Muhammad and Islam – a rejoinder

Muslims are often accused of being intolerant; they lose their temper too swiftly and are too impulsive, too emotional. But a quick look at the NFB and some other cyber discussion forums, browsed by Muslims, would prove you wrong and may show that they are probably the most tolerant of all people. Not too long ago, a Bengali-speaking Hindu from Advani’s India, went berserk in NFB unleashing his savagery by abusing all Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Yet, no one reprimanded him for his demented and repugnant behavior. Imagine, if any major Indian news website would have put up with such an offensive piece if Hindus were treated as badly? I can at least imagine that even if such an offensive piece had gotten posted, it would have drawn condemnation or criticisms from many respectable Hindus for its offensive content. But not quite so with the NFB editorial board and its highly tolerant Muslim readers. They are in a league of their own. They were nonchalant about the abuse; they simply shrugged it off. They are not so easily perturbed or aroused by such offensive writings, rants or outbursts, especially when the abuser is either ill-informed or has learning disability. I often wonder by airing such pieces if the editorial board of NFB is not trying to outdo others: e.g., setting a new standard for freedom of expression! It is known that imitators are more zealous in showing off, so when the bikini travels south, much of it is lost to the strings!

9/11 has offered a unique opportunity for all the spiteful and bigoted individuals, the neo-Crusaders of the 21st century CE, to come out of their holes and demean Islam. They have a monumental task ahead of them to divide our world into rival camps (what is dubbed as ‘clash of civilizations’). So, with all the demonic and missionary zeal they go after the major sources: the Prophet (S), his family and the Qur’an. Their passion to abuse, hypothesize, lie and concoct knows no bound. They know very well that the Prophet of Islam and his family are venerated much by Muslims, so they sadistically attack the sensitivity of Muslim community by hurling their abuse against the prophet and his family. [1] Every arrow is thrown to test how much more its victim can endure in the next round. These bigots have forgotten the wisdom that one’s freedom to stretch arms stops where they touch another person’s nose. No, we cannot teach such words of wisdom to those who frequented massage parlors and whorehouses in Bangkok, and think of the world in their image: as a whorehouse. Nor can we let the deaf hear that enough is enough and spare us from all your idiosyncrasies, hallucinating theories and hypotheses, which border into indecencies and are hurting us: don’t abuse our prophet. Most of these spineless creatures do not have the guts to write under their actual names, but take shelter behind pseudonyms, which, invariably, are Muslim names, as if to give credence to their sickening ideas or suppositions (what they sometimes arrogantly label as ‘circumstantial evidences’).

A reading of their fictitious theses shows that these individuals suffer from serious mental derangement, disorder of thoughts, paranoia and vindictiveness, requiring psychiatric treatment in a lunatic asylum. I wonder who inspires or whispers them to slander, fabricate and lie, demeaning Islam and its prophet! They behave as if they are in possession of the genie of Aladdin who had helped them to unearth some new evidence or (or what they claim as ‘now lost’) manuscript to throw some new light on Prophet’s life.

Writing about conjugal relationship between Prophet Muhammad’s (s) parents, Mr. Ashgor opines in a website (under the title: "Mohammad & Islam: Stories not told before"):

"Recognizing the fact that she [Amina] and her husband [Abdullah] did not have the means to feed another mouth, Amina always forced her man to ejaculate his semen outside her vagina. This practice helped her to avoid pregnancy for sometime, but one night Abdullah failed to control himself, and she ended up being a pregnant woman. Amina was angry. She tried her best to destroy the pregnancy, but failed. …

But as misfortune would have it, Amina’s husband died when she was about six months into her pregnancy. This tragedy increased her hatred towards the child she was carrying in her belly. She considered it to be the harbinger of a bad luck. She feared that many more mishaps would befall her after she delivered the jinxed baby." [2]

What a ludicrous story! What a preposterous assertion! Where is the evidence to support the alternative hypotheses? One probably has to be under the influence of a highly potent mind-altering intoxicant to imagine a story like this, behaving as if he was a ‘Peeping Tom’ in Abdullah and Aminah’s bedroom. After all, no biographer of the prophet ever hinted such a story. What is the source behind this ridiculous story? Readers are not offered one.

Mr. Ashgor haughtily calls Muhammad – a jinxed baby! Probably, he had a memory lapse (we can probably excuse him for his advance age) forgetting that if his allegation were true, no child would later have been named after Muhammad. But the fact remains that no other human being in recorded history has been named as often as Muhammad was whom Mr. Ashgor calls a ‘jinxed baby’? [How about his own first name (assuming that is his real name)? Why was he named after the Prophet and why did not he change his name?] Contrary to Mr. Ashgor’s hypothesis, we are told by early biographers that Aminah, during her pregnancy, was conscious of a light within her, that she was carrying in her womb the lord of Arabia who should be named Muhammad upon his birth. [3] And that is what actually happened when the Prophet of Islam became the master of the Arabian Peninsula. He has been ranked as the most influential person in human history: "he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both religious and secular levels." [4]

If you thought that was enough of a sample from our hallucinating writer, wait; there is more. He says that Haleemah’s son Masroud was switched as Muhammad (S):

"Pleased with her plan, Haleema began working on its implementation. First of all, she needed to call Muhammad Masroud, and Masroud Muhammad. At the beginning, the infants appeared a little confused, but after a short period of time, they got used to the change. …

Haleema had to resort to this cunning tactic in order to hide a serious problem: The child that was born to Amina bore no mark at the back of his body; whereas Masroud had a distinctive birth mark between his shoulders. Now, if Haleema had not invented the story of the angels who, she had to claim, impressed Muhammad’s body with "the seal of prophecy," her entire scheme would have been jeopardized, and her desire to plant her son in Amina’s house frustrated."

So, according to this pen-pusher, Haleemah’s son became the historical Muhammad (S). I wonder why for all these fourteen centuries no one was able to discover this earth-shattering discovery except this cyber pundit! And there are many other manifestly absurd, unfounded claims and suppositions that he makes, which only prove either his mental imbalance or lack of comprehension. It is quite hilarious that he could not even spell the name of Prophet’s wife Khadijah properly. He profusely calls her Khudeija. That alone speaks volumes as to his shallowness in the subject he wrote about.

It is said that falsehood oft repeated achieves the veneer of truth and some are sure to swallow it. The series of articles ‘Muhammad and Islam: stories not told before’ is a typical example of such an attempt at disseminating falsehood with doggedness and cruelty. A collection of lies and half-truths, many fuzzy facts, and a plethora of wild imagination and false interpretation, therefore, forms the nucleus material for the above work. Rather than discovering Muhammad (S), the writer has only proven his own idiosyncrasy and inability to discern truth from fiction.

If someone is sincere in his search for Islam and/or Muhammad (S), there are many good books that are already available to shed enough light on the subject. We definitely don’t need a malicious and cynical individual with ulterior motives, masquerading as a historian now, to revise history. For instance, Dr. Martin Lings (Muhammad: his life based on the earliest sources) and Javeed Akhter (The Seven Phases of Prophet Muhammad’s Life) are two good sources in English on Prophet’s biography. And then there are also notable books (smaller in size) written by credible non-Muslim authors like Karen Armstrong and Prof. R. K. Rao.

Notes:

[1] As late Annmarie Schimmel had observed that such veneration of religious leaders in understandable and not uncommon.

[2] See http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/asghar/muhammad_islam.htm

[3] Ibn Ishaq as quoted by Martin Lings, p. 21.

[4] Michael Hart as quoted by Prof. John Voll in Foreword to Javeed Akhter’s "The Seven Phases of Prophet Muhammad’s Life," ISPI, Chicago.