Time and again, human institutions have demonstrated an enormous capacity to create and mythologize hero figures. The French took an illiterate peasant named Joan and turned her into God’s military lieutenant on Earth, the Russians entombed a loud-mouthed economist-turned-politician and suddenly Lenin’s corpse became a holy shrine, and we Americans took a hemp-farming slaveholder and turned him into the infallible, absurdly masculine, I-cannot-tell-a-lie George Washington of modern folklore.
Religious institutions are no different from nations, in this respect. Even where the Buddha himself condemned the notion of his divinity, people still kneel and request intercession, or offer ministrations of his effigies to evoke whatever form of magic powers they choose to believe in. The Biblical Jesus, a relatively unsuccessful evangelist whose only followers during his lifetime were the poor and uneducated, has been turned into an extension of God himself, despite Jesus’ clear claim that his death would bring him to his father, “who is greater than I.”
Mohammed, whom the Koran refers to as the Prophet, is not an exception, the angry cries of heresy from the modern Muslim far-right establishment notwithstanding. In the Muslim world, mere depiction of this mortal man is a crime, as the Muslim establishment made so loudly clear following the revelation of the existence of some cartoons in the Netherlands depicting the Prophet. He has been deified in a way that transcends all reason; millions of people throughout the Muslim world actually invest in the enormous modern pantheon that is the Mohammed cult of personality.
What are some of these myths? Some of them are just silly. For example, throughout the Muslim world it is simply a common understanding that Mohammed first began receiving the Koran after ascending to heaven on a magical, winged horse. This belief clearly has no relationship to reality other than wishful thinking, but that is not necessarily uncommon; the huge majority of Americans today still believe the nonsense idea that Jesus was born of a virgin or the even more severe nonsense that evolutionary theory somehow doesn’t stand up to the Genesis creation myth. Creationist beliefs abound in even greater numbers in the Middle East, so it is no surprise that further intellectual filth, such as Mohammed’s equine escapades, has been able to propagate with such abandon in the Muslim world.
But some of these claims have been made into weapons for social control. Consider for example the claim that Mohammed himself was a morally perfect, infallible quasi-divinity whose life we must dedicate ourselves to imitating. As such, the moral character he shows in the Koran has become the foundation for strictly theocratic authoritarianism throughout Anatolia and the Middle East. This has resulted in some unbelievably harsh treatment of supposed “immorality” in these nations, amounting to public executions, torture, and so on. Consider that until very recently in Pakistan, a woman had to be able to produce at least four witnesses in order to file a rape suit against a man (an impossible task 99% of the time), or she herself could be prosecuted for adultery. Why? Because that is the law as it appears in Islamic canon.
So let us dignify this claim for a moment. Let us start from this foundation belief that the Koran is the supreme moral code of the universe and any deviation from said code puts one at serious risk for the “special doom” that Allah has prepared for an apparently enormous number of people.
Depictions of Mohammed in the Koran and in popular Islamic lore as a perfectly virtuous man in direct contact with God do not stand up to the rigors of historical examination. One of the steeple claims of Islam, that the Koran is absolutely infallible and is the perfect and final word of God, is problematic from a rational perspective, chiefly because the political intention of the words of the Koran change dramatically depending on which point in the development of Islam they were written in.
Scholarly sources almost unanimously divide Mohammed’s life as a prophet into two periods, the Meccan and the Medinan, named for the city in which his “revelations” were made. Generally, the revelations of the Meccan period are characterized by their benign quality; many of the stories in the Koran from this period are duplications of earlier stories from the area or retellings of stories available in the Talmud, the New Testament, and the Apocrypha. Verses from the later period, the Medinan period, are somewhat different. John Muir writes that “There [in Medina] 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. [1]”
One notable such incident that occurred after the journey to Medina was Mohammed’s troubling marriage to a young girl named Aisha. While there is some dispute within the Muslim community itself about her exact age, the Hadith (the other canonical document of Islam containing sayings and stories from Muslim holy men, roughly analogous to the Apocrypha) and modern historical authors are fairly sure that they were married when Aisha was six, and their marriage was consummated when she was about nine or ten years old.
Muslim scholars defend Mohammed’s pedophilia by pointing out that underage marriages were common at the time, that women in general were normally treated as second-class citizens, and so forth. Notice that such excuses fly in the face of Mohammed’s supposed status as a moral example of his age, miraculous above the abhorrent practice of the Arabic pagans of his day… well, except for those abhorrent practices that he really, really liked.
Make no mistake: Mohammed was something of a ladies man. Undisputed historical sources list no less than twelve wives, most of them concurrently, ranging in ages from 6 to 65, married for reasons ranging from cementing alliances with allies such as Abu Bakr, to simple lust, as in Aisha’s case. Then there is the awkward historical fact that one of his wives, Maria al-Qibtiyya, an Egyptian slave, who, according to non-Muslim historical sources, became pregnant with the Prophet’s son before they were married (the son, Ibrahim, did not live long after birth).
However, these incidents occur after the Medinan period, in which we see Mohammed having God say some very interesting things. Just as his vast career of lust starts picking up, God comes down just in time and tells Mohammed that he, and he ALONE, is exempt from laws regarding polygamy, as we read in the Koran 33:50 [2]. Later in that same Surah, we see that Mohammed’s wives alone were forbidden from remarrying after his death (33:53), which is a little bit awkward because Mohammed married 10 widows. The personal motivation here is clear and obvious; why do so many Muslims just take it in stride that God’s desire that Mohammed alone be exempt from polygamy be expressed right after Mohammed starts shacking up with all sorts of women in Medina? The Koran distinguishes itself from the books of Christianity and Islam in that it contains several clauses demanding examination of its contents and origins by its followers for authenticity; shouldn’t this be a bit of a tip-off that the Koran’s authorship may have had personal motivations?
Mohammed’s own vast and numerous adulterous relationships, as hinted throughout suspiciously non-canonized Muslim texts such as those of al-Tabari’s history of Islam, become almost meaningless when we see that Islam offers clear exemption from sin for Mohammed. Of course they can say that he is perfect: everything imperfect he did is excused directly by God!
We see even more of a sense of the personal motivations that Mohammed may have had in authoring the Koran in the militarism that its later passages show. Famous Muslim-turned-atheist Ibn Warraq, author of the bestselling “Why I Am Not A Muslim” writes of the “ruthless fanaticism into which the teachings of the Prophet was fast drifting [3]” in the Medinan period. Another story, recounted by Ibn Ishaq, tells of one man who was tortured by having a fire on his chest kindled with flint and steel until near death, at which point Mohammed beheaded him and took his wife as a concubine [4]. The early Koran was silent on such military matters as torture, but the verses revealed after the meteoric rise of Islam as a viable military force amongst the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula offer a wealth of provisions for murder and massacre. The Hadith 5:59:32 [5] also tells of a charming incident in which Mohammed had as many as 900 unarmed POWs simply beheaded, and the women and children sold into slavery.
It is telling that the Koran makes such broad allowances for murder only after Mohammed has put himself in such a position that such ruthlessness would be at all possible for him and his followers. Even more telling, however, is what the Koran once said, but does no longer.
One day in Mecca, Mohammed was reciting Surah 52 of the Koran (al-Najm), with his followers and scribes listening intently as always. At one point in this narrative, he said something that sounds a bit funny:
“Have you thought of Allat and al-‘Uzza and Manat the third, the other: These are the exalted Gharaniq, whose intercession is hoped for. [6]”
In short, Mohammed was on the record exhorting his followers to worship three pagan goddesses (Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat). How could this be? The Prophet is supposed to be infallible! Abu Bakr had all references to these verses, popularly known as the “Satanic Verses,” deleted from the Koran after the Prophet’s death, he himself abrogated it quickly from his recitation, and modern Islamic scholars offer all sorts of idiotic excuses for this obvious aberration of prophecy. Some say that Satan tempted and corrupted the Prophet into uttering these verses. Others say Mohammed didn’t say them at all and that Satan simply took on the Prophet’s voice to mislead his followers. But that is irrelevant: what is important is that clear and obvious abrogation existed in the Koran, even though 2:106 and 16:101 make is explicitly clear that the Koran cannot be abrogated.
Some Muslim scholars actually say that Mohammed is still infallible because infallibility doesn’t mean he’s never wrong, only that when he is wrong, God corrects him. Besides of course the fact that it was careful political maneuvering on Abu Bakr’s part that corrected the text and not God flying down from the sky and scratching a big red X over those parts of Surah 52, there is a gaping logical hole in this argument. Suppose I get a math problem wrong on a test and my teacher takes points off, and helpfully writes in the correct answer next to my incorrect one for study purposes. Does this mean that I did perfectly on the test? If I tried to argue with my teacher that because I was corrected for having a wrong answer I should get an A for being right, he or she would probably look at me like I were an idiot. And she would be right: such reasoning only appears logical to an idiot or a madman.
The question of authorship itself is problematic because the Koran says that it comes from God. This is simply not possible given the grammatical construction of the Koran; even if we set aside the clear political taint that the Koran shows alongside Mohammed’s vastly deviant sexual proclivities, there is simply the fact that the Koran is addressed to Allah in several places. The very first verse of the whole book opens as a prayer, referring to Allah as “thee” (1:5). Other verses that refer to Allah as an entity separate from the author include 6:104, 6:114, 37:164-7, 51:50, and 84:16. This alone is damning and canonical evidence that the Koran is the highly creative work of a single man, well-versed in stories from the Jewish and Christian traditions, trying his best to create a loose federation of warring Arabian tribes by offering a cohesive social element: a single religion to rally under. And he was certainly vastly successful.
My good friend Mishel Caspi, professor of Islamic Studies at Bates College, once lamented to a class that his chief gripe with Islam was its tendency to silence and suppress voices of dissent. As such, several of the criticisms mentioned above are not widely-known among Muslims, and certainly not among Westerners, and as we have seen in the modern historical context, Islam is frightfully intolerant of even the mildest criticism. Hopefully, the Internet free press will help to contribute to the debate that has never been had, that is, the debate over the authenticity of the Koran, and over the historicity of the perfect moral paragon that is the Prophet Mohammed.
Reference:
[1] Muir, William (1878). Life of Mahomet. Kessinger Publishing, 583. ISBN 0-7661-7741-6.[2] My English translation of the Koran is the Tahriq Tarsile translation by Muhammed Picknett, though there are no significant variations between English translations from the Arabic.[3] Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 320, Prometheus Books, 1995, 0879759844[4] Ibn Ishaq, A. Guillaume (translator), The Life of Muhammad, pp 510-517, 2002, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-636033-1[5] www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/bukhari/059.sbt.html#005.059.362 [6] G. R. Hawting (1999). The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65165-4.
