Ways of Looking at the Prophet

Ways of Looking at the Prophet

Devout Muslims see him as the model for human behavior. Non-Muslims have seen him as lustful, barbarous or worse.

By Eric Ormsby in the Wall Street Journal

The Prophet Muhammad might justly be described as the Jekyll and Hyde of historical biography. For centuries, he has been “alternately revered and reviled,” as Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University, notes in her excellent overview of the abundant literature. As a result, Muhammad presents two violently incompatible faces to the historian. For devout Muslims, relying both on the Quran and the vast corpus of sacred traditions, the hadith, he serves as the unimpeachable model for human behavior, not only in matters of faith and ritual but in the most humdrum aspects of daily life, from marital and business relations to personal hygiene, including even the proper use of the toothpick. For non-Muslims, drawing on the same sources, he has been viewed from the earliest times as lustful and barbarous, as a raving impostor aping the ancient prophets; nowadays he is further charged with misogyny and pedophilia. The contrast is so stark as to appear irreconcilable.

Instead of attempting to skirt this divergence, Ms. Ali uses it to structure her inquiry. Each of her chapters is prefaced by a capsule account of some episode in the Prophet Muhammad’s career taken from traditional Muslim sources, most of which involve some age-old point of contention. She follows these up with lively and often intricate discussions of Muslim and non-Muslim reactions. In this manner, she addresses such fraught matters as Muhammad’s “multiple wives” or the brutal seventh-century massacre of the Jewish tribe of the Banu Qurayza in Medina.

Two of the book’s best chapters deal with the most prominent of Muhammad’s 12 or so wives: the saintly Khadija, a Meccan businesswoman 15 years older than he; and the more spirited—and controversial—Aisha, the child-bride who became Muhammad’s “favorite wife” in later years. For both Muslim and non-Muslim biographers, Khadija represents a model wife. She is Muhammad’s comforter in moments of doubt or distress—an “angel of mercy,” according to the modern Egyptian biographer Muhammad Husayn Haykal—and their household is an abode of domestic felicity. Much is made of the fact that Muhammad took other wives only after Khadija’s death.

His marriage to Aisha is another matter altogether. She was only 6 years old when she became engaged to Muhammad, but he considerately postponed consummation of the marriage until she was 9. Though earlier critics said surprisingly little about this marriage—they seemed not even to note the anomaly of the couple’s ages—modern commentators have denounced it roundly, accusing Muhammad of pedophilia. Muslim biographers squirm to defend it, and some quibble over whether the bride was in fact only 9 when she was ushered into the marriage bed (to which she also brought her childhood toys, according to traditional accounts). A recent biography by one Abdul Hameed Siddiqui even goes so far as to praise the union with the fatuous remark that by marrying an older man, “the bride is immediately introduced and accustomed to moderate sexual intercourse.” For pious Muslims, the marriage raises a painful dilemma. For non-Muslim polemicists, Ms. Ali says, the marriage and its presumed consummation are reasons to vilify Islam generally—to believe that “all of Islam and every Muslim is tainted.”

The author is very good on the transformations that the image of Muhammad underwent in successive centuries. In the Reformation he was a foil in Catholic-Protestant diatribes: For the reformers, Muhammad and the pope were “twin anti-Christs.” But for the 16th-century Catholic polemicist Guillaume Postel, “the spiritual sons of Luther are the little bastards of Mahom.” The Enlightenment improved Muhammad’s image somewhat perversely: He was still an “imposter,” but so were all prophets.

The author shows how, since the 19th century, Muslim and non-Muslim biographical viewpoints have intertwined. This was the result, first, of Thomas Carlyle’s 1840 lecture “The Hero as Prophet,” which, translated into Arabic in 1911, has become, Ms. Ali says, “a touchstone for Muslims seeking Western support for their claims about Muhammad’s greatness.” Carlyle admired Muhammad’s “authentic barbarian originality.” But it was the Scottish evangelical Christian William Muir, an official in the Bengal Civil Service from 1837 to 1876—and an accomplished Arabist—who had the greatest impact on later biographies of Muhammad. His four-volume “The Life of Mahomet from Original Sources,” published in 1858, revolutionized the subject. Because Muir had read and sifted through the Arabic sources—and because he struggled to be scrupulously accurate—his biography had an immense impact, especially among Muslim readers. Such future biographers as Syed Ahmad Khan and Syed Ameer Ali in India, as well as Muhammad Husayn Haykal and Ahmad Amin in Egypt, borrowed heavily from Muir’s work even when they disagreed with his conclusions.

Ms. Ali declares rather boldly that “modern Islam is a profoundly Protestant tradition.” The reliance of fundamentalist Muslims on Scripture alone (the “sola scriptura” of the Protestant reformers), as well as their use of vernacular translations, does suggest a parallel. But her contention would have shocked such 19th-century polemicists as the Methodist preacher George Bush (a distant relative of the presidents Bush). In one of her many intriguing asides, she notes that Bush viewed Muhammad’s career as “the fulfillment of biblical prophecies about the end times.”

The gulf between revilers and admirers of Muhammad is perhaps wider now than at any time since the early Middle Ages, as the 2005 uproar over the silly Danish cartoons of Muhammad showed. Cynically manipulated though that outrage was by certain Muslim clerics, it illustrated what a live nerve the image of the Prophet remains, even for ordinary Muslims. For them, he stands uniquely apart from the common run of humanity; for them he remains, as they would say, “a ruby among stones.”

—Mr. Ormsby’s “Theodicy in Islamic Thought” has just been reissued in
the Princeton Legacy Library.