Muhammad SAW

Muhammad: 'Braveheart meets Butch Cassidy'

Muhammad disdained people with bad breath. He's the Muslim prophet who lived from 570-632, long after Jesus and long before Listerine.
Did Muhammad preach nonviolence, a debate swirling since Sept. 11? Yes, says Karen Armstrong, but he also instigated and led wars.
Was Muhammad a "demon-possessed pedophile," as some Southern Baptists claim? No, Armstrong says, though he wed women as well as girls, including a 6-year-old. The girl didn't attend the ceremony, but neither that nor polygamy was unusual at the time, says Armstrong, the best-selling author of A History of God.
"There was no impropriety," she writes in Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time. They didn't consummate the marriage until the girl reached puberty "when she would have married anyway." Armstrong is the would-be nun who specialized in English at Oxford. She's made her mark, however, as a scholarly narrator of religion books. Muhammad is extraordinary -- short, on point, scholarly and beautifully written.
The tone of the writing resembles Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Armstrong weaves a tale of two cities, Mecca and Medina, and of a reluctant prophet. He battled for people's souls and then for power. Armstrong's Muhammad is "Braveheart" meets "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." She empathizes and defends her main character, though she sees him as flawed. But even that serves Muhammad's point.
He didn't claim to be Allah or the son of Allah. He was simply a man who, for 23 years, said he received direct messages from God. The revelations survive in the Quran, the Muslim holy book first compiled about 20 years after Muhammad's death.
Armstrong's story picks up with Muhammad at 40, the year the messages began. At the time, Muhammad was a merchant in Mecca. Back then, most Arabs were nomads and not city folk. Theirs was a day-to-day struggle for food and water; that is, basic survival. Mecca was a stopover for caravans and for pilgrims.
They came for hajj, a time of intense prayer and for circling around the Kabah, a huge granite cube embedded with a black stone. Muhammad's clan, Hashim, dispensed water to the pilgrims. Muhammad also made an annual retreat to Mount Hira' during Ramadan to give money to the poor. While on retreat in 610, the first revelation came.
Upon God's command, Muhammad fell to his knees and touched his head to the ground -- a prayer posture that distinguishes Muslims today. Muhammad was terrified and initially didn't understand what was happening. In time, he became convinced he was Allah's prophet -- a role he didn't want.
He would probably be expelled from Mecca, a spiritual leader warned him. Echoing words from the New Testament, Armstrong writes: "A prophet was always without honor in his own country." In an age of many gods, Muhammad taught monotheism, specifically a surrendering (islam) of hearts to Allah.
Faith wasn't merely a matter of belief, but a journey of the heart. Muhammad's sensitivity to the poor stemmed from being orphaned as a boy, Armstrong says. He called for giving alms to the needy and a prayer discipline.
"His life was a tireless campaign against greed, injustice and arrogance," she writes. But so strong was the hostility toward these views, Muslims resettled 280 miles away in Medina. There Muhammad made a fateful decision -- to attack caravans headed to Mecca.
Armstrong says he justified the attacks to secure the financial survival of Muslims. But he also wanted the power that comes with victory to ensure the spread of Islam. "He had felt impelled to war in order to achieve a final peace," she writes.
But violence led to more violence. In one gruesome episode, Muslims captured and executed 700 men, and sold their wives and children into slavery, she says. Muslims divided the property -- all with Muhammad's awareness.
"It is not acceptable to us today," Armstrong writes. "His original aim had been to end the violence ... but he was now behaving like an ordinary Arab chieftain." She says Muhammad eventually abandoned war as an answer.
He was a "profound genius" who founded a religion that liberated women and cultivated peace, she concludes. "Muhammad was not a man of violence," Armstrong writes.
To say otherwise is nothing less than bigotry. "It is a gift to extremists who can use such statements to prove that the Western world is indeed engaged on a new crusade against the Islamic world."