Balancing the Prophet
by Karen Armstrong
Financial Times: Published: April 27 2007
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
stigmatized 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 civilization 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 recognize 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” (arrafiq), ”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”