were proposing a
controversial innovation. They believed it was justified by the current
political emergency.

The criminal activities of terrorists have given the old western prejudice
a new lease of life. People often seem eager to believe the worst about
Muhammad, are reluctant to put his life in its historical perspective and
assume the Jewish and Christian traditions lack the flaws they attribute
to Islam. This entrenched hostility informs Robert Spencer’s misnamed
biography The Truth about Muhammad, subtitled Founder of the World’s
Most Intolerant Religion.

Spencer has studied Islam for 20 years, largely, it seems, to prove that it
is an evil, inherently violent religion. He is a hero of the American right
and author of the US bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam.
Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read.
Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic
and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is
impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life.
Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more
damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.

The traditions of any religion are multifarious. It is easy, therefore, to

quote so selectively that the main thrust of the faith is distorted. But
Spencer is not interested in balance. He picks out only those aspects of
Islamic tradition that support his thesis. For example, he cites only
passages from the Koran that are hostile to Jews and Christians and does
not mention the numerous verses that insist on the continuity of Islam
with the People of the Book: ”Say to them: We believe what you believe;
your God and our God is one.”

Islam has a far better record than either Christianity or Judaism of

appreciating other faiths. In Muslim Spain, relations between the three
religions of Abraham were uniquely harmonious in medieval Europe. The
Christian Byzantines had forbidden Jews from residing in Jerusalem, but
when Caliph Umar conquered the city in AD638, he invited them to return
and was hailed as the precursor of the Messiah. Spencer doesn’t refer to
this. Jewish-Muslim relations certainly have declined as a result of the
Arab-Israeli conflict, but this departs from centuries of peaceful and
often positive co-existence. When discussing Muhammad’s war with
Mecca, Spencer never cites the Koran’s condemnation of all warfare as an
”awesome evil”, its prohibition of aggression or its insistence that only
self-defence justifies armed conflict. He ignores the Koranic emphasis on
the primacy of forgiveness and peaceful negotiation: the second the
enemy asks for peace, Muslims must lay down their arms and accept any
terms offered, however disadvantageous. There is no mention of
Muhammad’s non-violent campaign that ended the conflict.

People would be offended by an account of Judaism that dwelled

exclusively on Joshua’s massacres and never mentioned Rabbi Hillel’s
Golden Rule, or a description of Christianity based on the bellicose Book
of Revelation that failed to cite the Sermon on the Mount. But the
widespread ignorance about Islam in the west makes many vulnerable to
Spencer’s polemic; he is telling them what they are predisposed to hear.
His book is a gift to extremists who can use it to ”prove” to those
Muslims who have been alienated by events in Palestine, Lebanon and
Iraq that the west is incurably hostile to their faith.

Eliot Weinberger is a poet whose interest in Islam began at the time of

the first Gulf war. His slim volume, Muhammad, is also a selective
anthology about the Prophet. His avowed aim is to ”give a small sense of
the awe surrounding this historical and sacred figure, at a time of the
demonisation of the Muslim world in much of the media”. Many of the
passages he quotes are indeed mystical and beautiful, but others are
likely to confirm some readers in their prejudice. Without knowing their
provenance, how can we respond to such statements as ”He said that he
who plays chess is like one who has dyed his hand in the blood of a pig”
or ”Filling the stomach with pus is better than stuffing the brain with
poetry”?

It is difficult to see how selecting only these dubious traditions as

examples could advance mutual understanding. The second section of
this anthology is devoted to anecdotes about Muhammad’s wives that
smack of prurient gossip. Western readers need historical perspective to
understand the significance of the Prophet’s domestic arrangements, his
respect for his wives, and the free and forthright way in which they
approached him. Equally eccentric are the stories cited by Weinberger to
describe miracles attributed to the Prophet: the Koran makes it clear that
Muhammad did not perform miracles and insists that he was an ordinary
human being, with no divine powers.

It is, therefore, a relief to turn to Barnaby Rogerson’s more balanced and

nuanced account of early Muslim history in The Heirs of the Prophet
Muhammad. Rogerson is a travel writer by trade; his explanation of the
Sunni/Shia divide is theologically simplistic, but his account of the
rashidun, the first four ”rightly guided” caliphs who succeeded the
Prophet, is historically sound, accessible and clears up many western
misconceptions about this crucial period.
Rogerson makes it clear, for example, that the wars of conquest and the
establishment of the Islamic empire after Muhammad’s death were not
inspired by religious ideology but by pragmatic politics. The idea that
Islam should conquer the world was alien to the Koran and there was no
attempt to convert Jews or Christians. Islam was for the Arabs, the sons
of Ishmael, as Judaism was for the descendants of Isaac and Christianity
for the followers of Jesus.

Rogerson also shows that Muslim tradition is multi-layered and many-

faceted. The early historians regularly gave two or three variant accounts
of an incident in the life of the Prophet; readers were expected to make
up their own minds.

Similarly, there are at least four contrasting and sometimes conflicting

versions of the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible, and in the New
Testament the four evangelists interpret the life of Jesus quite
differently. To choose one tradition and ignore the rest - as Weinberger
and Spencer do - is distorting.

Professor Tariq Ramadan has studied Islam at the University of Geneva

and al-Azhar University in Cairo and is currently senior research fellow at
St Antony’s College, Oxford. The Messenger is easily the most scholarly
and knowledgeable of these four biographies of Muhammad, but it is also
practical and relevant, drawing lessons from the Prophet’s life that are
crucial for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Ramadan makes it clear, for
example, that Muhammad did not shun non-Muslims as ”unbelievers” but
from the beginning co-operated with them in the pursuit of the common
good. Islam was not a closed system at variance with other traditions.
Muhammad insisted that relations between the different groups must be
egalitarian. Even warfare must not obviate the primary duty of justice
and respect.

When the Muslims were forced to leave Mecca because they were
persecuted by the Meccan establishment, Ramadan shows, they had to
adapt to the alien customs of their new home in Medina, where, for
example, women enjoyed more freedom than in Mecca. The hijrah
(”migration”) was a test of intelligence; the emigrants had to recognise
that some of their customs were cultural rather than Islamic, and had to
learn foreign practices.

Ramadan also makes it clear that, in the Koran, jihad was not
synonymous with ”holy war”. The verb jihada should rather be
translated: ”making an effort”. The first time the word is used in the
Koran, it signified a ”resistance to oppression” (25:26) that was
intellectual and spiritual rather than militant. Muslims were required to
oppose the lies and terror of those who were motivated solely by self-
interest; they had to be patient and enduring. Only after the hijrah, when
they encountered the enmity of Mecca, did the word jihad take
connotations of self-defence and armed resistance in the face of military
aggression. Even so, in mainstream Muslim tradition, the greatest jihad
was not warfare but reform of one’s own society and heart; as
Muhammad explained to one of his companions, the true jihad was an
inner struggle against egotism.

The Koran teaches that, while warfare must be avoided whenever

possible, it is sometimes necessary to resist humanity’s natural
propensity to expansionism and oppression, which all too often seeks to
obliterate the diversity and religious pluralism that is God’s will. If they
do wage war, Muslims must behave ethically. ”Do not kill women,
children and old people,” Abu Bakr, the first caliph, commanded his
troops. ”Do not commit treacherous actions. Do not burn houses and
cornfields.” Muslims must be especially careful not to destroy
monasteries where Christian monks served God in prayer.

Ramadan could have devoted more time to such contentious issues as

the veiling of women, polygamy and Muhammad’s treatment of some
(though by no means all) of the Jewish tribes of Medina. But his account
restores the balance that is so often lacking in western narratives.
Muhammad was not a belligerent warrior. Ramadan shows that he
constantly emphasised the importance of ”gentleness” (ar-rafiq),
”tolerance” (al-ana) and clemency (al-hilm).

It will be interesting to see how The Messenger is received. Ramadan is

clearly addressing issues that inspire some Muslims to distort their
religion. Western people often complain that they never hear from
”moderate” Muslims, but when such Muslims do speak out they are
frequently dismissed as apologists and hagiographers. Until we all learn
to approach one another with generosity and respect, we cannot hope for
peace.

Karen Armstrong is the author of ”Muhammad: Prophet For Our Time”

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