Tirade against Muhammad

By: Dr Rafiq Zakaria, October 16, 2002 The Mid-Day, Bombay. Original Source
Muslims are bound to be hurt if their Prophet is called “a terrorist”, as the Christian priest Jerry Falwell did; he has now apologised for the hurt to the Muslims but has not withdrawn his statement about the Prophet. To me it matters little; there are mindless and vulgar preachers among Christians, who occasionally give vent to their ugly ire against Muhammad. However, what worries me is the notice that the Muslims are made to take of such stupid expressions and S whip up the religious feelings of their co-religionists: the bandhs and such actions inevitably cause death and destruction of Muslims only. This is witnessed more in India than in any Muslim country which does not resort to such protest.

Last week in Maharashtra a bandh was called on this issue, which unfortunately resulted in the death of ten agitating Muslims; some years ago a massive demonstration was organised in Mumbai to protest against Salman Rushdie’s notorious book The Satanic Verses, demanding a ban on it. The Government had already banned the book but the organisers still went ahead with their march, which ended in the death of twelve innocent Muslims. Such protests have not only proved counter-productive but they have brought a lot of misery to a number of common Muslims, who are easily roused; in the process they become victims of mob fury and police firing. Hence utmost caution and restraint must be exercised and better ways need to be adopted by the Muslims here to express their anger and hurt.

Christians right from the time of the rise of Islam have indulged in the worst forms of character assassination of the Prophet. St John of Damascus, soon after the death of the Prophet, mounted a campaign of denunciation by calling Muhammad an “impostor”. The others who followed him used the worst epithets; they could not tolerate the success of Islam, which spread at their cost everywhere.

When the new religion reached almost the heart of Europe, most Christians lost their balance. Hichem Djait, the distinguished historian attached to the universities of McGill and Berkeley in America wrote: “Over the centuries Christian tradition came to look upon Islam as a disturbing upstart movement that awakened such bitter passion precisely because it laid claim to the same territory as Christianity.”

Frustrated Christian monks hurled the vilest abuses on Muhammad and the Quran. The situation became even worse after the Crusades. The Church led the campaign of hate, with Christian writers and poets following suit. The anti-Islamic literature of Medieval times is a painful and pathetic reflection on Christian bigotry.

The Italian scholar Professor Francesco Gabrieli puts it succinctly: “We find it in various versions, inconsistent in their content, but entirely consistent in their spirit of vituperation and hatred, in the writing of chronicles, apologists, hagiographers and encyclopaedists of the Latin Middle Ages; Guibert of Nogent and Hildebert of Tours in the eleventh century, Peter the Venerable in the twelfth, Jacques de Vitry, Martinus Polonus, Vincent of Beauvais and Jacobus, a Varagine, in the thirteenth, up to Brunetto Latini and his imitators, and Dante and his commentators.”

The obscene diatribe used by Dante did not die with him; it became the source of the damnation of Muhammad. Even after the advent of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, there was not much change in the Christian attitude; Luther bracketed Muhammad with his enemy the Pope and described them as “anti Christ”. Sir Edward Denison Ross has rightly observed: “For many centuries the acquaintance which the majority of Europeans possessed of Muhammadanism was based almost entirely on distorted reports of fanatical Christians, which led to the dissemination of a multitude of gross calumnies.” The Christian fantasy against Muhammad has had no bounds; one lie after another was invented. The kind of abuse in sermons year after year continued with uncanny fidelity by not only bishops and monks but also the Popes. Muslims could have in retaliation encouraged the controversy about the legitimacy of the birth of Christ and the virginity of his mother Mary; but, but they on the contrary, affirmed the divinity of Jesus and extolled the purity of Mary. Even during the height of their power they always paid the utmost reverence to Christ.

However there have been a few notable exceptions among the Christians . For instance the pioneer of rationalism, Winwood Reade, wrote: “Instead of repining that Mahomet did no more, we have reason to be astonished that he did so much. His career is the best example that can be given of the influence of the Individual in human history. That single man created the glory of his nation and spread his language over half the earth.” Even H G Wells, who was a bitter critic of Muhammad, has observed in his Outline of History: “Islam prevailed because it was the best social and political order the times could offer. It prevailed because everywhere it found politically apathetic peoples, robbed, oppressed, bullied, uneducated and unorganised and it found selfish and unsound governments out of touch with any people at all. It was the broadest, freshest and cleanest political idea that had yet come into actual activity in the world and it offered better terms than any other to the mass of mankind.” But these do not represent the general Christian sentiment which did not refrain from casting aspersions on the character of Mohammed.The tradition of hatred against Muhammad, violently propagated by Peter the Venerable, was carried forward by scholars like John of Segovia and Nicholas of Cusa. In 1453, just after the Turks had conquered the Christian empire of Byzantium and brought Islam to the threshold of Europe, John of Segovia pointed out that the Islamic menace of Muhammad could not be defeated by war or conventional missionary activity; but only by an intellectual onslaught. Hence the Bibliotheque Orientale of Barthelmy d’Herbelot, which was the most important and authoritative source of reference in Islamic and Oriental studies in England and Europe until the beginning of the nineteenth century gave the most damaging account of Muhammad. The first Encyclopaedia of Islam described “Mahomet” as “Author and Founder of a heresy”. Simon Ockley called him “a very subtle and crafty man, who put on the appearance only of those good qualities, while the principles of his soul were ambition and lust”. In his essay Les Moeurs, Voltaire said that even those who regarded Muhammad as a great man knew that he was an impostor; even Gibbon argued that Muhammad had lured the Arabs to follow him with “the bait of loot and sex”.

In short animosity of all classes of Christians against Muhammad is endemic; they have never accepted him as a true prophet or his immense contribution to human upliftment. The epithets may have been modified in recent times but these erupt in one form or the other every now and again. In injecting the hatred against Muhammad among the Hindus, the British played the decisive role. Until their advent in India there existed in none of the Indian languages any diatribe against Muhammad; it is the British governors and Christian missionaries who did all the dirty work to prejudice Hindus against the Prophet.

After September 11, the Christian ire against Muslims is further roused. But they must ignore it because it is the result of their centuries-old enmity and frustration at their failure to suppress Islam. As I wrote in The Asian Age: “Dogs will continue to bark; but the Caravan of Muhammad will go on.” I will add a caveat: provided the so-called jehadis in their madness to kill innocent men, women and children in the name of Islam do not hijack the caravan. Then only God may protect it.