Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time) - Introduction

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Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time) - Introduction

 

(p.13) THE HISTORY OF A RELIGIOUS tradition is a continuous dialogue between a

transcendent reality and current events in the mundane sphere. The faithful

scrutinize the sacred past, looking for lessons that speak directly to the

conditions of their lives. Most religions have a figurehead, an individual who

expresses the ideals of the faith in human form. In contemplating the serenity

of the Buddha, Buddhists see the supreme reality of Nirvana to which each of

them aspires; in Jesus, Christians glimpse the divine presence as a force for

goodness and compassion in the world. These paradigmatic personalities shed

light on the often dark conditions in which most of us seek salvation in our

flawed world. They tell us what a human being can be.

 

Muslims have always understood this. Their scripture, the Qur'an, gave them a

mission: to create a just and decent society, in which all members were treated

with respect. (p.14) The political well-being of the Muslim community was, and

is, a matter of supreme importance. Like any religious ideal, it is almost

insuperably difficult to fulfill, but after each failure, Muslims have tried to

get up and begin again. Many Islamic rituals, philosophies, doctrines, sacred

texts, and shrines are the result of frequently anguished and self-critical

contemplation of the political events of Islamic society.

 

The life of the Prophet Muhammad (c.570-632 CE) was as crucial to the unfolding

Islamic ideal as it is today. His career revealed the inscrutable God's activity

in the world, and illustrated the perfect surrender (in Arabic, the word for

" surrender " is 'islam') that every human being should make to the divine.

Beginning during the Prophet's lifetime, Muslims had to strive to understand the

meaning of his life and apply it to their own. A little more than a hundred

years after Muhammad's death, as Islam continued to spread to new territories

and gain converts, Muslim scholars began to compile the great collections of

Muhammad's sayings ('ahadith') and customary practice ('sunnah'), which would

form the basis of Muslim law. The sunnah taught Muslims to imitate the way

Muhammad spoke, ate, loved, washed, and worshipped, so that in the smallest

details of their daily existence, they reproduced his life on earth in the hope

that they would acquire his internal disposition of total surrender to God.

 

At about the same time, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the first Muslim

historians began to write about the life of the Prophet Muhammad: Muhammad ibn

Ishaq (d.767); Muhammad ibn 'Umar al-Waqidi (d.c. 820); Muhammad ibn Sa'd (d.

845); and Abu Jarir at-Tabari (d. 923). (p.15) These historians were not simply

relying on their own memories and impressions, but were attempting a serious

historical reconstruction. They included earlier documents in their narratives,

traced oral traditions back to their original source, and, though they revered

Muhammad as a man of God, they were not entirely uncritical. Largely as a result

of their efforts, we know more about Muhammad than about nearly any other

founder of a major religious tradition. These early sources are indispensable to

any biographer of the Prophet, and I will frequently refer to them in these

pages.

 

The work of Muhammad's first biographers would probably not satisfy a modern

historian. They were men of their time and often included stories of a

miraculous and legendary nature that we would interpret differently today. But

they were aware of the complexity of their material. They did not promote one

theory or interpretation of events at the expense of others. Sometimes they put

two quite different versions of an incident side by side, and gave equal weight

to each account, so that readers could make up their own minds. They did not

always agree with the traditions they included, but were trying to tell the

story of their Prophet as honestly and truthfully as they could. There are

lacunae [gaps] in their accounts. We know practically nothing about Muhammad's

early life before he began to receive what he believed were revelations from God

at the age of forty. Inevitably, pious legends developed about Muhammad's birth,

childhood, and youth, but these clearly have symbolic rather than historical

value.

 

(p.16) There is also very little material about Muhammad's early political

career in Mecca. At that time, he was a relatively obscure figure, and nobody

thought it worthwhile to make note of his activities. Our main source of

information is the scripture that he brought to the Arabs. For some twenty-three

years, from about 610 to his death in 632, Muhammad claimed that he was the

recipient of direct messages from God, which were collected into the text that

became known as the Qur'an. It does not contain a straightforward account of

Muhammad's life, of course, but came to the Prophet piecemeal, line by line,

verse by verse, chapter by chapter. Sometimes the revelations dealt with a

particular situation in Mecca or Medina. In the Qur'an, God answered Muhammad's

critics; he reviewed their arguments; he explained the deeper significance of a

battle or a conflict within the community. As each new set of verses was

revealed to Muhammad, the Muslims learned it by heart, and those who were

literate wrote it down. The first official compilation of the Qur'an was made in

about 650, twenty years after Muhammad's death, and achieved canonical status.

 

The Qur'an is the holy word of God, and its authority remains absolute. But

Muslims know that it is not always easy to interpret. Its laws were designed for

a small community, but a century after their Prophet's death, Muslims ruled a

vast empire, stretching from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees. Their circumstances

were entirely different from those of the Prophet and the first Muslims, and

Islam had to change and adapt. The first essays in Muslim history were written

to address current perplexities. How could Muslims apply the Prophet's insights

and practice to their own times? (p.17) When the early biographers told the

story of his life, they tried to explain some of the passages in the Qur'an by

reproducing the historical context in which these particular revelations had

come down to Muhammad. By understanding what had prompted a particular Qur'anic

teaching, they could relate it to their own situation by means of a disciplined

process of analogy. The historians and thinkers of the time believed that

learning about the Prophet's struggles to make the word of God audible in the

seventh century would help them to preserve his spirit in their own. From the

very start, writing about the Prophet Muhammad was never a wholly antiquarian

[i.e., connected with the study of antiquities] pursuit. The process continues

today. Some Muslim fundamentalists have based their militant ideology on the

life of Muhammad; Muslim extremists believe that he would have condoned and

admired their atrocities. Other Muslims are appalled by these claims, and point

to the extraordinary pluralism of the Qur'an, which condemns aggression and sees

all rightly guided religions as deriving from the one God. We have a long

history of Islamophobia in Western culture that dates back to the time of the

Crusades. In the twelfth century, Christian monks in Europe insisted that Islam

was a violent religion of the sword, and that Muhammad was a charlatan who

imposed his religion on a reluctant world by force of arms; they called him a

lecher and a sexual pervert. This distorted version of the Prophet's life became

one of the received ideas of the West, and Western people have always found it

difficult to see Muhammad in a more objective light. (p.18) Since the

destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, members of the

Christian Right in the United States and some sectors of the Western media have

continued this tradition of hostility, claiming that Muhammad was irredeemably

addicted to war. Some have gone so far as to claim that he was a terrorist and a

pedophile.

 

We can no longer afford to indulge this type of bigotry, because it is a gift to

extremists who can use such statements to " prove " that the Western world is

indeed engaged on a new crusade against the Islamic world. Muhammad was not a

man of violence. We must approach his life in a balanced way, in order to

appreciate his considerable achievements. To cultivate an inaccurate prejudice

damages the tolerance, liberality, and compassion that are supposed to

characterize the Western culture.

 

I became convinced of this fifteen years ago, after the fatwah of Ayatollah

Khomeini had sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death because of

what was perceived to be a blasphemous portrait of Muhammad in 'The Satanic

Verses'. I abhorred the fatwah and believed that Rushdie had a right to publish

whatever he chose, but I was disturbed by the way some of Rushdie's liberal

supporters segued from a denunciation of the fatwah to an out-and-out

condemnation of Islam itself that bore no relation to the facts. It seemed wrong

to defend a liberal principle by reviving a medieval prejudice. We appeared to

have learned nothing from the tragedy of the 1930s, when this type of bigotry

made it possible for Hitler to kill six million Jews. But I realized that many

Western people had no opportunity to revise their impression of Muhammad, so I

decided to write a popular accessible account of his life to challenge this

entrenched view. (p.19) The result was 'Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet',

which was first published in 1991. But in the wake of September 11, we need to

focus on other aspects of Muhammad's life. So this is a completely new and

entirely different book, which, I hope, will speak more directly to the

terrifying realities of our post-September 11 world.

 

As a paradigmatic personality, Muhammad has important lessons, not only for

Muslims, but also for Western people. His life was a jihad: as we shall see,

this word does not mean " holy war, " it means " struggle. " Muhammad literally

sweated with the effort to bring peace to war-torn Arabia, and we need people

who are prepared to do this today. His life was a tireless campaign against

greed, injustice, and arrogance. He realized that Arabia was at a turning point

and that the old way of thinking would no longer suffice, so he wore himself out

in the creative effort to evolve an entirely new solution. We entered another

era of history on September 11, and must strive with equal intensity to develop

a different outlook.

 

Strangely, events that took place in seventh-century Arabia have much to teach

us about the events of our time and their underlying significance--far more, in

fact, than the facile sound bites of politicians. Muhammad was not trying to

impose religious orthodoxy--he was not much interested in metaphysics--but to

change people's hearts and minds. He called the prevailing spirit of his time

'jahiliyyah'. Muslims usually understand this to mean the " Time of Ignorance, "

that is, the pre-Islamic period in Arabia. But, as recent research shows,

Muhammad used the term jahiliyyah to refer not to an historical era but to a

state of mind that caused violence and terror in seventh-century Arabia. (p.20)

Jahiliyyah, I would argue, is also much in evidence in the West today as well as

in the Muslim world.

 

Paradoxically, Muhammad became a timeless personality because he was so rooted

in his own period. We cannot understand his achievement unless we appreciate

what he was up against. In order to see what he can contribute to our own

predicament, we must enter the tragic world that made him a prophet nearly

fourteen hundred years ago, on a lonely mountain top just outside the holy city

of Mecca.

 

Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time)

Introduction, pg. 13-20

Karen Armstrong

Harper Perennial - London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

ISBN-13 978-0-00-723248-2

ISBN-10 0-00-723248-9