Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time)
Conclusion: Salam (Peace)

Karen Armstrong, Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time)

"From the very start, Muslims used their Prophet as a yardstick by which to challenge their politicians and to measure the spiritual health of the ummah.

This critical spirit is needed today. Some Muslim thinkers regard the jihad against Mecca as the climax of Muhammad's career and fail to note that he eventually abjured warfare and adopted a nonviolent policy. Western critics also persist in viewing the Prophet of Islam as a man of war, and fail to see that from the very first he was opposed to the jahili arrogance and egotism that not only fuelled the aggression of his time but is much in evidence in some leaders, Western and Muslim alike, today. The Prophet, whose aim was peace and practical compassion, is becoming a symbol of division and strife—a development that is not only tragic but also dangerous to the stability on which the future of our species depends."

"Muhammad had been as controversial in his dying as in his living. Very few of his followers had comprehended the full significance of his prophetic career. These fissures within the community had surfaced at Hudaybiyyah, when most of the pilgrims seem to have expected something miraculous to occur. People came to Islam for very different reasons. Many were devoted to the ideal of social justice, but not to Muhammad's ideal of nonviolence and reconciliation. The rebellious young highwaymen, who followed Abu Basir, had an entirely different agenda from the Prophet. The Bedouin tribesmen, who had not volunteered for the pilgrimage in 628, had a political rather than a religious commitment to Islam. From the very beginning, Islam was never a monolithic entity.

There is nothing surprising about this lack of unity. In the gospels, Jesus's disciples are often presented as obtuse and blind to the deeper aspect of his mission. Paradigmatic figures are usually so far ahead of their time that their contemporaries fail to understand them, and, after their deaths, the movement splinters—as Buddhism divided into Hinayana and Mahayana schools not long after the death of Siddhatta Gotama. In Islam, too, the divisions that had split the ummah during the Prophet's lifetime became even clearer after his death. Many of the Bedouin, who had never fully comprehended the religious message of the Qur'an, believed that Islam had died with Muhammad and felt free to secede from the ummah in the same way as they would renege on any treaty with a deceased chieftain. After the Prophet's death, the community was lead by his 'kalifa', his "successor." The first four caliphs were elected by the people: Abu Bakr, 'Umar, 'Uthman and 'Ali, known as the "rightly guided" ('rashidun') caliphs. They led wars of conquest outside Arabia, but at the time these had no religious significance. Like any statesmen or generals, the rashidun were responding to a political opportunity—the disintegration of the Persian and Byzantine empires—rather than a Qur'anic imperative. The terrible civil wars that resulted in the assassinations of 'Umar, 'Uthman, 'Ali and Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, were later given a religious significance but were simply a by-product of an extraordinarily accelerated transition from a peripheral, primitive polity to the status of a major world power.

Far more surprising than this political turbulence was the Muslims' response. Their understanding of the Qur'an matured when they considered these disastrous events. Nearly every single major religious and literary development in Islam has had its origin in a desire to return to the original vision of the Prophet. Many were appalled by the lavish lifestyle of later caliphs, and tried to return to the austere vision of the early ummah. Mystics, theologians, historians, and jurists asked important questions. How could a society that killed its devout leaders claim to be guided by God? What kind of man should lead the ummah? Could rulers who lived in such luxury and condoned the poverty of the vast majority of the people be true Muslims?

These intense debates about the political leadership of the ummah played a role in Islam that was similar to the great Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries in Christianity. The ascetic spirituality of Sufism had its roots in this discontent. Sufis turned their back on the luxury of the court, and tried to live as austerely as the Prophet; they developed a mysticism modelled on his night journey and ascension to heaven. The Shi'ah, the self-styled "party of 'Ali", Muhammad's closest male relative, believed that the ummah must be led by one of 'Ali's direct descendants, since they alone had inherited the Prophet's charisma. Shiis developed a piety of protest against the injustice of mainstream Muslim society and tried to return to the egalitarian spirit of the Qur'an. Yet while these and many other movements looked back to the towering figure of Muhammad, they all took the Qur'anic visions into entirely new directions, and showed that the original revelations had the flexibility to respond to unprecedented circumstances that is essential to any great world movement. From the very start, Muslims used their Prophet as a yardstick by which to challenge their politicians and to measure the spiritual health of the ummah.

This critical spirit is needed today. Some Muslim thinkers regard the jihad against Mecca as the climax of Muhammad's career and fail to note that he eventually abjured warfare and adopted a nonviolent policy. Western critics also persist in viewing the Prophet of Islam as a man of war, and fail to see that from the very first he was opposed to the jahili arrogance and egotism that not only fuelled the aggression of his time but is much in evidence in some leaders, Western and Muslim alike, today. The Prophet, whose aim was peace and practical compassion, is becoming a symbol of division and strife—a development that is not only tragic but also dangerous to the stability on which the future of our species depends.

At the end of my first attempt to write a biography of Muhammad, I quoted the prescient words of the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Writing in the mid-twentieth century shortly before the Suez Crisis, he observed that a healthy, functioning Islam had for centuries helped Muslims cultivate decent values which we in the West share, because they spring from a common tradition. Some Muslims have problems with Western modernity. They have turned against the cultures of the People of the Book, and have even begun to Islamize their new hatred of these sister faiths, which were so powerfully endorsed by the Qur'an. Cantwell Smith argued that if they are to meet the challenge of the day, Muslims must learn to understand our Western traditions and institutions, because they are not going to disappear. If Islamic societies did not do this, he maintained, they would fail the test of the twentieth century. But he pointed out that Western people also have a problem: "an inability to recognize that they share the planet not with inferiors but with equals."

Unless Western civilization intellectually and socially, politically and economically, and the Christian church theologically, can learn to treat other men with fundamental respect, these two in their turn will have failed to come to terms with the actualities of the twentieth century. The problems raised in this are, of course, as profound as anything that we have touched on for Islam. [52]

The brief history of the twenty-first century shows that neither side has mastered these lessons. If we are to avoid catastrophe, the Muslim and Western worlds must learn not merely to tolerate but to appreciate one another. A good place to start is with the figure of Muhammad: a complex man, who resists facile, ideologically-driven categorization, who sometimes did things that were difficult or impossible for us to accept, but who had profound genius and founded a religion and cultural tradition that was not based on the sword but whose name—"Islam"—signified peace and reconciliation."

Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time)
Chapter 5, 'Salam', p. 210-214
Karen Armstrong
Harper Perennial - London, New York, Toronto and Sydney
ISBN-13 978-0-00-723248-2
ISBN-10 0-00-723248-9

Notes:
[52] Wilfred Cantwell Smith, 'Islam in Modern History' (Princeton and London, 1957), 305.

NOTE: If this page was accessed during a web search you may wish to browse the sites listed below where this topic or related issues are discussed in detail to promote global peace, religious harmony, and spiritual development of humanity:

www.adishakti.org/
www.al-qiyamah.org/
www.adi-shakti.org/  — Divine Feminine (Hinduism)
www.holyspirit-shekinah.org/  — Divine Feminine (Christianity)
www.ruach-elohim.org/  — Divine Feminine (Judaism)
www.ruh-allah.org/  — Divine Feminine (Islam)
www.tao-mother.org/  — Divine Feminine (Taoism)
www.prajnaaparamita.org/  — Divine Feminine (Buddhism)
www.aykaa-mayee.org/  — Divine Feminine (Sikhism)
www.great-spirit-mother.org/  — Divine Feminine (Native Traditions)

"Now, the principle of Mother is in every, every scripture - has to be there." Shri Mataji, Radio Interview 1983 Oct 01, Santa Cruz, USA

Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time)Conclusion: Salam (Peace)

Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time)
Conclusion: Salam (Peace)