Unmasking Islam: A false Prophet Muhammad and his sexual perversion
The original book of Ibn Ishaq is lost to history and all we know of it is what is quoted from it by the later writers, particularly Ibn Hisham and al-Tabari. These quotations are fortunately quite reliable. Ibn Hisham edited and abridged Ibn Ishaq’s work about sixty-five years later. In his edition, Hisham (Guillaume, 1955, p. 691) wrote, “I am omitting things which Ishaq recorded in this book. I have omitted things which are disgraceful to discuss and matters which would distress certain people.”
This particular comment of Hisham speaks volumes. Today we need to know, what were those ‘disgraceful to discuss’ discussions Hisham omitted from Ishaq’s original works and what were those ‘matters which would distress certain people’.
We understand Hisham’s position. He was actually compromising with the truth to save his life, which was dependant upon not offending the cleric-kings during his time. But he was honest enough to admit that he had compromised with the truth.
However, a few modern historians have attempted to recover the lost portion of Ishaq’s work.
They applied the Biblical criteria of ‘Form and Redaction criticism’ (Form criticism is an analysis of literary documents, particularly the Bible, to discover earlier oral traditions as example, stories, legends, myths, etc upon which they were based. Redaction Criticism is concerned with when and by what process (of collecting and editing) did a particular section or book of the Bible reach its final literary form) to the basis historical assemblage of Ishaq.
To quote Margoliouth (cited Warraq, 2000, p. 340), “The character attributed to Muhammad in the biography of Ibn Ishaq is exceedingly unfavorable… 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 a 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.”
The Pagan Meccans were wise enough not to believe Muhammad’s gigantic claim because they had seen many such imposters. There are more than a dozen verses which confirm that Muhammad and the ‘voice’ he had heard were ridiculed by the pagans.
They thought that Muhammad was fabricating verses or in the parlance of those days, he was demon-possessed.
The contemporaries or Muhammad called him ‘majnoon’ (Lunatic, crazy, possessed by jinn) (Sina, 2008. p. 6) or a soothsayer ‘kahin’. This is very explicit in the ten Qur’anic verses 15.6, 23.70-72, 34.8, 34.45/46, 37.35/36, 44.13/14, 52.29, 68.2, 68.51 and 81.22. In a few instances, there are verses 21:5, 36:69, 37:36/35, 52:30 where an alternative explanation was given that Muhammad was an ambitious but fanciful poet who had merely invented it all.
To defend himself Muhammad added several references to Biblical Prophets likewise accused of ghost-possession, as example earlier Prophets in general (Q: 51.52), Noah (Q: 23.25), Moses (Q: 26.26/27, Q: 51.39). Let it be on record that the Bible nowhere mentions such an allegation against Noah, Moses or most other Prophets. The one exception is Hosea, a Prophet apparently unknown to Muhammad: "They call the man of the spirit a madman: so great is their guilt that their resistance is likewise great" (Hosea: 9.7). Undoubtedly, Muhammad, whose knowledge of the Bible was only sketchy, was merely projecting his own plight onto Noah and Moses.
Muhammad’s argument was very silly and stands on a slippery ground. His reason was something like this, - ‘I am a Prophet but am not acknowledged by my narrow-minded contemporaries, just as the ancient genuine Prophets were not given due recognition either at first instance. Hence I am also a genuine Prophet’. Muhammad lost many of his followers on this account.
Bukhari (9:87:111) recorded that Muhammad’s Prophetic mission was confirmed by cousin of Khadija, a Christian convert from Judaism named Waraqa Bin Naufal. After few days of confirming Muhammad’s Prophethood, Waraqa died mysteriously. The fact that Waraqa was a Christian had been a source of embarrassment to the Muslims. Hence they often deny it to get rid of this shame. Some overenthusiastic Muslim sources say that, by recognizing Prophet, Waraqa converted to Islam. However, some modern scholars contend that Waraqa actually rejected Muhammad and the text of Ibn Hisham’s version of the Sira was later corrupted (Spencer, 2006, p. 53).
There is no account in voluminous Hadith that Waraqa converted to Islam and the details of his mysterious death. From the Hadith collections we can find minutest details of Muhammad’s activities and the events of early Muslim communities. The conversion of a Christian priest who was a cousin of Muhammad and his wife would have been a momentous event. Waraqa was the most revered holy man in Mecca
Though it appears shocking, but I believe that Waraqa was murdered by Muhammad.
This is a possibility which we cannot ignore. After Muhammad and Khadija had used him, he became a liability—someone who could and would profess that Muhammad’s claims were untrue.
Once Waraqa was dead, Muhammad felt free to concoct any lies and attribute them to him and the deception continued unabated.
Strange but true that, even there is mention in Hadith (Bukhari 4. 56.814) that Muhammad was once challenged by a Christian convert who reverted back to Christianity by seeing that Muhammad was actually faking the Qur’anic revelations and declared, “Muhammad knows nothing but what I have written for him”. There was a similar type of observation by one of the Muhammad’s scribes; Abdullah Ibn Abi Sarh, who used to write down Allah’s revelations.
When Abdullah suggested some changes to Muhammad's dictation, Muhammad readily agreed with Abdullah. This led Abdullah to suspect Muhammad's claim of reception of messages from God, apostatized and left Medina for Mecca
In the Christian view, the gospel concerning Christ was final. Bible exclusively cautioned that any other teaching is false even if an angel from heaven (here meaning Gabriel) came down to preach it, was not to be accepted (Gal.1:8). Christ specifically spoke of false Prophets yet to come, and warned that if people report that such a one in the desert – ‘do not go there’ (Matt. 24:26). But in spite of this clear warning in the Bible; many early Christians did not recognize this false Prophet. Muhammad and his sect were most believably understood as yet another wave of theological deviants of Christendom who had gone astray.
When Muhammad advised a small group of his followers to flee Mecca , the Christian king of Abyssinia received them and gave them refuge. In biographies of Muhammad, there are many references of a Christian monk named Bahira who is said to have recognized in Muhammad the signs of a Prophet. The idea that Islam might be ‘a new religion’ was in the strict sense of the term was unthinkable to the Christians. When Jerusalem was surrendered to Muslims in 638, Sophronius (Patriarch of Jerusalem), who had negotiated the surrender of the city to the Muslims, explained the invasion of Palestine
The notion was that the Muslims were the instruments of the God’s wrath (Fletcher, 2003, p. 16).
But slowly the early Christians recognized Muhammad as a man of blood and his followers as irredeemably violent.
Throughout the medieval period, all of the characteristics of Muhammad that confirmed his authority in the eyes of Muslims were reversed by Christian authors and turned into defects.
When Christians recognized Islam as a rival religion to Christianity, they simply refused the notion of a new Prophet after Christ (Ernst, 2005, p. 14). The traditional doctrine that Muhammad was illiterate, which to Muslims was proof of Divine origin of Qur’an, indicated to the Christians that he must have been a fraud. When challenged by the Meccans to produce miracles, Muhammad said that Qur’an was his only miracle. While Muslims viewed this as proof of the spirituality of his mission, Christian antagonists considered this lack of miracles as clear evidence that Muhammad was a fake.
In 850, a monk called Perfectus went shopping in the capital of Muslim state of al-Andalus. Here he was stopped by a group of Arabs who asked him whether Jesus or Muhammad was the greater Prophet. There was a trick in the question because it was a capital offence in the Islamic empire to insult Muhammad and Perfectus knew it very well. So at first he responded cautiously.
He gave an exact account of the Christian faith respecting the Divinity of Christ. But suddenly he snapped and burst into a passionate stream of abuse, calling Muhammad a charlatan, a sexual pervert and the antichrist himself and a false Prophet spoken of in the Gospel (Foxe, 1827, p. 76- 7). Perfectus was thrown into the prison but later released because the judge realized that he was provoked by the Muslims. However after few days of his release, the Muslims’ pranks provoked him once more and Perfectus cracked a second time and insulted Muhammad in such crude terms that he was again taken and later on executed (Armstrong, 2006, p. 22).
Few days later, another Christian monk by the name Ishaq appeared before the same judge and attacked Muhammad and his religion with many crude and disgusting words. His insulting words to Muhammad and Islam were so strong that the Judge, thinking him drunk or deranged, slapped him to bring him to his senses. But Ishaq persisted in his abuse and the Judge ordered his execution also.
A few days after Ishaq’s execution, six monks from the same monastery arrived and delivered yet another venomous attack on Muhammad. There were executed too. That summer, about fifty Christian monks died this way (Armstrong, 2006, p. 23).
But those Christian monks had all the right to call Muhammad a fake. They were well educated, wise and they had studied Muhammad and his religion thoroughly. The two biggest Christian criticisms of Muhammad were undoubtedly in relation to his military activities, marriages and sexual perversions. For Christians, the celibacy and nonviolent approach of Jesus were generally seen as indispensable characteristics of true spirituality.
The cruelty of Muhammad and his sexual perversion were taken as clear proof that Muhammad could not be on the same exalted level as Jesus. The early Christian critics of Muhammad generally described him as motivated by a combination of political ambition and sensual lust. But the success of Islam raised a disturbing theological question: How had God allowed this impious faith to prosper? Could it be that God had deserted His own people?
The earliest reference to Muhammad in Christian literature is found in the writings of seventh century. The Armenian ‘Chronicle of Sebeos’ says the Muhammad was an ‘Ishmaelite’, who claimed to be a Prophet. In the coming years many Biblical scholars realized that though Islam and Christianity has many similarities, like, praying, fasting, giving alms, pilgrimage etc, but actually Islam is against Christianity. During the middle ages of Christian Europe, Christians had a very strong negative feeling against Muslims. As example, Bede, a monk and Biblical scholar described Qur’an as ‘a parody of sacred scripture of Christianity [i.e. Bible]’ and Muhammad as a pseudo-Prophet, who and his followers has made war on Christians and seized their Holy places. In a work of Biblical commentary completed in 716, Bede described Muslims as ‘enemies of the Church’ (Fletcher, 2003, p. 19).
Like Bede, another prolific writer of theology was John of Damascus. He hailed from an ethnic Arab family and whose three generations had served Muslim rulers. He was one of the earliest Christian writers to concern himself at any length and in a systematic way with Islam. John was the first scholar who had explained the Biblical deviation of the Ishmaelites.
He went on to castigate Muhammad as a false Prophet who cribbed part of his teaching from the Old and New Testaments and also from the sayings of a heretic Christian monk, Bahira. According to John, Muhammad wrote down ‘some ridiculous compositions in a book of his’ (Chase, 1958, p. 153), which he claimed had been sent down to him from heaven. Somewhere around 745, John composed a play, ‘Dialogue between a Saracen and a Christian’.
This dialog envisages a situation in which a Muslim puts awkward questions to a Christian on such matters as the nature of Christ, creation, free will and many others. The Christian parries these questions so skillfully that at the end of the play it is mentioned ‘the Saracen went his way surprised and bewildered, having nothing more to say’ (Seale, 1978 p. 70). John also quoted at length but selectively from Qur’an and mocked the faith of the Ishmaelites.
During late eighth or early ninth century, a short work was composed probably in southern Spain
He put together an absurd farrago of doctrine delivered to him by a vulture claiming to be the angel Gabriel. He incited his followers to war. He was a slave to lust, which he justified by laws for which he falsely claimed Divine inspiration. He foretold his resurrection after his death but in the event his body was fittingly devoured by dogs (cited Wolf, 1990, p. 97-9). Like the John of Damascus, this anonymous author was very knowledgeable of Islam. He was well-versed with the Qur’an and often gave fairly recondite references from this book.
In a Christian work named ‘Doctrina Jacobi Nuper Baptizati’ (The teaching of Jacob the newlybaptized) a tract of anti-Jewish literature written in dialog form composed probably in Palestine round about the time of the surrender of Jerusalem
I asked him:
‘What is your view; master and teacher, of the Prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?’
He replied groaning mightily: ‘He is an impostor. Do the Prophets come with sword and chariot?
Truly these happenings today are works of disorder… But you go off, Master Abraham, and find out about the Prophet who has appeared.’ So I, Abraham, made enquiries, and was told by those who had met him: ‘There is no truth to be found in the so-called Prophet, only bloodshed; for he says he has the keys of Paradise , which is incredible’.”
Muhammad’s Prophetic life can be divided into two distinctive periods, the Meccan period and Medinan period. During the first period i.e., Meccan period, Muhammad was a simple preacher and warner. But his preaching was clearly, from the worldly point of view, an utter failure and as a result of thirteen years of propaganda he had won no more than a handful of converts.
But the scene completely changed at Medina
Here he was what one might simply call a robber chief. After conquering Mecca
So Muhammad was changing his color like a lizard as situation dictated. Throughout his Prophetic mission, he dealt with Jews and Christians keeping strict political aims in view.
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