Trends and Developments in Interreligious Dialogue

JAN SLOMP THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD IN ENLIGHTENMENT AND CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE Introduction The second half of the twentieth century saw a revaluation among ecumenic- ally-minded Protestant and Roman Catholic thinkers of the Prophet Muham- mad. Writers like William Montgomery Watt (1961; Anglican), Anton Wessels (1978; Reformed), Kenneth Cragg (1984; Anglican), Hans Küng (1984; Ro- man Catholic), and Reinhard Leuze (1994; Lutheran),1 to mention only a few, do see him as a prophet. They are far from the influential Dominican monk Ri- coldo de Monte Cruce, who lived in Baghdad from about 1290-1300 and de- scribed Muhammad as a hominem diabolicum (cf. Bijlefeld 1959: 48). John Calvin’s view has been left behind as well: he saw Muhammad as the great se- ducer of the Turks, not taking the trouble to study Islam himself but referring to this religion in numerous places in his works (cf. Slomp 1995: 126-57). Martin Luther and Erasmus, on the other hand, did study Islam. Luther translated Ricoldo and wanted to study Islam and the Qur’an seriously, for he did not consider it responsible to state, without further investigation, that “Muham- mad was an enemy of the Christian faith” (In: Bobzin 2004: 269). Each of the authors cited make clear immediately, each in his own way, that they do not use the word “prophet” precisely in the same way that Muslims do. To do so would imply that, as Christians, they see Muhammad as the last and final messenger of God. In short, for them he is a prophet and not the Prophet, using a biblical or phenomenological, frame of reference for their definition of prophet, rather than a Qur’anic one. But the Bible and the Qur’an have, as Küng demonstrated, so many similarities that this approach is justified. One semi-official church gathering, a conference on Islam organized by the Confer- ence of European Churches, stated in March 1984 in St. Pölten in Austria that Christians, with certain biblical reservations, could speak about Muhammad as 1 Prophet with a capital always refers to Muhammad. Cf. Leuze 1994: 26 The other writers mentioned here will be discussed below. 63 STUDIES IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 18 (2008) 1 a prophet—but, it was added, for Christians Jesus is more than a prophet. We will look at some of these writers and their views (Slomp 1995b).2 Hans Zirker, a Roman Catholic, discusses the dilemma for Christians by means of the following question: Was Muhammad a prophetic genius or a prophet? He concludes that it cannot be expected that there will soon be unanimity among Christians concerning this (Zirker 1993: 158). This is certainly absent in most evangelical circles, although positive changes are occurring there as well. What is the source of the revaluation of Islam as a religion in general and of the person of the Prophet in particular? In the Dutch-speaking world, the well-known expert on Islam in Leiden, C. Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) wrote retrospectives in 1886 and 1894—which are still worth reading—on pre- vious literature on this subject (Snouck Hurgronje 1886: 185-294; 1894: 321- 62). To my knowledge, Clinton Bennet offers the most extensive overview in his In Search of Muhammad of how Muhammad has been viewed in the West in recent centuries (Bennet 1998). He limits himself largely to sources written in or translated into English. In particular, he misses the contributions by writers from German Enlightenment circles, such as Lessing and Goethe, towards a revaluation of Muhammad. The former Baptist missionary could have been expected also to provide an overview of recent views by Christian theologians who propose recognizing Muhammad as a prophet. David Kerr filled this gap in his “He Walked in the Path of the Prophets: Toward Christian Theological Recognition of the Prophethood of Muhammad” (Kerr 1995). In that same year, the writer of this article did the same for Dutch-speaking areas: “Het de- bat over de christelijke erkenning van Mohammed” (The Debate on the Chris- tian Recognition of Muhammad) (Slomp 1995b). No use could be made of Da- vid Kerr’s insights at this point. In this article I will sketch four trails that have led to a more positive view of the Prophet of Islam. It is not possible to keep these four trails completely sep- arate, for they converge frequently in one and the same individual. These trails are the following: 1) the literary trail of the Enlightenment, 2) the orientalistic trail, 3) the trail of writers from the Muslim world leading to 4) the Christian theological trail. The first three trails—although the one more than the other— have influenced the thinking of Christian theologians on Islam in general and on the Prophet Muhammad in particular in both positive and negative ways. The Literary Trail of the Enlightenment The first people in Western Europe to liberate themselves from a negative image of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad were not theologians but scholars, 2 The report of this conference is found on p. 132. 64 THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD historians, poets, novelists and playwrights. In Enlightenment circles, Islam was appreciated as a rational, natural religion with, according to thinkers in this period, a clearer and more delineated monotheism than the incomprehensi- ble and complex Christian reflections on three-in-oneness. In contrast to what is now the case among those who today claim to endorse Enlightenment ideals, the revaluation of Islam was accompanied to a certain extent by a critique of Christianity, particularly Christian doctrine. The following quote will serve to illustrate this: Leibniz and many other Enlightenment figures saw Muhammad as a herald of natural religion. Indeed, Henry de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) made him into a hero of an “anticlerical novel” (first published in 1730) in which he was portrayed as the creator of a rational religion far superior to Christianity. (Fück 1955: 103) Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881): The Hero as Prophet Whoever follows this trail discovers that the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle is often cited as the first European writer to take a positive view of the Prophet Muhammad and as someone who broke the long chain of slanderous state- ments about him. He did this in the second of his six lectures on heroes and hero worship, which was on “The Hero As Prophet. Mahomet: Islam” on 8 May 1840.3 This lecture certainly made Carlyle the most well-known, most im- portant and influential writer on this subject, particularly in the English-speaking world, but he was not the first. Carlyle himself cited George Sale’s first English translation of the Qur’an directly from Arabic in 1734 as a positive source. Sale’s translation led people to suspect him of being a “closet Muslim” (Bennett 1998: 99). The body that commissioned the translation, the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, severed all ties with him because of his translation. Another source was the work of the British scholar Edward Po- cocke (1604-1691), the first professor of the Arabic language in Oxford. Car- lyle could profit also from Edward Gibbon’s famous The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-83), in which the latter, as a secular historian, wrote positively about Muhammad (Gibbon 1998: 861f.). Carlyle did not provide any footnotes and indicates sources only in passing. It is therefore possible that he was also acquainted with two works that were published in 1829: Godfrey Hig- gins’ Apology for the Life of Mahomed, which called Muhammad a “very great man,” and Charles Forster’s Mahomatism Unveiled, which stated that the Pro- phet “in some sense was raised up by God” (Bennett 1998: 102f.). Forster’s book was severely attacked by, among others, William Muir, who published a two-volume Life of Mahomet himself in 1858, with which Muslims were certainly not happy. It would have great influence on missionaries in India and af- ter 1947 even in Pakistan (see below). Carlyle translated works by Goethe, Leibniz and other writers in the time of the Enlightenment. I will return to 3 On his life see “Thomas Carlyle,” in: Encyclopaedia Britannica 4: 923f. 65 STUDIES IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 18 (2008) 1 Goethe below. Another reason for beginning with Carlyle is that his work is discussed extensively in two well-known modern Egyptian biographies of Mu- hammad written in Arabic: Hayât Muhammad (The Life of Muhammed) by Mohammad Husayn Haykal and ‘Abqariyyat Muhammad (The Genius of Mo- hammed) by ‘Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad (cf. Sabanegh 1981: 117, 130, 357f.).4 Al-Aqqad wrote a book on Jesus, Hayât al Masih, as a counterpart, that was published in 1965 in Urdu. Because Carlyle made a greater contribution to a more positive image of Muhammad than his German predecessors, we will dis- cuss him first in this overview. Carlyle was born into a Calvinist family in Scotland. His father hoped that he would become a minister, but Carlyle taught mathematics, studied law and German and wrote many historical works, in particular on great men like Cromwell and Napoleon, which caused a furore among the Victorian public. All his writings were characterized by Calvinist severity and a prophetic tone. His admiration for Muhammad is clear in the following quotes: We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I justly can.

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