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Criticism Of Islam: Part V
Modern Era Western Authors
In the early 20th century, the prevailing view among Europeans was that Islam was the root cause of Arab and Berber “backwardness.” They saw Islam as an obstacle to assimilation, a view that was expressed by a writer in colonial French Algeria named André Servier. In his book, titled Islam and the Psychology of the Musulman, Servier wrote that “The only thing Arabs ever invented was their religion. And this religion is, precisely, the main obstacle between them and us.” Servier describes Islam as a “religious nationalism in which every Muslim brain is steeped.” According to Servier, the only reason this nationalism has not “been able to pose a threat to humanity” was that the “rigid dogma” of Islam had rendered the Arabs “incapable of fighting against the material forces placed at the disposal of Western civilization by science and progress.”
The Victorian orientalist scholar Sir William Muir criticised Islam for what he perceived to be an inflexible nature, which he held responsible for stifling progress and impeding social advancement in Muslims countries. The following sentences are taken from the Rede Lecture he delivered at Cambridge in 1881:
“Some, indeed, dream of an Islam in the future, rationalized and regenerate. All this has been tried already, and has miserably failed. The Koran has so encrusted the religion in a hard unyielding casement of ordinances and social laws, that if the shell be broken the life is gone. A rationalistic Islam would be Islam no longer. The contrast between our own faith and Islam is most remarkable. There are in our Scriptures living germs of truth, which accord with civil and religious liberty, and will expand with advancing civilization. In Islam it is just the reverse. The Koran has no such teaching as with us has abolished polygamy, slavery, and arbitrary divorce, and has elevated woman to her proper place. As a Reformer, Mahomet did advance his people to a certain point, but as a Prophet he left them fixed immovably at that point for all time to come. The tree is of artificial planting. Instead of containing within itself the germ of growth and adaptation to the various requirements of time and clime and circumstance, expanding with the genial sunshine and rain from heaven, it remains the same forced and stunted thing as when first planted some ]twelve centuries ago.”
The church historian Philip Schaff described Islam as spread by violence and fanaticism, and producing a variety of social ills in the regions it conquered.
Muhammadanism conquered the fairest portions of the earth by the sword and cursed them by polygamy, slavery, despotism and desolation. The moving power of Christian missions was love to Allah and man; the moving power of Islâm was fanaticism and brute force.
Anglican priest, scholar and hymn-writer John Mason Neale Schaff also described Islam as a derivative religion based on an amalgamation of “heathenism, Judaism and Christianity.”
Islâm is not a new religion. [i]t is a compound or mosaic of pre-existing elements, a rude attempt to combine heathenism, Judaism and Christianity, which Mohammed found in Arabia, but in a very imperfect form.
J. M. Neale criticized Islam in terms similar to those of Schaff, arguing that it was made up of a mixture of beliefs that provided something for everyone.
He [Muhammad] also infuses into his religion so much of each of those tenets to which the varying sects of his countrymen were addicted, as to enable each and all to please themselves by the belief that the new doctrine was only a reform of, and improvement on, that to which they had been accustomed. The Christians were conciliated by the acknowledgment of our LORD as the Greatest of Prophets; the Jews, by the respectful mention of Moses and their other Lawgivers; the idolaters, by the veneration which the Impostor professed for the Temple of Mecca, and the black stone which it contained; and the Chaldeans, by the pre-eminence which he gives to the ministrations of the Angel Gabriel, and his whole scheme of the Seven Heavens. To a people devoted to the gratification of their passions and addicted to Oriental luxury, he appealed, not unsuccessfully, by the promise of a Paradise whose sensual delights were unbounded, and the permission of a free exercise of pleasures in this world.
James Fitzjames Stephen, describing what he understood to be the Islamic conception of the ideal society, wrote the following:
Not only are the varieties of morality innumerable, but some of them are conflicting with each other. If a Muhammadan, for instance, is fully to realize his ideal, to carry out into actual fact his experiment of living, he must be one of a ruling race which has trodden the enemies of Islam under their feet, and has forced them to choose between the tribute and the sword. He must be able to put in force the law of the Koran both as to the faithful and as to unbelievers. In short, he must conquer. Englishmen come into a country where Muhammadans had more or less realized their ideal, and proceed to govern it with the most unfeigned belief in the order of ideas of which liberty is the motto.
The early 20th-century missionary James L. Barton argued that Islam’s view of the sovereignty of Allah is so extreme and unbalanced as to produce a fatalism that stifles human initiative:Man is reduced to a cipher. Human agency and human freedom are nullified. Right is no longer right because it is right, but because Allah wills it to be right. It is for this reason that monotheism has in Islam stifled human effort and progress. It has become a deadening doctrine of fate. Man must believe and pray, but these do not insure salvation or any benefit except Allah wills it. Why should human effort strive by sanitary means to prevent disease, when death or life depends in no way on such measures but upon the will of Allah? One reason why Muslim countries are so stagnant and backward in all that goes to make up a high civilization is owing to the deadening effects of monotheism thus interpreted, even in the most extreme forms of the Augustinian and Calvinistic systems there were always present in Christianity other elements which prevented the conception of the divine sovereignty from paralyzing the healthy activities of life as the Muhammadan doctrine has done.
G. K. Chesterton criticized Islam as a derivative from Christianity. He described it as a heresy or parody of Christianity. In The Everlasting Man he says:
“Islam was a product of Christianity; even if it was a by-product; even if it was a bad product. It was a heresy or parody emulating and therefore imitating the Church. Islam, historically speaking, is the greatest of the Eastern heresies. It owed something to the quite isolated and unique individuality of Israel; but it owed more to Byzantium and the theological enthusiasm of Christendom. It owed something even to the Crusades. had on its believers, which he described as fanatical frenzy combine.”
Winston Churchill criticized what he alleged to be the effects Islam with fatalistic apathy, enslavement of women, and militant proselytizing.[60] In his 1899 book The River War he says:
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a1 militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.
According to historian Warren Dockter, Churchill wrote this during a time of a fundamentalist revolt in Sudan and this statement does not reflect his full view of Islam, which were “often paradoxical and complex.” He could be critical but at times “romanticized” the Islamic world; he exhibited great “respect, understanding and magnanimity.” Churchill had a fascination of Islam and Islamic civilization. Winston Churchill’s future sister-in-law expressed concerns about his fascination by stating, “[p]lease don’t become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalism.” According to historian Warren Dockter, however, he “never seriously considered converting.” He primarily admired its martial aspects, the “Ottoman Empire’s history of territorial expansion and military acumen,” to the extent that in 1897 he wished to fight for the Ottoman Empire. According to Dockter, this was largely for his “lust for glory.
Based on Churchill’s letters, he seemed to regard Islam and Christianity as equals.
During a lecture given at the University of Regensburg in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI quoted an unfavorable remark about Islam made at the end of the 14th century by Manuel II Palaiologos, the Byzantine emperor:
Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
As the English translation of the Pope’s lecture was disseminated across the world, many Muslim politicians and religious leaders protested against what they saw as an insulting mischaracterization of Islam. Mass street protests were mounted in many Islamic countries, the Majlis-e-Shoora (Pakistani parliament) unanimously called on the Pope to retract “this objectionable statement.”
South Asian Authors
The Hindu philosopher Vivekananda commented on Islam:
Now, some Mohammedans are the crudest in this respect, and the most sectarian. Their watch-word is: “There is one Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.” Everything beyond that not only is bad, but must be destroyed forthwith, at a moment’s notice, every man or woman who does not exactly believe in that must be killed; everything that does not belong to this worship must be immediately broken; every book that teaches anything else must be burnt. From the Pacific to the Atlantic, for five hundred years blood ran all over the world. That is Mohammedanism. Nevertheless, among these Mohammedans, wherever there has a philosophic man, he was sure to protest against these cruelties. In that he showed the touch of the Divine and realized a fragment of the truth; he was not playing with his religion; for it was not his father’s religion he was| talking, but spoke the truth direct like a man. The more selfish a man, the more immoral he is. And so also with the race. That race which is bound down to itself has been the most cruel and the most wicked in the whole world. There has not been a religion that has clung to this dualism more than that founded by the Prophet of Arabia, and there has not been a religion, which has shed so much blood and been so cruel to other men. In the Koran there is the doctrine that a man who does not believe these teachings should be killed, it is a mercy to kill him! And the surest way to get to heaven, where there are beautiful houris and all sorts of sense enjoyments, is by killing these unbelievers. Think of the bloodshed there has been in consequence of such beliefs! Why religions should claim that they are not bound to abide by the standpoint of reason, no one knows.
If one does not take the standard of reason, there cannot be any true judgment, even in the case of religions. One religion may ordain something very hideous. For instance, the Mohammedan religion allows Mohammedans to kill all who are not of their religion. It is clearly stated in the Koran, Kill the infidels if they Do not become Mohammedans. They must be put to fire And sword. Now if we tell a Mohammedan that this is wrong, he will naturally ask, “How do you know that? How do you know it is not good? My book says it is.”
Dayanand Saraswati calls the concept of Islam to be highly offensive, and doubted that there is any connection of Islam with Allah: Had the Allah of the Qur’an been the Lord of all creatures, and been Merciful and kind to all, he would never have commanded the Mohammedans to slaughter men of other faiths, and animals, etc. If he is Merciful, will he show mercy even to the sinners? If the answer be given in the affirmative, it cannot be true, because further on it is said in the Qur’an “Put infidels to sword,” in other words, he that does not believe in the Qur’an and the Prophet Mohammad is an infidel (he should, therefore, be put to death). (Since the Qur’an sanctions such cruelty to non-Mohammedans and innocent creatures such as cows) it can never be the Word of Allah.
Pandit Lekh Ram regarded that Islam was grown through the violence and desire for wealth. He further asserted that Muslims deny the entire Islamic prescribed violence and atrocities, and will continue doing so. He wrote:
All educated people start looking down upon the forcible conversions and even started objecting to their very basis. Since then some naturalist Mohammedans [Muslims] are trying, rather opposing falsehood and accepting the truth, to prove unnecessarily and wrongly that Islam never indulged in Jihad and the people were never converted to Islam forcibly. Neither any temples were demolished nor /were ever cows slaughtered in the temples. Women and children belonging to other religious sects were never forcibly converted to Islam nor did they ever commit any sexual acts with them as could have been done with the slave-males and females both.
Mahatma Gandhi, the moral leader of the 20th-century Indian independence movement, found the history of Muslims to be aggressive, while he pointed out that Hindus have passed that stage of societal evolution:
The thirteen hundred years of imperialistic expansion has made the Muslims fighters as a body. They are therefore aggressive. Bullying is the natural excrescence of an aggressive spirit. The Hindu has an ages old civilization. He is essentially non violent. His civilization has passed through the experiences that the two recent ones are still passing through. If Hinduism was ever imperialistic in the modern sense of the term, it has outlived its imperialism and has either deliberately or as a matter of course given it up. Predominance of the violent spirit has restricted the use of arms to a small minority which must always be subordinate to a civil power highly spiritual, learned and selfless. The Hindus as a body are therefore not equipped for fighting. But not having retained their spiritual training, they have forgotten the use of an effective substitute for arms and not knowing their use nor having an aptitude for them, they have become docile to the point of timidity and cowardice. This vice is therefore a natural excrescence of gentleness.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, in his book Discovery of India, describes Islam to have been a faith for military conquests. He wrote “Islam had become a more rigid faith suited more to military conquests rather than the conquests of the mind,” and that Muslims brought nothing new to his country.
The Muslims who came to India from outside brought no new technique or political or economic structure. In spite of religious belief in the brotherhood of Islam, they were class bound and feudal in outlook.
Other Authors
Sadegh Hedayat
Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat regarded Islam as the corrupter of Iran, he said:
Every aspect of life and thought, including women’s condition, changed after Islam. Enslaved by men, women were confined to the home. Polygamy, injection of fatalistic attitude, mourning, sorrow and grief led people to seek solace in magic, witchcraft, prayer, and supernatural beings.
Nobel prize-winning novelist V. S. Naipaul stated that Islam requires its adherents to destroy everything which is not related to it. He described it as having a:
Calamitous effect on converted peoples, to be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter.’ Nobel prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka stated that Islam had a role in denigrating African spiritual traditions. He criticized attempts to whitewash what he sees as the destructive and coercive history of Islam on the continent:
Let those who wish to retain or evaluate religion as a twenty-first project feel free to do so, but let it not be done as a continuation of the game of denigration against the African spiritual heritage as in a recent television series perpetrated by Islam’s born again revisionist of history, Professor Ali Mazrui. Soyinka also regarded Islam as “superstition,” and said that it does not belong to Africa. He stated that it is mainly spread with violence and force.
Tatars Tengrists, criticize Islam as a semitic religion, which forced Turks to submission to an alien culture. Submission and humility, two significant components of Islamic spirituality, are disregarded as major failings of Islam, not as virtues. Further, since Islam mentions semitic history as if it were the history of all mankind, but disregards components of other cultures and spirituality, the international approach of Islam is seen as a threat. It additionally gives Imams an opportunity to march against their own people under the banner of international Islam.
Reliability Of Islamic Scriptures
Reliability Of The Qur’an
12th-Century Andalusian Qur’an
According to traditional Islamic scholarship, all of the Qur’an was written down by Muhammad’s companions while he was alive (during 610–632 CE), but it was primarily an orally related document. The written compilation of the whole Qur’an in its definite form as we have it now was not completed until many years after the death of Muhammad. John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone and Yehuda D. Nevo argue that all the primary sources which exist are from 150–300 years after the events which they describe, and thus are chronologically far removed from those events.
Imperfections in the Qur’an. Critics reject the idea that the Qur’an is miraculously perfect and impossible to imitate as asserted in the Qur’an itself. The 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, for example, writes: “The language of the Koran is held by the Mohammedans to be a peerless model of perfection. Critics, however, argue that peculiarities can be found in the text. For example, critics note that a sentence in which something is said concerning Allah is sometimes followed immediately by another in which Allah is the speaker (examples of this are suras xvi. 81, xxvii. 61, xxxi. 9, and xliii. 10.) Many peculiarities in the positions of words are due to the necessities of rhyme (lxix. 31, lxxiv. 3), while the use of many rare words and new forms may be traced to the same cause (comp. especially xix. 8, 9, 11, 16).”
Judaism and the Qur’an. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “The dependence of Mohammed upon his Jewish teachers or upon what he heard of the Jewish Haggadah and Jewish practices is now generally conceded.” John Wansbrough believes that the Qur’an is a redaction in part of other sacred scriptures, in particular the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. Herbert Berg writes that “Despite John Wansbrough’s very cautious and careful inclusion of qualifications such as “conjectural,” and “tentative and emphatically provisional,” his work is condemned by some. Some of this negative reaction is undoubtedly due to its radicalness. Wansbrough’s work has been embraced wholeheartedly by few and has been employed in a piecemeal fashion by many. Many praise his insights and methods, if not all of his conclusions.” Early jurists and theologians of Islam mentioned some Jewish influence but they also say where it is seen and recognized as such, it is perceived as a debasement or a dilution of the authentic message. Bernard Lewis describes this as “something like what in Christian history was called a Judaizing heresy.” According to Moshe Sharon, the story of Muhammad having Jewish teachers is a legend developed in the 10th century AD. Philip Schaff described the Qur’an as having “many passages of poetic beauty, religious fervor, and wise counsel, but mixed with absurdities, bombast, unmeaning images, low sensuality.”
Mohammed and Allah as Speakers. According to Ibn Warraq, the Iranian rationalist Ali Dashti criticized the Qur’an on the basis that for some passages, “the speaker cannot have been Allah.” Warraq gives Surah Al-Fatiha as an example of a passage which is “clearly addressed to Allah, in the form of a prayer.” He says that by only adding the word “say” in front of the passage, this difficulty could have been removed. Furthermore, it is also known that one of the companions of Muhammad, Ibn Masud, rejected Surah Fatihah as being part of the Qur’an; these kind of disagreements are, in fact, common among the companions of Muhammad who could not decide which surahs were part of the Qur’an and which not.
Other Criticism
The Qur’an contains verses which are difficult to understand or contradictory.
Some accounts of the history of Islam say there were two verses of the Qur’an that were allegedly added by Muhammad when he was tricked by Satan (in an incident known as the “Story of the Cranes,” later referred to as the “Satanic Verses”). These verses were then retracted at angel Gabriel’s behest.
The author of the Apology of al-Kindy Abd al-Masih ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (not to be confused with the famed philosopher al-Kindi) claimed that the narratives in the Qur’an were “all jumbled together and intermingled” and that this was “an evidence that many different hands have been at work therein, and caused discrepancies, adding or cutting out whatever they liked or disliked.”
The companions of Muhammad could not agree on which surahs were part of the Qur’an and which not. Two of the most famous companions being Ibn Masud and Ubay ibn Ka’b.
Pre-existing Sources
Critics see the reliance of the Qur’an on various pre-existing sources as evidence for a human origin.
Critics point to various pre-existing sources to argue against the traditional narrative of revelation from Allah. Some scholars have calculated that one-third of the Qur’an has pre-Islamic Christian origins. Aside from the Bible, the Qur’an relies on several Apocryphal and legendary sources, like the Protoevangelium of James, Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and several infancy gospels. Several narratives rely on Jewish Midrash Tanhuma legends, like the narrative of Cain learning to bury the body of Abel in Surah 5:31. Critics, like Norman Geisler argue that the dependence of the Qur’an on preexisting sources is one evidence of a purely human origin. Richard Carrier regards this reliance on pre-Islamic Christian sources, as evidence that Islam derived from a heretical sect of Christianity.
Criticism Of Hadith
Hadith are Muslim traditions relating to the Sunnah (words and deeds) of Muhammad. They are drawn from the writings of scholars writing between 844 and 874 AD, more than 200 years after the death of Mohammed in 632 AD. Within Islam, different schools and sects have different opinions on the proper selection and use of Hadith. The four schools of Sunni Islam all consider Hadith second only to the Qur’an, although they differ on how much freedom of interpretation should be allowed to legal scholars. Shi’i scholars disagree with Sunni scholars as to which Hadith should be considered reliable. The Shi’as accept the Sunnah of Ali and the Imams as authoritative in addition to the Sunnah of Muhammad, and as a consequence they maintain their own, different, collections of Hadith.
It has been suggested that there exists around the Hadith three major sources of corruption: political conflicts, sectarian prejudice, and the desire to translate the underlying meaning, rather than the original words verbatim.
Muslim critics of the hadith, Qur’anists, reject the authority of hadith on theological grounds, pointing to verses in the Qur’an itself: “Nothing have We omitted from the Book,” declaring that all necessary instruction can be found within the Qur’an, without reference to the Hadith. They claim that following the Hadith has led to people straying from the original purpose of Allah’s revelation to Muhammad, adherence to the Qur’an alone. Ghulam Ahmed Pervez (1903–1985) was a noted critic of the Hadith and believed that the Qur’an alone was all that was necessary to discern Allah’s will and our obligations. A fatwa, ruling, signed by more than a thousand orthodox clerics, denounced him as a ‘kafir,’ a non-believer. His seminal work, Maqam-e Hadith argued that the Hadith were composed of “the garbled words of previous centuries,” but suggests that he is not against the idea of collected sayings of the Prophet, only that he would consider any hadith that goes against the teachings of Qur’an to have been falsely attributed to the Prophet. The 1986 Malaysian book “Hadith: A Re-evaluation” by Kassim Ahmad was met with controversy and some scholars declared him an apostate from Islam for suggesting that “the hadith are sectarian, anti-science, anti-reason and anti-women.”
John Esposito notes that “Modern Western scholarship has seriously questioned the historicity and authenticity of the hadith,” maintaining that “the bulk of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad were actually written much later.” He mentions Joseph Schacht, considered the father of the revisionist movement, as one scholar who argues this, claiming that Schacht “found no evidence of legal traditions before 722,” from which Schacht concluded that “the Sunna of the Prophet is not the words and deeds of the Prophet, but apocryphal material” dating from later. Other scholars, however, such as Wilferd Madelung, have argued that “wholesale rejection as late fiction is unjustified.”
Orthodox Muslims do not deny the existence of false hadith, but believe that through the scholars’ work, these false hadith have been largely eliminated.
Lack Of Secondary Evidence
Sana’a Manuscripts Of The Qur’an
The traditional view of Islam has also been criticised for the lack of supporting evidence consistent with that view, such as the lack of archaeological evidence, and discrepancies with non-Muslim literary sources. In the 1970s, what has been described as a “wave of skeptical scholars” challenged a great deal of the received wisdom in Islamic studies. They argued that the Islamic historical tradition had been greatly corrupted in transmission. They tried to correct or reconstruct the early history of Islam from other, presumably more reliable, sources such as coins, inscriptions, and non-Islamic sources. The oldest of this group was John Wansbrough (1928–2002). Wansbrough’s works were widely noted, but perhaps not widely read.
In 1972 a cache of ancient Qur’ans in a mosque in Sana’a, Yemen was discovered – commonly known as the Sana’a manuscripts. The German scholar Gerd R. Puin has been investigating these Qur’an fragments for years. His research team made 35,000 microfilm photographs of the manuscripts, which he dated to early part of the 8th century. Puin has not published the entirety of his work, but noted unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography. He also suggested that some of the parchments were palimpsests which had been reused. Puin believed that this implied a text that changed over time as opposed to one that remained the same.
Kaaba
Kaaba is revered as the most sacred site in Islam. Criticism has centered on the possible pagan origins of the Kaaba.
Kaaba is the most sacred site in Islam. Criticism has centered on the origins of the Kaaba. In her book, Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong asserts that the Kaaba was officially dedicated to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and contained 360 idols that probably represented the days of the year. She also contends that there were numerous such Kaaba sanctuaries in Arabia at one time, but this was the only one built of stone. The others also allegedly had counterparts of the Black Stone. There was a “red stone,” the deity of the south Arabian city of Ghaiman, and the “white stone” in the Kaaba of al-Abalat (near the city of Tabala, south of Mecca). Grunebaum in Classical Islam points out that the experience of divinity of that period was often associated with stone fetishes, mountains, special rock formations, or “trees of strange growth.”
According to Sarwar, about 400 years before the birth of Muhammad, a man named “Amr bin Lahyo bin Harath bin Amr ul-Qais bin Thalaba bin Azd bin Khalan bin Babalyun bin Saba,” who was descended from Qahtan and was the king of Hijaz had placed a Hubal idol onto the roof of the Kaaba. This idol was one of the chief deities of the ruling tribe Quraysh. The idol was made of red agate and shaped like a human, but with the right hand broken off and replaced with a golden hand. When the idol was moved inside the Kaaba, it had seven arrows in front of it, which were used for divination. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “before the rise of Islam it was revered as a sacred sanctuary and was a site of pilgrimage.”. Many Muslim and academic historians stress the power and importance of the pre-Islamic Mecca. They depict it as a city grown rich on the proceeds of the spice trade. Patricia Crone believes that this is an exaggeration and that Mecca may only have been an outpost trading with nomads for leather, cloth, and camel butter. Crone argues that if Mecca had been a well-known center of trade, it would have been mentioned by later authors such as Procopius (of Caesarea, was a prominent late antique Byzantine Greek scholar from Palaestina Prima), Nonnosus, or the Syrian church chroniclers writing in Syriac. The town is absent, however, from any geographies or histories written in the three centuries before the rise of Islam.
Morality
Criticism Of Muhammad
Dante Alighieri criticised Muhammad in his work Inferno, depicting him as being tortured in Hell.
Muhammad is considered as one of the prophets in Islam and as a model forfollowers. Critics such as Sigismund Koelle and former Muslim Ibn Warraq see some of Mohammed’s actions as immoral.
Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf wrote a poetic eulogy commemorating the slain Quraish notables; later, he had traveled to Mecca and provoked the Quraish to fight Muhammad. He also wrote erotic poetry about Muslim women, which offended the Muslims there. This poetry influenced so many that this too was considered directly against the Constitution of Medina which states, loyalty gives protection against treachery and this document will not (be employed to) protect one who is unjust or commits a crime. Other sources also state that he was plotting to assassinate Muhammad. Muhammad called upon his followers to kill Ka’b. Muhammad ibn Maslama offered his services, collecting four others. By pretending to have turned against Muhammad, Muhammad ibn Maslama and the others enticed Ka’b out of his fortress on a moonlit night, and killed him in spite of his vigorous resistance. The Jews were terrified at his assassination, and as the historian Ibn Ishaq put it “. . . there was not a Jew who did not fear for his life.”
Age Of Muhammad’s Wife, Aisha
According to scriptural Sunni’s Hadith sources, Aisha was six or seven years old when she was married to Muhammad and nine when the marriage was consummated.
Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, born in Persia 200 years after Muhammmad’s death, suggested that she was ten years old. Six hundred years after Muhammad, Ibn Khallikan recorded that she was nine years old at marriage, and twelve at consummation. Ibn Sa’d al-Baghdadi, born about 150 years after Muhammad’s death, cited Hisham ibn Urwah as saying that she was nine years old at marriage, and twelve at consummation, but Hisham ibn Urwah’s original source is otherwise unknown, and Ibn Sa’d al-Baghdadi’s work does not have the high religious status of the Hadith.
In the twentieth century, Indian writer Muhammad Ali challenged the Hadith showing that Aisha was as young as the traditional sources claim; arguing that instead a new interpretation of the Hadith compiled by Mishkat al-Masabih, Wali-ud-Din Muhammad ibn Abdullah Al-Khatib, could indicate that Aisha would have been nineteen years old around the time of her marriage.
Colin Turner, a UK professor of Islamic studies, states that since such marriages between an older man and a young girl were customary among the Bedouins, Muhammad’s marriage would not have been considered improper by his contemporaries. Karen Armstrong, the British author on comparative religion, has affirmed that, “There was no impropriety in Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha. Marriages conducted in absentia to seal an alliance were often contracted at this time between adults and minors who were even younger than Aisha.”
Morality Of The Qur’an
9th-Century Qur’an In Reza Abbasi Museum
According to some critics, the morality of the Qur’an appears to be a moral regression when judged by the standards of the moral traditions of Judaism and Christianity it says that it builds upon. The Catholic Encyclopedia, for example, states that “the ethics of Islam are far inferior to those of Judaism and even more inferior to those of the New Testament” and “that in the ethics of Islam there is a great deal to admire and to approve, is beyond dispute; but of originality or superiority, there is none.”
Critics stated that the Qur’an [Qur’an 4:34] allows Muslim men to discipline their wives by striking them. (There is however confusion amongst translations of Qur’an with the original Arabic term “wadribuhunna” being translated as “to go away from them,” “beat,” “strike lightly” and “separate.” The film Submission, which rose to fame after the murder of its director Theo van Gogh, critiqued this and similar verses of the Qur’an by displaying them painted on the bodies of abused Muslim women. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the film’s writer, said “it is written in the Koran a woman may be slapped if she is disobedient. This is one of the evils I wish to point out in the film.”
Some critics argue that the Qur’an is incompatible with other religious scriptures as it attacks and advocates hate against people of other religions. For instance, Sam Harris interprets certain verses of the Qur’an as sanctioning military action against unbelievers as a whole both during the lifetime of Muhammad and after. The Qur’an said “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.”[Surah 9:29] Jizya is a tax for protection provided by the Muslim ruler to non-Muslims, for the exemption from military service for non-Muslims, for the permission to practice a non-Muslim faith with some communal autonomy in a Muslim state.
In The End of Faith Harris argues that Muslim extremism is simply a consequence of taking the Qur’an literally, and is skeptical that moderate Islam is possible. Various calls to arms were identified in the Qur’an by US citizen Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, all of which were cited as “most relevant to my actions on March 3, 2006” (9:44, 9:19, 57:10–11, 8:72–73, 9:120, 3:167–75, 4:66, 4:104, 9:81, 9:93–94, 9:100, 16:110, 61:11–12, 47:35).
Max I. Dimont interprets that the Houris described in the Qur’an are specifically dedicated to “male pleasure.” However, according to Pakistani Islamic scholar Maulana Umar Ahmed Usmani, “it is a misconception that hurun (Houri) means the females of paradise who will be reserved for good men. He says that “‘hur’ or ‘hurun’ is the plural of both ‘ahwaro’, which is the masculine form as well as ‘haurao’, which is feminine. It means both pure males and pure females. He says that basically the word ‘hurun’ means white.”
Henry Martyn claims that the concept of the Houris was chosen to satisfy Muhammad’s followers.
Criticism Of Islam: Part V
701 – 009e
https://discerning-Islam.org
Last Updated: 09/2021
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