4

Muhammad and His Message

It is worthy of note ... that the scholars who are most familiar with Arabic sources and have got closest to an understanding of the life of the period, scholars such as Margoliouth, Hurgronje, Lammens, Caetani, are the most decisive against the prophetic claims of Mohammed; and one must confess that the further one goes in one’s own study of the sources the more difficult it becomes in one’s own thinking to escape the conclusions of these scholars.

Arthur Jeffery (1926)²⁰²

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature—a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man.

Winwood Reade (1872)²⁰³

Either we conclude with Cook, Crone, Wansbrough, and others that we do not know a great deal about the man we call Muhammad, or we make do with the traditional sources. Muslims would perhaps be better off accepting the former alternative, since the picture that emerges of the Prophet in these traditional accounts is not at all flattering. Furthermore, Muslims cannot complain that this is a portrait drawn by an enemy.

Probably the first work in the West to apply the historicocritical method to the problem of the life of Muhammad was Gustav Weil’s Mohammad der Prophet, sein Leben und sein Lehre (1843), in which is put forward the idea that Muhammad suffered from epilepsy. This was followed by, among others, the works of Sprenger, Noldeke, and Muir. We shall examine Sprenger’s views in a moment. Noldeke’s great work on the Koran, Geschichte des Qorans (1860) will also be discussed in the next chapter on the Koran.

Muir’s Life of Mahomet appeared between 1856-61, in four volumes, based on the original Muslim sources, the very sources whose reliability was questioned in the last chapter, but which Muir accepted as worthy of attention. Muir was to pass a judgment on Muhammad’s character that was to be repeated over and over again by subsequent scholars. The scholar²⁰⁴ divided Muhammad’s life into two periods, the Meccan period and the Medinan period; during the first period, in Mecca, Muhammad was a religiously motivated, sincere seeker after truth; but in the second period, Muhammad the man shows his feet of clay, and is corrupted by power and worldly ambitions:

In the Meccan period of his life there certainly can be traced no personal ends or unworthy motives.... Mahomet then was nothing more than he professed to be, “a simple Preacher and a Warner”; he was the despised and rejected prophet of a gainsaying people, having no ulterior object but their reformation. He may have mistaken the right means for effecting this end, but there is no sufficient reason for doubting that he used those means in good faith and with an honest purpose.

But the scene changes at Medina. There temporal power, aggrandisement, and self-gratification mingled rapidly with the grand object of the Prophet’s life; and they were sought and attained by just the same instrumentality. Messages from heaven were freely brought down to justify political conduct, in precisely the same manner as to inculcate religious precept. Battles were fought, executions ordered, and territories annexed, under cover of the Almighty’s sanction. Nay, even personal indulgences were not only excused but encouraged by the divine approval or command. A special license was produced, allowing the Prophet many wives; the affair with Mary the Coptic bond-maid was justified in a separate Sura; and the passion for the wife of his own adopted son and bosom friend was the subject of an inspired message in which the Prophet’s scruples were rebuked by God, a divorce permitted, and marriage with the object of his unhallowed desires enjoined. If we say that such “revelations” were believed by Mahomet sincerely to bear the divine sanction, it can only be in a modified and peculiar sense. He surely must be held responsible for that belief; and, in arriving at it, have done violence to his judgement and the better principles of his nature.

As the natural result, we trace from the period of Mahomet’s arrival at Medina a marked and rapid declension in the system he inculcated. Intolerance quickly took the place of freedom; force, of persuasion. The spiritual weapons designed at first for higher objects were no sooner devoted to the purposes of temporal authority, than temporal authority was employed to give weight and temper to those spiritual weapons. The name of the Almighty imparted a terrible strength to the sword of the State; and the sword of the State yielded a willing return by destroying “the enemies of God” and sacrificing them at the shrine of the new religion. “Slay the unbelievers wheresoever ye find them,” was now the watchword of Islam. “Fight in the ways of God until opposition be crushed and the Religion become the Lord’s alone.” The warm and simple devotion breathed by the Prophet and his followers at Mecca, when mingled with worldly motives, soon became dull and vapid; while faith degenerated into a fierce fanaticism, or evaporated in a lifeless round of formal ceremonies.

Muir went on to say that so long as the Koran remained the standard of belief, certains evils would continue to flow: “Polygamy, Divorce, and Slavery strike at the root of public morals, poison domestic life, and disorganize society; while the Veil removes the female sex from its just position and influence in the world.... Freedom of thought and private judgment are crushed and annihilated. Toleration is unknown, and the possibility of free and liberal institutions foreclosed.”

Muir points out the inconsistencies in Muhammad’s character:

Simultaneously with the anxious desire to extinguish idolatry and promote religion and virtue in the world, there arose . . . a tendency to self-indulgence; till in the end, assuming to be the favorite of Heaven, he justified himself by “revelations,” releasing himself in some cases from social proprieties, and the commonest obligations of self restraint.

Muir’s final judgment is “The sword of Mahomet, and the Coran [Koran], are the most stubborn enemies of Civilization, Liberty, and Truth, which the world has yet known.”²⁰⁵

Caetani, writing at the beginning of the century, came to a similar conclusion. In Medina, Muhammad is far more sure of himself, is conscious of his superiority.

It is thus the person of Mohammed that stands out above all in the front rank, till to God is given a secondary position in His capacity as the auxiliary of the Prophet. He is no longer the Supreme Being, for whose service everything should be sacrificed, but rather the all-powerful Being who aids the Prophet in his political mission, who facilitates his victories, consoles him in defeat, assists him in unravelling all the mundane and worldly complications of a great Empire over men, and helps him smooth over the difficulties which rise up every day as he works out these new phases of his prophetic and political career. This “deus ex machina” becomes supremely useful to him in a society of rude, violent, sanguinary men, quickly angered, immoveable in hatred and their passion for revenge, indifferent towards human blood, greedy of plunder, changeable as the wind in their sympathies.... It is from [Muhammad’s] mouth and not from God that [Muhammad’s men] await replies to questions, the verdict which is to decide their destinies, and for the most part it is no longer God that counts but only the Prophet. Mohammed is a fact more visible and tangible every day; God becomes ever more a useful theory, a supreme principle, who from above the heavens follows with affectionate solicitude the capricious movements and the neither few nor small weaknesses of his favorite prophet, assisting him with legions of angels in brigand expeditions, meeting with revealed verses every troublesome question, smoothing over errors, legalising faults, encouraging fierce instincts with all the immoral brutality of the tyrannical God of the Semites.

If Mohammed 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. Mohammed became thus the more easily corruptible when fortune in the end smiled upon him.... [In Medina], he offered very little resistance to the corrupting action of the new social position, more particularly in view of the fact that the first steps were accompanied by bewildering triumphs and by fatal sweetness of practically unlimited political power.... The deterioration of his moral character was a phenomenon supremely human, of which history provides not one but a thousand examples. It is easier to die holy on the cross or at the stake than on a throne after a titanic struggle against pitiless and obstinate enemies. The figure of Mohammed loses in beauty, but gains in power.

Later I shall examine Muir’s and Caetani’s arguments to see whether they are justified or not in their assessments of the character of the Prophet. Here I want to look at Sprenger’s work on the life of Muhammad. The Muslim sources are full of references to the strange fits to which the Prophet was subject, particularly at the time of the revelations he periodically received. Here is how Margoliouth describes them:

The notion . . . that he was subject to epilepsy finds curious confirmation in the notices recorded of his experiences during the process of revelation—the importance of which is not lessened by the probability that the symptoms were often artificially produced. The process was attended by a fit of unconsciousness, accompanied (or preceded) at times by the sound of bells in the ears or the belief that someone was present: by a sense of fright, such as to make the patient burst out into perspiration: by the turning of the head to one side: by foaming at the mouth: by the reddening or whitening of the face: by a sense of headache.²⁰⁶

Sprenger decided that these apparent fits of epilepsy were a key to Muhammad’s character. Most scholars dismissed his speculations as too fanciful, except the eminent Danish scholar, Franz Buhl, who put forward a modified form of the same theory. Buhl²⁰⁷thought that, in his Medinan phase, Muhammad reveals the unattractive side of his character: cruelty, slyness, dishonesty, untrustworthiness; someone whose leading principle was “the end justifies the means”; a despot who demanded absolute obedience, his sensuality inordinately increased, so that:

even his revelations were made the means of sanctioning his erotic tendencies or of restoring order to his harem.... The supposition is forced upon us that the earlier forms of revelation may now have been artificial means for keeping alive his reputation, and that in reality he may often consciously have been guilty of pious fraud.

Not only do his peculiar attacks . . . point to a pathological condition, but in many other ways he betrays an hysterical nature with decided anomalies. A characteristic which constantly runs through such natures is the complete inability to distinguish falsehood from truth; being governed entirely by compelling ideas, it is impossible for them to view matters in their true relation, and they are so thoroughly convinced of their own right, that not even the most compelling reasoning can persuade them to the contrary.

But Buhl denies that there was a complete transformation of Muhammad’s character—we can find traces of his earlier idealism in his Medinan period.

Dr. Macdonald in his Aspects of Islam puts forward a psychoanalytic theory, whereby the Prophet is seen as a pathological case, and that “how he passed over at last into that turpitude is a problem again for those who have made a study of how the most honest trance mediums may at any time begin to cheat.”²⁰⁸

In Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (London, 1905), Margoliouth²⁰⁹ develops the idea of Islam as a secret society and compares Muhammad to modern mediums and Joseph Smith the founder of the Mormons. Margoliouth describes the subterfuges and chicanery of the mediums and shows that Muhammad uses similar techniques to establish and extend his power over the minds of the early Meccans who became the first converts. Two quotes from Margoliouth’s book will make clear its tone and substance:

In an empty room he [Muhammad] professed to be unable to find sitting-place,all the seats being occupied by angels. He turned his face away modestly from a corpse, out of regard for two Houris who had come from heaven to tend their husband. There is even reason for supposing that he, at times, let confederates act the part of Gabriel, or let his followers identify some interlocutor of his with that angel. The revelations which he produced find a close parallel in those of modern mediums, which can be studied in the history of Spiritualism by Mr. F. Podmore, whose researches cast great doubt on the proposition that an honourable man would not mystify his fellows; and also make it appear that the conviction produced by the performances of a medium is often not shaken by the clearest exposure. Of one of the mediums whose career he describes, this author observes that he possessed the friendship and perfect trust of his sitters, was aided by the religious emotions inspired by his trance utterances, and could appeal to an unstained character and a life of honourable activity. The possession of these advantages greatly helped this medium in producing belief in his sincerity, but the historian of Spiritualism, though uncertain how to account for all the phenomena, and acknowledging the difficulties which attend his explanation, is inclined to attribute all that is wonderful in the medium’s performances to trickery. What is clear is that Mohammed possessed the same advantages as Podmore enumerates, and thereby won adherents; that nevertheless the process of revelation was so suspicious that one of the scribes employed to take down the effusions became convinced that it was imposture and discarded Islam in consequence. But to those who are studying merely the political effectiveness of supernatural revelations the sincerity of the medium is a question of little consequence.

A fair amount of the Koran must have been in existence when Abu Bakr started his mission; at least he must have been able to assure the proselytes that his Prophet was in receipt of divine communications, such as he could allege in proof of his personal acquaintance with the real God; and it is probable that with the gradual increase in the numbers of the believers, the Koran transformed itself from the “mediumistic” communications with which it began to the powerful sermons with which its second period is occupied. For a very small audience the processes undergone by the medium are exceedingly effective. The necessity of excluding strangers keeps those present in a state of alarm; the approach of the “superior condition” shown by the medium collapsing, requiring to be wrapped up, and then revealing himself in a violent state of perspiration, is highly sensational; the marvellous processes which the spectators have witnessed make them attach extraordinary value to the utterances which the medium produces, as the result of his trance. If any unbelievers are present the medium (in many cases) cannot act: and the words of the biographers imply that in the case of these early converts they signified their belief before they were brought into Mohammed’s presence. As the Prophet more and more identified himself with his part he endeavoured to live up to it. It is said that he habitually wore a veil, and this practice may have begun at the time of these mysterious trances, of which it served to enhance the solemnity. In course of time he acquired a benign and pastoral manner; when he shook hands he would not withdraw his hand first; when he looked at a man he would wait for the other to turn away his face. Scrupulous care was bestowed by him on his person: every night he painted his eyes, and his body was at all times fragrant with perfumes. His hair was suffered to grow long till it reached his shoulders; and when it began to display signs of grey, these were concealed with dyes. He possessed the art of speaking a word in season to the neophytes—saying something which gratified the special inclinations of each, or which manifested acquaintance with his antecedents. How many of the stories which illustrate the latter talent are true it is hard to say; but there is little doubt that he was acquainted with the devices known to modem mediums by which private information can either be obtained, or the appearance of possessing it displayed. Moreover, in the early period none were admitted to see the Prophet in character of whom the missionary was not sure, and who had not been prepared to venerate.

We can now look at the incidents in Muhammad’s life that elicited the severe judgment from Muir and Caetani. It should be made clear from the start that these incidents are recounted in the Muslim sources (Ibn Ishaq, al-Tabari, and others).

Political Assassinations; The Massacre of the Jews

Medina in 622 was inhabited by several Jewish tribes; the most important of these were the Banu ‘l-Nadir, the Banu Qurayza, and the Banu Qaynuqa. There were also pagan Arab inhabitants who were divided into two clans, the Aws and the Khazraj. The Jews were divided in their loyalties, with the Nadir and the Qurayza siding with the Aws, and the Qaynuqa with the Khazraj. Years of bitter and bloody rivalry had left the parties concerned and exhausted. Muhammad arrived on this scene in September 622. Soon after his arrival, Muhammad is said to have established an agreement that was a kind of federation between the various groups in Medina and the new arrivals from Mecca. This document, known as the Constitution of Medina, is described thus, by Ibn Ishaq:

The Messenger of God wrote a document between the Emigrants [i.e., the Muslim followers of Muhammad from Mecca] and the Ansar [i.e., the new converts among the Medinans], and in it he made a treaty and covenant with the Jews, establishing them in their religion and possessions, and assigning to them rights and duties.

According to several eminent²¹⁰ scholars, this constitution showed that right from the start Muhammad meant to move against the Jews. For Wellhausen, it revealed “a certain mistrust of the Jews”; while Wensinck believed that “Muhammad drafted the Constitution merely to neutralize the politically influential Jewish clans; he was stalling for time until he could find an opportunity to subdue them.” Moshe Gil believes that:

Through his alliance with the Arab tribes of Medina the Prophet gained enough strength to achieve a gradual anti-Jewish policy, despite the reluctance of his Medinese allies.... In fact, this inter-tribal law [i.e., the Constitution of Medina] had in view the expulsion of the Jews even at the moment of its writing.

The document, therefore, was not a covenant with the Jews. On the contrary, it was a formal statement of intent to disengage the Arab clans of Medina from the Jewish neighbors they had been with up to that time.²¹¹

At first, Muhammad had to proceed cautiously since not all the Medinese had welcomed him, and his financial position was weak. He was further chagrined to learn that the Jews rejected his claims to prophethood. Muhammad began sending out raiding parties; in effect, he was no more than the head of a robber community, unwilling to earn an honest living. Muhammad himself led three expeditions that were unsuccessful attacks on Meccan caravans on the way to, or from, Syria. Their first success came at Nakhla, when the Muslims—this time without Muhammad himself being present—attacked the Meccans during the sacred month, when bloodshed was forbidden. A Meccan was killed, two were taken prisoner, and much booty was carried back to Medina. But, much to Muhammad’s surprise, many Medinese were shocked at the profanation of the sacred month. Nonetheless, Muhammad accepted a fifth of the ill-gotten gains and, to salve his guilty conscience conveniently “received” a revelation “justifying warfare even in the sacred months as a lesser evil than hostility to Islam.” Sura 2.217: “They will ask you concerning the Sacred months, whether they may war therein. Say: Warring therein is grievous; but to obstruct the way of God and to deny Him, to hinder men from the holy temple, and to expel His people thence, that is more grievous than slaughter.” Muhammad readily accepted a ransom of forty ounces of silver for each prisoner.

At about this time, the head of the Aws, Sa’d b. Mu’adh, took the decision to support Muhammad and even took part in raiding parties. Thus some Medinese were slowly beginning to accept Muhammad, but the Jews continued to reject his claims to prophethood and began criticizing him, saying that some passages of his revelations contradicted their own scriptures. His acceptance of certain Jewish practices was of no avail, and he realized that the Jews posed a real danger to his slowly increasing power in Medina.

The turning point in Muhammad’s fortunes is, without doubt, the battle of Badr, in which with the help of Allah and a thousand angels, forty-nine Meccans were killed, as many taken prisoner, and much booty gathered. As the severed head of Muhammad’s enemy was cast at The Prophet’s feet, Muhammad cried out, “It is more acceptable to me than the choicest camel in all Arabia.”

Then began a series of assassinations as Muhammad, feeling more confident, moved against his enemies, settled old scores, and ruthlessly established his power. First he ordered the execution of al-Nader—he who had scoffed at Muhammad during his days at Mecca and had told better stories than the Prophet himself. Here is how Muir describes the murder of another prisoner, Ocba:

Two days afterwards . . . Ocba was ordered out for execution. He ventured to expostulate, and demand why he should be treated more rigorously than the other captives. “Because of thine enmity to God and his Prophet,” replied Mahomet. “And my little girl!” cried Ocba, in the bitterness of his soul—“who will take care of her?” “Hell-fire!” exclaimed the Prophet; and on the instant the victim was hewn to the ground. “Wretch that thou wast!” he continued, “and persecutor! unbeliever in God, in his Prophet, and in his Book! I give thanks unto the Lord that hath slain thee, and comforted mine eyes thereby.”

Again, these assassinations are sanctioned by a revelation in sura 8.68: “It has not been for any prophet to take captives until he has slaughtered in the land.”

From now on Muhammad proceeded to rid himself of opposition dangerous to him. “Even secret conversations were reported to the Prophet, and on such information he countenanced proceedings that were sometimes both cruel and unscrupulous.”

The next person that Muhammad moved against was the poetess Asma bint Marwan, who belonged to the Aws tribe. She had never concealed her dislike of Islam, and had composed couplets on the folly of trusting a stranger who fought his own people:

Fucked men of Malik and of Nabit

And of Aws, fucked men of Khazraj

You obey a stranger who does not belong among you

Who is not of Murad, nor of Madh’hij

Do you, when your own chiefs have been murdered, put your hope in him

Like men greedy for meal soup when it is cooking?

Is there no man of honour who will take advantage of an unguarded moment

And cut off the gulls’ hopes?²¹²

On hearing these lines Muhammad said, “Will no one rid me of this daughter of Marwan?” One zealous Muslim, Umayr ibn Adi, decided to execute the Prophet’s wishes, and that very night crept into the writer’s home while she lay sleeping, surrounded by her young children. There was even one at her breast. Umayr removed the suckling babe and then plunged his sword into the poetess. “Next morning, in the mosque at prayer, Mahomet [Muhammad], who was aware of the bloody design, said to Omeir [Umayr]:‘Hast thou slain the daughter of Merwan?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered; ’but tell me now, is there cause for apprehension?’ ‘None,’ said Mahomet; ‘a couple of goats will hardly knock their heads together for it.’ ” Muhammad then praised him in front of the Muslims gathered in the mosque for his services to God and his Prophet. As Sprenger says, the rest of the family was forced to accept Islam since a blood feud was out of the question for them.

Soon afterwards, Muhammad decided to rid himself of another whose verses had dared to criticize The Prophet. Abu Afak, said to be more than a hundred years old, belonged to a Khazrajite clan. He was murdered while he slept.

In the meantime, Muhammad was only waiting for a suitable excuse to attack the Jews. A silly quarrel in the marketplace led to the Jewish tribe’s, the Banu Qaynuqa, being besieged in their fortified settlement. As Muir justly notes, though bound by a friendly treaty, Muhammad did nothing to sort out the minor incident that was the initial cause of the feud. “And had there not been relentless enmity and predetermination to root out the Israelites, the differences might easily have been composed.” Eventually the Jews surrendered, and preparations were made for execution. But the head of the Khazrajites, Abd Allah b. Ubayy, pleaded on their behalf, and Muhammad, not feeling confident enough to reject such a request, had to agree. The Banu Qaynuqa were banished from Medina and eventually settled in Syria. Their belongings were divided among the the army, after Muhammad had received his royal fifth. On this occasion Muhammad received the verses that form part of sura 3.12-13: “Say to those who disbelieve—You will be defeated and gathered into Hell, and what an evil resting place is that!”

There followed various other, not always very successful raids on Meccan caravans, and a few months of calm. But the assassinations continued—“another of those dastardly acts of cruelty which darken the pages of the Prophet’s life.” Kab ibn al-Ashraf was the son of a Jewess of the Banu Nadir. He had gone to Mecca after the battle of Badr and had composed poems in praise of the dead, trying to stir up the Meccans to avenge their heroes of Badr. Rather foolishly he returned to Medina, where Muhammad prayed aloud, “O Lord, deliver me from the son of Ashraf, in whatsoever way it seems good to you, because of his open sedition and his verses.” But the Banu Nadir were powerful enough to protect Kab, and the Muslims who volunteered to murder him explained to the Prophet that only by cunning could they hope to accomplish their task. The conspirators met in Muhammad’s house, and as they emerged at night, the Prophet gave them his full blessings. Pretending to be Kab’s friends, the Muslims lured him out into the night and, in a suitable spot near a waterfall, murdered him. They threw Kab’s head at the Prophet’s feet. Muhammad praised their good work in the cause of God. As one of the conspirators recalled: “The Jews were terrified by our attack upon Allah’s enemy. And there was not a Jew there who did not fear for his life.”

On the morning after the murder of Kab, the Prophet declared: “ ‘Kill any Jew who falls into your power.’ So Muhayyisa b. Masud fell upon Ibn Sunayna, one of the Jewish merchants with whom his family had social and commercial relations and killed him.” When his brother remonstrated with him, Muhayyisa replied that had Muhammad commanded him to murder his brother, he would have done so. Whereupon his brother Huwayyisa, who was not yet a Muslim, converted to Islam saying, “any religion that can bring you to this is indeed wonderful!” These assassinations faithfully illustrate “the ruthless fanaticism into which the teaching of the Prophet was fast drifting.”²¹³

As we saw earlier the battle of Uhud was a serious defeat for the Muslims and threatened to undermine the Prophet’s authority and prestige. In the aftermath of the war, we may record two further executions ordered by Muhammad: those of Abu Uzza, a prisoner left over from the battle of Badr, and Uthman ibn Moghira.

Needing a victory, Muhammad decided to attack the Jewish tribe of Nadir, who are said to have expressed joy at the defeat of the Muslims. On the pretext that he had received a divine warning of their intention to assassinate him, Muhammad ordered them to leave Medina within ten days on pain of death. After a siege of several weeks, the Jews surrendered and were allowed to leave; they left and joined the Jews of Khaybar, only to be massacred there two years later. This victory over the Jews is referred to at length in sura 59. The Prophet had been well aware of the wealth of the departing Nadir, whose land was divided between the Muslims; Muhammad’s share made him financially independent.

In 627 the Meccans and their allies began their attack on Medina. The siege lasted only two weeks and was later known as the Battle of the Trench. The last Jewish tribe in Medina, the Banu Qurayza, contributed to the city’s defense, but on the whole remained neutral. However, their loyalty was questioned and inevitably, after the siege, Muhammad moved against them. Realizing that they had no chance of surviving, the Banu Qurayza agreed to surrender on condition that they quit Medina empty-handed. Muhammad refused and wanted nothing less than unconditional surrender. The Jews then appealed to their ancient friendship with the Banu Aws and asked that Abu Lubaba, an ally belonging to that tribe, be allowed to visit them. He was asked what Muhammad’s intentions were; by way of reply Abu Lubaba drew his hand across his throat, indicating that they must fight to the end, as death was all that they could hope for. At last, after several weeks, the Jews surrendered on condition that their fate should be decided by their allies, the Banu Aws. The latter were inclined to show mercy, but Muhammad decided that the fate of the Jews was to be decided by one of the Banu Aws. Muhammad nominated Sa’d ibn Muadh to be the judge. Sa’d was still suffering from a wound sustained at the Trench. He pronounced, “My judgment is that the men shall be put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, and the spoil divided among the army.” Muhammad adopted the verdict as his own: “Truly the judgment of Sad is the judgment of God pronounced on high from beyond the seventh heaven.”

During the night trenches sufficient to contain the dead bodies of the men were dug across the market place of the city. In the morning, Mahomet, himself a spectator of the tragedy, commanded the male captives to be brought forth in companies of five or six at a time. Each company as it came up was made to sit down in a row on the brink of the trench destined for its grave, there beheaded, and the bodies cast therein.... The butchery, begun in the morning, lasted all day, and continued by torchlight till the evening. Having thus drenched the market place with the blood of seven or eight hundred victims, and having given command for the earth to be smoothed over their remains, Mahomet returned from the horrid spectacle to solace himself with the charms of Rihana, whose husband and all her male relatives had just perished in the massacre.²¹⁴

The booty was divided, slave girls given as presents, women sold, and property auctioned. And yes, a revelation came down from heaven justifying the stern punishment meted out to the Jews: sura 33.25—“And He has caused to descend from their strongholds the Jews that assisted them. And he struck terror into their hearts. Some you slaughtered and some you took prisoner.”

In face of such manifest cruelty, barbarity, and inhumanity modern historians have adopted many different positions.

1. Those still left with a robust sense of right and wrong, historians such as Tor Andrae, H. Z. Hirschberg, Salo Baron, and William Muir (as we shall see) have condemned the savage treament. Tor Andrae, whose biography of Muhammad is considered one of the two most important in the last sixty years, unhesitatingly reproaches the Prophet for this “inhuman verdict” and adds, “On this occasion he again revealed that lack of honesty and moral courage which was an unattractive trait in his character.” However, Andrae does try to see “Mohammed’s cruelty toward the Jews against the background of the fact that their scorn and rejection was the greatest disappointment of his life.”²¹⁵

2. The apologists such as Watt (astonishingly) totally exonerate the Prophet; on reading their sophistical apologies, one is reminded of Lord Acton’s dictum, “Every villain is followed by a sophist with a sponge.” But as Rodinson rightly says, it is “difficult to accept the Prophet’s innocence.” Nothing in his previous or subsequent behavior shows any mercy for the Jews. As Moshe Gil showed, right from the start Muhammad had at least the expulsion of the Jews in mind. Further he had expressly ordered the murder of various Jews and had given out the general command to kill any Jew that came into Muslim hands. And given Abu Lubaba’s gesture, it is obvious that the fate of the Banu Qurayza had already been decided. The choice of Sa’d was no accident either; a man wounded (he was to die soon afterwards) during the siege against the Qurayza; a devout Muslim; and, as Andrae puts it, “one of Muhammad’s most fanatical followers” (someone who had been one of the first to give Muhammad allegiance). Finally Muhammad’s wholehearted endorsement of Sa’d’s verdict speaks for itself.

3. Then there are the relativists—moral and cultural—who argue, “Neither blame nor vindication are in order here. We cannot judge the treatment of the Qurayza by present-day moral standards. Their fate was a bitter one, but not unusual according to the harsh rules of war during that period.”²¹⁶ . I have already referred to relativism as a malady of modem times, and I shall have occasion to discuss it again in my last chapter. But here I shall make the following comments, addressing some logical points first.

● One of the objections to the above proposition is “that this proposition itself cannot be asserted as objective. Relativism can’t be stated, because the proposition that expounds relativism cannot itself be relative. You claim absolute truth for it.”²¹⁷ In other words, there is something inherently illogical in relativism.

● If there is total incommensurability between our times and some remote time in the past then, logically, not only can we not decline to pass adverse moral judgments, but we cannot pass favorable judgments either. We cannot praise a past society, or an individual from it, from our twentieth-century perspective. And yet, inconsistently, relativists constantly use value-laden adjectives to describe Muhammad, as for example, “compassionate” (Rodinson, p. 313). In the preceding quote from Norman Stillman, the fate of the Qurayza is described as “bitter.” From which perspective is it bitter? The twentieth-century or seventh-century? Further, Stillman talks of the “harsh” rules of war—“harsh” from which perspective?

It is practically impossible to write history in perfectly neutral terms, even if it were desirable to do so. Stillman’s own book, The Jews of Arab Lands, is full of morally evaluative expressions such as “tolerance.” And no relativist can legitimately praise Muhammad in such absolutist terms as “one of the greatest of the sons of Adam” (Watt).

● If relativism is true, then as a consequence we cannot compare Jesus Christ or Socrates or Solon with Hitler. We cannot truly say that Jesus was morally superior to Hitler, which is absurd. If morals were entirely relative, then “American citizens and British subjects might disapprove of slavery and of persecuting Jews, but they could not argue that these things were wrong in any absolute sense or that it was their business to try to stop them.”²¹⁸

● Buried in Stillman’s proposition quoted earlier is another quite separate thesis, namely, the idea that we cannot blame a man or woman for being “someone of his times.” Such a thesis shifts the moral blame from the individual to the “period” in which the person under discussion lived. But this will not do as a defense of Muhammad. If Muhammad lived in barbaric times, then he was a barbarian: no worse than any other member of his society; but no better either. (And, of course, the relativist cannot merely blame the “times.”)

Now some empirical observations.

1. It simply is not true that seventh-century Arabia is so morally remote from us. Stillman’s remark is condescending in the extreme. As Muir²¹⁹ says, in reference to the murder of the Jew Ibn Sunayna, “There can be little doubt that some Moslems were at times scandalised by crimes like this; though it is not in the nature of tradition to preserve the record of what they said. The present is one of the few occasions on which such murmurs have come to light. When Merwan was governor of Medina, he one day asked Benjamin, a convert from Kab’s tribe, in what manner Kab met his death. ‘By guile and perfidy,’ said Benjamin.” Rodinson²²⁰ makes the same point, “The care taken by the texts to exculpate Muhammad shows that it must have aroused some feeling. Details emerge even from these very texts which make it difficult to accept the Prophet’s innocence.”

It is absurd to postulate that mercy, compassion, and generosity were totally unknown to the Arabs of seventh-century Arabia. As Isaiah Berlin²²¹ has remarked, “The differences among peoples and societies can be exaggerated. No culture that we know lacks the notions of good and bad; true and false. Courage, for example, has so far as we can tell, been admired in every society known to us. There are universal values. This is an empirical fact about mankind.” Barbarity remains barbarity in whichever epoch one finds it.

Muhammad himself, ironically, taught that true nobility lay in forgiveness, that in Islam those who restrain their anger and pardon men shall receive Paradise as well-doers (sura 3.128; 24.22). Yet, he singularly failed to do that in his treatment of the Banu Qurayza.

2. Eminent historians have not hesitated to pass moral judgments on historical personages. Sir Steven Runciman in his classic History of the Crusades describes the Sultan Baibars as “cruel, disloyal, and treacherous, rough in his manners and harsh in his speech.... As a man he was evil.”²²²

After the extermination of the Jews of Banu Qurayza, Muhammad continued his banditry and the assassinations. A group of the banished Banul-Nadir had settled at Khaybar, a nearby oasis, and were suspected of encouraging the Bedouin tribes to attack the Muslims. Muhammad ordered the murder of the chief of the Jews, Abi ‘I Huqayq. The Prophet’s henchmen assassinated Huqayq in his bed. Realizing that this latest assassination had not solved his problems, Muhammad devised a new plan; he sent out a delegation to Khaybar to persuade their new leader, Usayr b. Zarim, to come to Medina to discuss the possibility of his being made ruler of Khaybar. Solemn guarantees of his safety were given. Usayr set out, unarmed, with thirty of his men. On the way, on the flimsiest of pretexts, the Muslims turned on their invited, unarmed guests and killed all but one of them who escaped. On their return, the Muslims were greeted by Muhammad who, on learning the fate of the Jews, gave thanks and said, “Verily, the Lord hath delivered you from an unrighteous people.” On another occason, Muhammad gave his philosophy of war: “War is deception.”

Muhammad and his men attacked the forts that studded the vale of Khaybar one by one, all the while crying, “O you who have been given victory, kill! kill!” One by one the forts fell, until the Muslims arrived at the fort of Khamus, which also eventually succumbed. The chief of the Jews, Kinana b. al-Rabi, and his cousin were led out and accused by Muhammad of concealing the treasure of the Banu’l-Nadir. The Jews protested that they no longer had anything left. Then [here I am quoting from the much revered biography of the Prophet by Ibn Hisham] “Muhammad gave Kinana over to al-Zubayr, one of Muhammad’s own men, saying, ‘Torture him until you extract it from him.’ Al-Zubayr struck a fire with flint on his chest until he expired. Then the Apostle [Muhammad] gave him over to Muhammad b. Maslama who cut off his head as part of his revenge for his brother Mahmud b. Maslama.”²²³

The Jews of the other forts of Khaybar were eventually attacked and forced to surrender on terms, “except that is for the Nadir, who were given no quarter.”

Assassinations, murder, cruelty, and torture must all be taken into consideration in any judgment on the moral character of Muhammad. But, unfortunately this sorry catalogue of misdeeds is incomplete. We need to examine his conduct on several other occasions, as always basing our account on the Muslim sources.

The Zaynab Affair

One day the Prophet set out to visit his adopted son Zaid. Zaid had been one of the earliest converts to Islam—the third, in fact—and he was very loyal to his foster father, who in return held him in high regard. Zaid was married to Zaynab bint Jahsh, a cousin of the Prophet. By all accounts—and this point is very important for our story—she was very beautiful.

On the day concerned, Zaid was not at home, but Zaynab, rather lightly clad, and hence revealing a great many of her charms, opened the door to the Prophet, and asked him in. As she hastily prepared to receive him, Muhammad was smitten by her beauty: “Gracious Lord! Good Heavens! How you do turn the hearts of men!” exclaimed the Prophet. He declined to enter and went away in some confusion. However, Zaynab had heard his words and repeated them to Zaid, when he returned home. Zaid went straight to the Prophet and dutifully offered to divorce his wife for him. Muhammad declined, adding, “Keep your wife and fear God.” Zaynab now seemed quite taken with the idea of marrying the Prophet, and Zaid, seeing that Muhammad still yearned for her, divorced her. Still, fear of public opinion made Muhammad hesitate: after all, an adopted son was in every respect equal to a natural son; therefore, such a union would have been seen as incestuous by the Arabs of his time. As always, a revelation came to him in time, enabling him to “cast his scruples to the wind.” While Muhammad was sitting next to his wife Aisha, he suddenly went into one of his prophetic swoons. When he had recovered, he said, “Who will go and congratulate Zaynab and say that the Lord has joined her to me in marriage?” Thus we find in sura 33.2-33.7:

God has not given to a man two hearts within him.... neither has He made your adopted sons to be as your own sons.... Let your adopted sons go by their own father’s name. This is more just with God.

And it is not for a believer, man or woman, to have any choice in their affairs, when God and His Apostle have decreed a matter.... And remember, when you said to the person whom God has shown favor, and to whom you also have shown favor, “Keep your wife to yourself, and fear God” and you did conceal in your soul what God was about to reveal and you did fear [the opinion] of men when you should have feared God. And when Zaid had settled concerning her to divorce her, we married her to you, that it might not be a crime in the faithful to marry the wives of their adopted sons, when they have settled the affair concerning them. God’s bidding must be performed. Muhammad is not the father of any man among you, but he is the Apostle of God, and the seal of the Prophets.

The most natural and immediate reaction to the preceding account must surely be that of the Prophet’s own wife, Aisha, who is said to have remarked wittily on this occasion, “Truly your God seems to have been very quick in fulfilling your prayers.”

How do the apologists defend the indefensible? Watt and others have tried to argue that the marriage was contracted for political reasons; there was nothing sexually improper about Muhammad’s conduct. They point to the fact that Zaynab was thirty-five at the time and hence could not have been very desirable. But this is nonsense. The Muslim sources themselves give the entire story a sexual interpretation: Zaynab’s beauty, her state of undress, her charms revealed by a gust of wind, Muhammad’s remarks and signs of confusion. Clearly, some of Muhammad’s followers were disquieted, but what perturbed them was not the Prophet’s amorousness. “What struck them as odd was that the rule [revealed in the above sura] should have been so exactly calculated to satisfy desires which were for once in conflict with social taboos.” Rodinson continues,

As for thinking with that most learned Muslim apologist Muhammad Hamidullah, that Muhammad’s exclamations at the beauty of Zaynab merely signified his astonishment that Zayd [Zaid] should not have managed to get on with such a lovely woman, this is out of the question since it is in flat contradiction to the obvious meaning of the text. Even the passage from the Koran, brief though it is, implies that the Prophet certainly wanted to do what the revelation did not command him to do until later, and that only fear of public opinion prevented him. Hamidullah’s theory only shows once again the over subtleties which can result from the desire to prove theories the truth of which has already been proclaimed by dogma.²²⁴

Another sexual scandal threatened to disturb the domestic bliss of the Prophet’s harem. To prevent jealousy among his wives, Muhammad used to divide his time equally among them, spending one night with each of them in turn. On a day when it was his wife Hafsa’s turn, she was out visiting her father. Returning unexpectedly, she surprised Muhammad in her bed with Mary the Coptic maid, his legal concubine. Hafsa was furious and reproached him bitterly; what is more, she threatened to expose him to others in the harem. Muhammad begged her to keep quiet and promised to stay clear of the hated Mary. Hafsa was unable to keep the news to herself and told Aisha, who also hated Mary. The scandal spread throughout the harem, and soon Muhammad found himself ostracized by his own wives. As in the Zaynab affair, a divine revelation interposed to sort out his domestic problems. The heavenly message disallowed the earlier promise to keep away from the seductive maid and reprimanded the wives for their insubordination; it even hinted that the Prophet would divorce all the wives in the whole harem and replace them with more submissive ones. Then, Muhammad retired with Mary and stayed aloof from his wives for a month. Eventually, on the intercession of Umar and Abu Bakr, Muhammad made peace and forgave the wives. Harmony returned again to the harem. The sura concerned is 66.15:

O Prophet! Why have you forbidden yourself that which God has made lawful unto you [i.e., Mary], out of desire to please your wives, for God is forgiving and merciful? Verily God has sanctioned the revocation of your oaths; ... The Prophet had entrusted a secret to one of his wives but she repeated it and God revealed it to him.... If he divorces you, God will give him in your stead wives more submissive unto God, believers, pious, repentant, devout, fasting; both Women married previously, and virgins.

As Muir says, “there is surely no grotesquer utterance than this in the ‘Sacred Books of the East’; and yet it has been gravely read all these ages, and is still read, by the Moslem, both in public and private, as part of the eternal Coran.”²²⁵

The Satanic Verses

Again, we have from impeccable Muslim sources (al-Tabari; Waqidi), the damaging story of the Satanic Verses (an expression coined by Muir in the late 1850s, and now well known). During his days in Mecca, before the flight to Medina, Muhammad was sitting with some eminent men of Mecca next to the Kaaba, when he began to recite sura 53, which describes Gabriel’s first visit to Muhammad and then goes on to the second visit:

He also saw him [Gabriel] another time

By the Lote tree at the furthest boundary

Near to which is the Paradise of rest,

When the Lote tree covered that which it covered,

His sight turned not aside, neither did it wander

And verily he beheld some of the greatest Signs of his Lord

What do you think of Lat and Uzza

And Manat the third beside?

At this point, we are told that Satan put into his mouth words of reconciliation and compromise:

These are exalted Females

Whose intercession verily is to be sought after.

Of course, the Meccans were delighted at this recognition of their deities and are said to have prayed with the Muslims. But Muhammad himself was visited by Gabriel who reprimanded him and told him that the true ending to the verse should have been:

What! shall there be male progeny unto you, and female unto Him?

That were indeed an unjust partition!

They are naught but names, which ye and your fathers have invented.

Muslims have always been uncomfortable with this story, unwilling to believe that the Prophet could have made such a concession to idolatry. But if we accept the authenticity of the Muslim sources in general, there is no reason to reject the story. It seems unthinkable that such a story could have been invented by a devout Muslim such as al-Tabari, or that he could have accepted it from a dubious source.²²⁶ Besides, it explains the fact why those Muslims who had fled to Abyssinia returned: they had heard that the Meccans had converted. It seems apparent that this was no sudden lapse on the part of Muhammad, but had been carefully calculated to win the support of the Meccans. It also casts serious doubts on Muhammad’s sincerity: Even if Satan had really put the words in his mouth, what faith can we put in a man so easily led astray by Satan? Why did God let it happen? How do we know there are no other passages where Muhammad has not been led astray?

The Peace if Hudalblya

Muhammad was also criticized by his followers on another occasion, when he was thought to have compromised his principles once again. Muhammad, feeling very confident after the consolidation of his position in Medina, decided that the moment had come to take Mecca. But realizing that the time was not right, he changed his mind at the last moment and entered into negotiations with the Meccans. By the treaty of Hudaibiya, Muhammad was to be permitted to perform the pilgrimage the following year, but in return he was to refrain from calling himself “prophet,” and to refrain from using the formulae of Islam. Later Muhammad was to break the truce with the Meccans.

With these elements we are in a better position to understand Dr. Margoliouth’s references²²⁷ in his summary of the picture that emerges of Muhammad in the biography by Ibn Ishaq:

The character attributed to Mohammed in the biography of Ibn Ishaq is exceedingly unfavorable. In order to gain his ends he recoils from no expedient, and he approves of similar unscrupulousness on the part of his adherents, when exercised in his interest. He profits to the utmost from the chivalry of the Meccans, but rarely requites it with the like. He organises assassinations and wholesale massacres. His career as tyrant of Medina is that of a robber chief, whose political economy consists in securing and dividing plunder, the distribution of the latter being at times carried out on principles which fail to satisfy his follower’s ideas of justice. He is himself an unbridled libertine and encourages the same passion in his followers. For whatever he does he is prepared to plead the express authorization of the deity. It is, however, impossible to find any doctrine which he is not prepared to abandon in order to secure a political end. At different points in his career he abandons the unity of God and his claim to the title of Prophet. This is a disagreeable picture for the founder of a religion, and it cannot be pleaded that it is a picture drawn by an enemy: and even though Ibn Ishaq’s name was for some reason held in low esteem by the classical traditionalists of the third Islamic century, they make no attempt to discredit those portions of the biography which bear hardest on the character of their Prophet.

A final assessment of Muhammad’s achievement must wait until we have looked at the Koran and its doctrines, in the next chapter.