Perspective Islam

Perspective – Islam

World History Name: ______

E. Napp Date: ______

Editor’s Reflection: Mohammed as a Man of his Time

(From 32 Problems in World History: Source Readings and Interpretations; Edited by Edwin Fenton)

“When historians study religions, they should not try to answer questions about the truth of religious doctrines. Such questions cannot be proved to the satisfaction of all by using the discipline of history. They depend upon faith for their answers and so cannot be proved true or false by factual evidence.

When a historian examines a religious institution or set of beliefs, he often looks for connections between the religion and the culture of which it is a part. Such relationships can be seen between the religion and the life of the Babylonians, the Jews, and the Christians. However, historians have much more evidence about both Islam and its setting than they have about most earlier religions. Your reading today indicates the conclusions a skilled historian can draw from such information. It should be read carefully to see whether Muller gives sufficient evidence to support his interpretation.

Islam has been and still is one of the most vital forces in the world. The followers of Islam swept over Africa and much of Asia in great religious wars during and after the time of Mohammed. During the early Middle Ages, Moslem centers of learning preserved much of the knowledge accumulated by the Greeks and Romans. Renaissance scholars often found priceless remnants of classical manuscripts only in Arab libraries. In our own day, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and the faith of over a billion people.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. What were some of the influences of time and place on Mohammed? Would you expect other religious leaders to come under similar influences?

2. In the sixth paragraph, the author writes that Mohammed “was a great man, superior to his time and place.” What standards of judgment for greatness is he employing here? Are these standards good ones?

3. In the fifth paragraph from the end of the essay, the author advances several explanations for the fact that Mohammed retained the sacred Black Stone. Why would the author do this? How does this correspond to our understanding of history as interpretation?

~ Edwin Fenton, 32 Problems in World History

What are the main points of the passage?

The Loom of History / by Herbert J. Muller

(Excerpt from The Loom of History by Herbert J. Muller: 1958)

As an avowed mortal, Mohammed was naturally influenced by his time and place. The religion of the Arabs before him was a very primitive one. Their holy of holies was the Kaaba – the Black Stone of Mecca…Together with nature spirits, the Arabs worshipped various goddesses…Allah himself was ancient – a thousand years before Mohammed the Persians wrote that “Allah is exalted” – but he was one of many deities. All this refutes the seductive and popular idea of [French historian Ernest] Renan that monotheism is the “natural religion of the desert.” Mohammed himself was not a man of the desert. He was a man of Mecca: a busy, prosperous city on a caravan route (like Petra and Palmyra before it), which largely controlled the overland trade between the Indian and the Mediterranean oceans, and which confronted the Prophet with the familiar problem of the rich and the poor. He shared in the chief spiritual possession of the Arabs aside from the Kaaba – their poetry. In their passion for poetry and their common illiteracy, the Arabs developed a prodigious capacity for memorizing that enabled them to preserve the Koran. The scattered verses of the Prophet had been inscribed not only on date leaves and shreds of leather but on “the hearts of men.”

On his own heart had been inscribed more than Arab tradition. There were large numbers of Jews and Christians in Arabia, including many converted Arabs… Mohammed had direct relations with colonies of Jews in and about Medina. In the Koran, he displayed an acquaintance with their Scriptures, if an imperfect one (he declared that the Jews worshipped Ezra as the son of God); often he used Biblical characters to preach his doctrines. Of Christian Scriptures he had a more limited, garbled knowledge, or at least he felt freer to reinterpret them, in an original and somewhat incongruous fashion. Thus he denied the divinity of Christ and rejected the Crucifixion as a Jewish falsehood, while for some reason he accepted the miraculous birth (perhaps because there were paintings of Jesus and Mary on the inner walls of the Kaaba.) But he identified Allah with the God of Judaism and Christianity. He borrowed other ideas foreign to Arab tradition, notably the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the flesh, which the Arabs of Mecca thought ridiculous and revolting. We cannot know to what extent he consciously borrowed, and may assume that he was more deeply indebted than he realized…In any case; his basic teaching is undeniably in the line of Judaism and Christianity.

The key events of Mohammed’s career are also beyond dispute. After some forty years of respectable but obscure life, during which his abilities in business won him the confidence and the hand of a rich widow, he felt his calling as a prophet. In his belief, the Angel Gabriel appeared to him and dictated this calling…His subsequent career supports the tradition that he was at first appalled by God’s orders, knowing that there would be no more sleep or rest for him. Like Jesus, he was from the beginning opposed by the most powerful, respectable, God-fearing members of his community. Men said: “Shall we forsake our gods for a mad poet?” Although he won over a few influential men, most of his early converts came from among the poor people and the slaves of Mecca. The mockery of the respectable turned to violent hostility when his preaching threatened the profitable business of Mecca as the sanctuary of all Arabia, the hostelry of the annual pilgrimage. The persecution of Mohammed was so effective that conceivably his mission might have failed had not a few men come from Medina one year to hear his message, and returned home as missionaries. Finally, in A.D. 622, after thirteen years of generally disheartening obedience to God’s orders, he fled in the night and sought refuge in Medina – the hegira that marks the beginning of the Islamic era with a certainty that cannot be claimed for the beginning of the Christian era.

What are the main points of the passage?

At Medina the Prophet entered the triumphant phase of his career, and the most dubious for a man of God. He became the political as well as spiritual leader of a community. He waged war against the Meccans, initiated hostilities by raiding one of their caravans in the holy month of pilgrimage, when war was banned in Arabia; to justify his aggression, he preached war against idolaters as a sacred duty (jihad). With a force of only three hundred, he routed some thousand Meccans in the piddling but momentous battle of Badr, and later proved his generalship by holding off much larger forces sent against him. He also attacked several wealthy Jewish communities, which had refused to recognize him as a prophet. When one of them surrendered after a short siege, he had all its men put to death and its women and children sold into slavery. By these campaigns he won much booty and prestige; one may suspect that it was not so much his spiritual message as his worldly success that now drew Arabs to Allah. At length the Meccans gave in: eight years after the hegira, Mohammed returned to his native city in triumph. As he then proved his wisdom and clemency by putting only four people to death, the Meccans accepted him as the apostle of Allah and joined his army. In the short time left to him he sent an expeditionary force to attack a Byzantine outpost in Syria. In the year 632 Muhammad shocked and confused his followers by dying. Most had refused to take his own word that he was a mortal.

Now Mohammed had certainly not lived like an angel. While often preaching an otherworldly gospel, he was a worldly man, with a shrewd eye to both political and economic interests. He enjoyed the company of a number of concubines in addition to his eleven wives. Most troublesome is his addiction to war. One may argue that in the Arabia of his time he could not have succeeded except by war…but the fact remains that his was no gospel of love, no message of peace and good will on earth. In preaching the holy war he could sound very naïve: the special rewards in Paradise he promised to martyrs who fell in battle included marriage to “seventy dark-eyed virgins.” His preaching involved some bloody texts as well” “It is not for a Prophet to hold captives till he hath dealt slaughter through the earth.” To all but pious Moslems Mohammed is bound to seem a distinctly fallible mortal, limited by his time and place. If his is indeed God’s final revelation to man, the Lord have mercy on us.

Yet as certainly Mohammed was a great man, superior to his time and place. He not only preached but practiced a morality that was lofty for his society. If he could be ruthless, he was more often gentle, kind, generous, magnanimous. He could be Christlike in his sympathy for the weak and poor. Through the pious fog of tradition one catches many glimpses of an attractive humanity, as in his unfailing courtesy touched by shyness, his fondness for jokes and fun, his humble sharing of the household chores, his wry indulgence of the frailties of his womenfolk, his tolerance of the foibles of his companions. One can understand why he was so deeply loved by those around him. As one reads of his death and of the quiet unaffected way in which he met it, one may almost share the grief of his companions, if not their bewilderment. Say the worst about his human limitations, and there remain a heroic and inspired life, a complete dedication to the service of his God, and a power of personality that made as deep an impression on his followers as Jesus made on his, in some ways a more lasting impression…

What are the main points of the passage?

The Koran is much harder for Westerners to admire. In Arabic, one gathers, it makes a magnificent music that still moves its readers to tears and ecstasy. In translation it strikes most Westerners as an uninspired work, occasionally eloquent but more often dully didactic, and on the whole loose, incoherent, and insufferably repetitious. The Angel Gabriel who dictated it to Mohammed seems most prosaic when he retells Biblical stories, as in the whole sura (chapter) on Joseph and his brethren. There are dull enough passages in the Old Testament, but few – even among unbelievers – would call it a mediocre book, as many do the Koran.

Our major concern, however, is the teaching of the Koran. Here the difficulty is that Mohammed was hardly a clear, consistent thinker, if a thinker at all. He did not reason – he merely preached or revealed, as the spirit dictated. The difficulty is aggravated by the lack of logical or chronological order in the suras of the Koran. Although Moslems make out a subtle sequence, to outsiders the only apparent principle is the arbitrary one of putting first the longer suras, which are generally the later ones chronologically. We must remember, at any rate, that Mohammed at first spoke as the prophet of a weak minority sect in Mecca, unable to enforce his will, given to calling himself the “Warner”; then as leader of an independent, increasingly strong community in Medina, and in this capacity both as prophet and statesman; and finally as the triumphant ruler of a temporal kingdom – the one great religious leader whose career ended in worldly success, rather than sacrifice or renunciation…

Even so, his basic teaching is clearer and more nearly uniform than that attributed to Jesus by the diverse author of the New Testament. The theme of more than half of the Koran is an insistence on an absolutely pure monotheism, a denunciation of all forms of polytheism and idolatry. “There is no god but God.” Allah is the God preached by the prophets, from Abraham and Ishmael through Moses to Jesus, and revealed in the Scriptures of the Jews and the Christians; Abraham was the true founder of the faith, Mohammed the last prophet, and the Koran the final, complete, perfect revelation, correcting the false beliefs that had corrupted Judaism and Christianity. In particular Mohammed repudiated the ideas that Allah had a Son and a Mother, or was part of a Trinity, and with them all the elaborate theology that Christianity had spun around its Godhead. While admitting angels and the Arabian jinn, the bad ones of whom were led by “the Satan” or Eblis, he rejected all human intermediaries between Allah and man – the priests and monks whom men “have taken as lords beside Allah.” Like Yahweh, Allah strictly banned all images, which might also become objects of worship…

What are the main points of the passage?

For the rest, Mohammed spelled out in minute detail the ceremonial and ethical requirements of Allah, many of them drawn from Arab custom. The major ceremonial duties were the daily prayers, fasting during the holy month of Ramadan (in which the Koran had been revealed), and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The later involved a major concession to pagan idolatry – the retention of the sacred Black Stone. Possibly Mohammed felt obliged to make this concession, or shrewdly calculated it as a means of uniting the Arabs behind him and making Islam a national crusade; just as possibly he had a sincere reverence for the ancient shrine of his people, in the belief that it had been set up by Abraham. He was not free from superstition. He also retained the jinn, and his prescriptions included some primitive taboos, such as those on the eating of pork and strangled animals…