Non-Islamic views of Muhammad

In contrast to the Islamic understanding of Muhammad, the Western image of him remained highly negative for over a millennium and has only recently begun to change. From the time when a polemical work by John of Damascus was translated from Greek into Latin, some knowledge of Muhammad's life was available in the West but was nearly always used abusively. Another influential work of the earlier Middle Ages was the Epistolae Saraceni (“Letters of a Saracen”) by an Oriental Christian and translated from Arabic into Latin. Besides Byzantine sources, the West gained some knowledge of Muhammad from the Mozarabs of Spain, including figures such as Eulogius of Cordova in the 9th century and Petrus Alfonsi, a Jew who converted to Christianity, in the 11th century. After the 9th century highly negative biographies of Muhammad appeared in Latin. In the 12th century Peter the Venerable ordered the Qur'an to be translated into Latin and information about Muhammad to be collected so that the teachings of Islam could be refuted by Christian thinkers.

During the 13th century European medieval knowledge of the life of Muhammad was “completed” in a series of works by scholars such as Pedro Pascual, Ricoldo de Monte Croce, and Ramon Llull. In these works, however, Muhammad was depicted as an imposter and Islam as a Christian heresy, and in some of them Muhammad was portrayed as the Antichrist. That he was considered unlettered by Muslims, that he married a wealthy widow, that he ruled over a human community and was therefore involved in several wars, and that in his later life he had several wives were all facts interpreted in the worst light possible. That he died like “an ordinary person” was contrasted with the supernatural end to Christ's earthly life.

This highly negative image of Muhammad as a heretic, false prophet, renegade cardinal, or founder of a religion that promotes violence found its way into many other works of European literature over the centuries, such as the chansons de geste, William Langland's Piers Plowman, and John Lydgate's The Fall of the Princes. Even Dante, who knew much about Islamic esoteric teachings, was forced to place the Prophet along with 'Ali in the inferno in the 28th canto of the Inferno of his Divine Comedy. From the 13th century onward, romantic representations of Muhammad's life also appeared, as in Alexandre du Pont's Roman de Mahom; and the Mi'raj was translated by a certain Abraham, the court physician of Alfonso X of Castile and Leon and his son, as Escala de Mahoma (“The Ladder of Muhammad”) and was definitely known by Dante in some version.

In the early modern period, the medieval image of Muhammad continued to be promoted by a variety of Western writers. The general hostility toward Islam formed part of Martin Luther's polemic against the Roman Catholic church, and the image of Muhammad as the Antichrist appeared in Alexander Ross's introduction to his translation of the Qur'an in 1649. Apocalyptic interpretations of Muhammad continued into the 19th century in America, notably in George Bush's Life of Mohammed (1830).

The first fairly positive biography of Muhammad not based on Christian “ideology” of the medieval period was Boulainvilliers's La Vie de Mahomet (“The Life of Muhammad”), published in London in 1730. The philosopher Voltaire had a fairly positive view of him as well. In 1742 Voltaire's tragedy La Fanatisme; ou, Mohamet le prophète (“Fanaticism; or, Muhammad the Prophet”) was performed in Paris, and Goethe translated it into German in 1799. This most revered of German writers was deeply attracted to Islam and planned to write a drama on this theme but completed only the famous poem Mahomets-Gesang (“Mahomet's Singing”). In the 19th century Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was among those who wrote dramas and novels about Muhammad. At the same time, Thomas Carlyle broke new ground in On Heroes, in which he provided a positive evaluation of the Prophet. Images of Muhammad were also used by Victor Hugo in his The Legend of the Centuries (La Légende des siècles) at a moment when Western Orientalism was turning to biographies about Muhammad based on modern historical and analytic methods. ^[1]

...Only a profound belief in himself and his mission explains Muhammad's readiness to endure hardship and persecution during the Meccan period when from a secular point of view there was no prospect of success. Without sincerity how could he have won the allegiance and even devotion of men of strong and upright character like Abu-Bakr and 'Umar ? For the theist there is the further question how God could have allowed a great religion like Islam to develop on a basis of lies and deceit. There is thus a strong case for holding that Muhammad was sincere. If in some respects he was mistaken, his mistakes were not due to deliberate lying or imposture.

...I therefore do not believe that either the Bible or the Qur’an is infallibly true in the sense that all their commands are valid for all time. ... when the form of society changes in important respects some commands cease to be appropriate, though many others continue to be valid. I do, however, believe that Muhammad, like the earlier prophets, had genuine religious experiences. I believe that he really did receive something directly from God. As such, I believe that the Qur’an came from God, that it is Divinely inspired. Muhammad could not have caused the great upsurge in religion that he did without God’s blessing. ^{[22] [23]}

This point is of special concern to Christians, since the Qur'an denies the bare fact of the death of Jesus on the cross, and Muslims still consider that this denial outweighs the contrary testimony of historical tradition. The primary intention of the Qur'an was to deny the Jews' interpretation of the crucifixion as a victory for themselves, but as normally explained it goes much farther. The same exaggeration of the role of ' revelation ' has also had other consequences. The Arab contribution to Islamic culture has been unduly magnified, and that of the civilized peoples of Egypt, Syria, 'Iraq and Persia, later converted to Islam, has been sadly belittled.

Too much must not be made of this slight flaw. Which of us, conscious of being called by God to perform a special task, would not have been more than a little proud ? On the whole Muhammad was remarkably free from pride. Yet this slight exaggeration of his own function has had grave consequences and cannot be ignored.