In the early biography of Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq there are many fascinating and intriguing incidents.  One unforgettable story tells how Huwayyisa came to embrace Islam:

The apostle said, ‘Kill any Jew that falls into your power.’ Thereupon Muhayyisa b. Mas’ud leapt upon Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom they had social and business relations, and killed him. Huwayyisa was not a Muslim at the time though he was the elder brother. When Muhayyisa killed him [Ibn Sunayna] Huwayyisa began to beat him [Muhayyisa], saying, ‘You enemy of God, did you kill him when much of the fat on your belly comes from his wealth?’ Muhayyisa answered, ‘Had the one who ordered me to kill him ordered me to kill you I would have cut your head off.’ He said that this was the beginning of Huwayyisa’s acceptance of Islam. The other replied, ‘By God, if Muhammad had ordered you to kill me would you have killed me?’ He [Muhayyisa] said, ‘Yes, by God, had he ordered me to cut off your head I would have done so.’ He [Huwayyisa] exclaimed, ‘By God, a religion which can bring you to this is marvellous!’ and he became a Muslim.
(The Life of Muhammad, by Ibn Ishaq,  translation by Alfred Guillaume, p.369.)

What a story!  Muhayyisa hears Muhammad urge Muslims to kill any Jew they could get their hands on.  So he goes out and kills Ibn Sunayna, his associate and business partner.  The assassin’s older brother Huwayyisa is amazed.  He protests that Ibn Sunayna had been the one putting food on Muhayissa’s table, and begins to beat up his brother, presumably for idiocy.  Muhayissa replies that he would have killed Huwayyisa too – even decapitating him – if Muhammad had commanded it.  Huwayyisa exclaims ‘what a marvellous religion!’, and follows his younger brother into Islam.

Does a story like this show Islam to be a great religion or a weak one?

This thing is, sometimes terror works.  Huwayyisa was not at any immediate risk in this story.  But he was deeply impressed by the alteration brought about in his brother by Islam.  This story reflects the intimidating, even traumatic effect of encountering a religion which inspires deadly violence in someone you thought you knew as a reasonable person.  The fact is that such trauma can jolt someone over to the ‘winning side’ of a faith which has the spiritual muscle to inspire violent acts in violation of the most stringent social norms.

This raises an important question:  Is Islam’s violence done in the name of Allah and his prophet something Muslims should be proud of or ashamed about? And should non-Muslims admire it – like Huwayyisa – or deride it?

Well, it all depends upon your perspective.  Ibn Ishaq, the author of the Life of Muhammad apparently thought this was a splendid story which reflected well on Islam.

When Malaysian apostate from Islam Lina Joy tried to get her Christian faith recognized by the Malaysian authorities her (ultimately unsuccessful) legal battle launched a storm of commentary.  Al-Jazeera reported the fears of some Malays that if Malaysia were to allow conversions to Christianity, this might set off ‘mass conversions’ away from Islam.  This implies a lack of conviction about the appeal Islam among the religions.  It implies that Islam is weak.

Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia, was scathing about those who depend upon violence to ‘defend’ Islam:

“Nothing could possibly threaten God who is Ominpotent and existing as absolute and eternal Truth… Those who claim to defend God, Islam, or the Prophet are thus either deluding themselves or manipulating religion for their own mundane and political purposes.  We witnessed this in the carefully manufactured outrage that swept the Muslim world several years ago, claiming hundreds of lives in response to cartoons published in Denmark.  Those who presume to full grasp God’s will, and dare to impose by force their own limited understanding of this upon others, are essentially equating themselves with God and are unwittingly engaged in blasphemy.”(From Silenced by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, p.xvii)

However not all Muslims share the views of President Wahid.  Some take pride in the apostasy law as evidence of Islam’s supremacy. Dr Wan Azhar Wan Ahmad, senior fellow at the Institute of Islamic Understanding in Kuala Lumpur, commented that the apostasy law reinforces Islam’s truthfulness and perfection, and  respect for ‘freedom of worship’ demands that non-Muslims must grant Islam the right to use violence against apostates:

  “If Islam were to grant permission for Muslims to change religion at will, it would imply it has no dignity, no self-esteem. And people may then question its completeness, truthfulness and perfection. …
If Islam forbids apostasy, not only the Muslims must observe it, but the followers of other religions that do not have such provisions must appreciate and respect this position as well. This is actually the freedom of worship that must be perceived by all.”

Among Muslims who are unapologetic about killing non-believers who have left Islam must be counted Yusuf al-Qaradawy, who recently declared:

‘If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment, Islam wouldn’t exist today. Islam would have ended with the death of the Prophet. So opposing apostasy is what has preserved Islam to this day.’

Al-Qaradawy affirms on a recent Egyptian television broadcast that it was violence which caused Islam to thrive and survive:

With sixty million regular viewers of his ‘Sharia and Life’ program, the views of Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawy are not to be sneezed at.  And they certainly cannot be written off as Islamophobic!

As long as the apostasy law is upheld, and even praised, by leading Islamic scholars such as Al-Qaradawy, no-one can credibly dismiss the proposition that Islam relies on and was advanced by violence.

The question is not whether Islam has prospered through violence, but whether this shows Islam is a great religion, or a weak one.

Another great article on this subject:

“If They [Muslims] Had Gotten Rid of the Punishment for Apostasy, Islam Would Not Exist Today”

Mohammed (on horseback) before members of the submitting Banu Nadir, one of the Medinan Jewish tribes he aggressively  vanquished and expropriated, in a series of proto-jihad campaigns which helped establish the nascent Islamic state. From the Jami’al-Tawarikh, dated 1314-5. In the Nour Foundation’s Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, London.

Cross-posted at AndrewBostom.org

Following violent Muslim reactions to the amateurish “Innocence of Muslims” video, which depicted some of the less salutary aspects of Muhammad’s biography, international and domestic Islamic agendas are openly converging with vehement calls for universal application of Islamic blasphemy law. This demand to abrogate Western freedom of expression was reiterated  in a parade of speeches by Muslim leaders at the UN General Assembly. The US Muslim community echoed such admonitions, for example during a large demonstration in Dearborn, Michigan, and in a press release by the Islamic Circle of North America.

Previously, the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (subsequently renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation [OIC])—the largest voting bloc in the UN, which represents all the major Muslim countries, and the Palestinian Authority—had sponsored and actually navigated to passage a compromise U.N. resolution insisting countries criminalize what it calls “defamation of religion.” Now the OIC—via its Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu—is calling for a specific ban on speech allegedly impugning the character of Islam’s prophet, which he termed “hate speech.” Ihsanoglu accompanied  his demand with a thinly veiled threat of violence should such “provocations” recur:

You have to see that there is a provocation. You should understand the psychology of people who revere their prophet and don’t want people to insult him,…If the Western world fails to understand the sensitivity of the Muslim world, then we are in trouble…[such provocations pose] a threat to international peace and security and the sanctity of life.

Earlier, in a long Pajamas Media review of the Huma Abedin family-dominated Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), and its ideological drivers, I highlighted the IMMA’s May 15, 2012 journal contents (vol. 32, issue 1), which championed the relevant Weltanschauung of Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (d. 1999).

Nadwi was a founding member of the Muslim World League, a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference (now Cooperation), a member of the World Supreme Council of Mosques, and a member of the Fiqh Council of Rabita. Nadwi participated in a host of other activities via Islamic organizations and institutions, including, notably, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). In India, Nadwi was a rector of Nadwatul Ulama, and president of the Academy of Islamic Research and Publications.)

Recently, I came across Nadwi’s remarkable juxtaposition of  his apologetic views on Muhammad, and the Sharia, which epitomize the mindset behind the current efforts to impose Sharia-based universal blasphemy laws, now clearly manifest.

Nadwi wrote these words just over 50 years ago (in 1961; the English translation was published in 1976; Speaking Plainly to the West, Lucknow, 1976, pp. 105-106):

…[T]he record of the sayings and doings of the sacred Prophet, his life-account, is a fragrant legacy which is extremely beautiful as well as incandescent. It makes the most shining page of the story of human advancement which can be recreated by reminding mankind of its true station. The reading of it restores the confidence of man in himself and revives in him the awareness of nobility. The picture it presents is so exquisitely charming that anyone whose aesthetic sense has not deserted him and in whom the feeling of perfection is present cannot fail to be aroused and inspired by it. He will be seized with ambition to attain the heights by emulating the Prophet’s example that may endue his life with sublimity, peace, and magnanimity. It unties knots of intellect and unravels the hidden mysteries. This wonderful portrait of lofty virtues and splendid accomplishments is present to this day in its pristine glory and the alteration of circumstances and the passage of time have done nothing to rob it of its purity or radiance.

The preserved treasure of the Islamic Sharia is present, without any distortion or amendment, as it was left behind by the bringer of the Sharia, the Prophet himself. The Sharia is the most complete and the most perfect jurisprudential system in the world. It denotes an admirable blending of the ancient with the modern and can serve the needs of all ages and climes. It is also well established for the future. It possesses such wise and sound foundations that the edifice of a healthy society or civilization can always be built on them.

I maintain that unless we are willing to offer a reasoned, but firm rebuttal to the entire genre (represented by Nadwi’s writings) of bowdlerized, triumphant views of Islam’s prophet, and the Sharia itself, than we are abetting, or passively accepting the Sharia supremacist agenda. Fortunately, pellucid, objective Western and freethinking Muslim scholarly analyses debunking these views are at our disposal.

Notwithstanding Nadwi’s hagiography, the renowned Islamologist, Arthur Jeffery, in his review of A. Guillaume’s seminal 1955 English translation of the defining pious Muslim biography of Islam’s prophet by Ibn Ishaq, remarked:

Years ago the late Canon Gairdner in Cairo said that the best answer to the numerous apologetic Lives of Muhammad published in the interests of Muslim propaganda in the West would be an unvarnished translation of the earliest Arabic biography of the prophet. In this present volume such a translation is put into our hands in a beautifully printed and produced book. … Byzantine, Syriac, and Armenian writers who mention him say only that he was a merchant who appeared as a prophet and sent the Arabs out on their wars of conquest.

Nearly a century ago (in 1915), W.H.T. Gairdner, the great Arabic linguist and scholar of Islam, had indeed noted dispassionately what is readily apparent from Muhammad’s actual biography (as opposed to the treacly Muslim hagiography), based exclusively on the reverent Muslim sources:

As incidents in the life of an Arab conqueror, the tales of raiding, private assassinations and public executions, perpetual enlargements of the harem, and so forth, might be  historically explicable and therefore pardonable but it is another matter that they should be taken as a setting forth of the moral ideal for all time.

Four years later, in 1919, Gairdner wrote an essay titled “Muhammad Without Camouflage,” responding to a mendacious birthday tribute panegyric of Islam’s prophet written collaboratively by Muslims and non-Muslims. A particularly trenchant segment of Gairdner’s rebuttal discussed the slaughter of the vanquished Medinan Jewish tribe, Banu Qurayza, whose massacre became an important motif in jihad war jurisprudence. Relying exclusively upon Muslim sources, Gairdner highlighted without equivocation the pivotal role that Muhammad himself played in orchestrating the overall events:

The umpire who gave the fatal decision (Saad) was extravagantly praised by Muhammad. Yet his action was wholly and admittedly due to his lust for personal vengeance on a tribe which had occasioned him a painful wound. In the agony of its treatment he cried out: “O God, let not my soul go forth ere thou has cooled my eye from the Bani Quraiza” [Banu Qurayza]. This was the arbiter to whose word the fate of that tribe was given over. His sentiments were well-known to Muhammad, who appointed him. It is perfectly clear from that that their slaughter had been decreed. What makes it clearer still is the assertion of another biographer that Muhammad had refused to treat with the Bani Quraiza at all until they had “come down to receive the judgment of the Apostle of God.” Accordingly “they came down”; in other words put themselves in his power. And only then was the arbitration of Saad proposed and accepted — but not accepted until it had been forced on him by Muhammad; for Saad first declined and tried to make Muhammad take the responsibility, but was told “qad amarak Allahu takhuma fihim,” — “Allah has commanded you to give sentence in their case.” From every point of view therefore the evidence is simply crushing that Muhammad was the ultimate author of this massacre.

The modern Muslim scholar Ali Dashti’s biography of Muhammad, 23 Years:  A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad has also chronicled Muhammad’s “changed course” at Medina, where the Muslim prophet begins to “issue orders for war” in multiple and repeated Koranic revelations (Sura [chapter] 9 being composed almost entirely of such war proclamations—permanent injunctions against pagans, Jews, and Christians). Prior to describing some of the numerous assassinations Muhammad ordered, Ali Dashti observes:

…Islam was gradually transformed from a purely spiritual mission into a militant and punitive organization whose progress depended on booty from raids and [tax] revenue….The Prophet’s steps in the decade after the hejra [emigration from Mecca to Medina] were directed to the end of establishing and consolidating a religion-based state. Some of the deeds done on his command [were] killings of prisoners and political assassinations…

Pace Nadwi’s hagiographic views—the narrative all are being forced to accept lest they be accused of “blasphemy” under the OIC-hatched “defamation of religions” UN resolution—the persistent consequences of Muhammad’s status as “a good [even ‘beautiful’] example of conduct” (Koran 33:21), across a continuum of nearly 14 centuries, remain glaringly evident. Invoked by contemporary Muslim clerics, governments, journalists and jihadists alike, Muhammad’s sacralized behaviors continue to result in: exploited child brides and general misogyny, sanctioned by law; Draconian, mutilating punishments such as stoning for adultery and amputation for theft; jihad violence against non-Muslims and Sharia (Islamic Law)-sanctioned oppression of non-Muslims under Muslim rule.

The great Orientalist David S. Margoliouth’s very balanced 1905 biography of Islam’s prophet recognized Muhammad as “ . . . a great man, who solved a political problem of appalling difficulty—the construction of a state and empire out of the Arab tribes.” Margoliouth recounted this accomplishment without “apology” or “indictment,” summarizing faithfully the images of Muhammad that emerge in the earliest and most authoritative pious Muslim biography of the Muslim prophet by Ibn Ishaq (d. 761/767), as follows:

In order to gain his ends he recoils from no expedient, and he approves of similar unscrupulousness on the part of his adherents, when exercised in his interest. He profits to the utmost from the chivalry of the Meccans, but rarely requites it with the like. He organizes assassinations and wholesale massacres. 

His career as tyrant of Medina is that of a robber chief, whose political economy consists in securing and dividing plunder . . . He is himself an unbridled libertine and encourages the same passion in his followers. For whatever he does he is prepared to plead the express authorization of the deity. It is, however, impossible to find any doctrine which he is not prepared to abandon in order to secure a political end…This is a disagreeable picture for the founder of a religion, and it cannot be pleaded that it is a picture drawn by an enemy…

If we are silent and ignore the reality of Muhammad’s “beautiful example of conduct”, in lieu of defiantly upholding the irrefragable evidence briefly adduced herein, we are tacitly condemning Professor Margoliouth, posthumously, and all who presently understand and expound the proven wisdom of his judgments,  and submissively acquiescing to the establishment of universal Islamic blasphemy law.

More Bostom

The complaint against him claims he sent text messages insulting Muhammad’s mother. Legal experts say the case is flawed because charges were laid under the wrong section of the Criminal Code. Human rights activists pledge a battle in court. For Mgr Rufin Anthony, personal animosities are behind the case.

Once again, Pakistan’s blasphemy law has been used to bring unsubstantiated charges against members of religious minorities. Rev Zafar Bhatti, president of the Jesus World Mission, is in prison after he was accused of violating the ‘black law.’ Judges now must decide whether or not to heed the appeal made on his behalf and release him on bail. A Muslim leader said the Christian clergyman sent him text messages that insulted Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Catholic leaders and human rights activists have responded immediately, pleading for his innocence, noting that police has been subjected to pressures and that the case is vitiated by errors in law.

Rev Bhatti hails from Karachi, but moved to Lahore in 2010, in Nawaz Sharif Colony, where he has worked on behalf of local Christians and religions minorities for the past two years. On 10 July, he decided to move with his family to the capital Islamabad. The next day, Ahmed Khan, deputy Secretary of the local Jamat Ehl-e-Sunnat, unexpectedly filed a complaint against the Christian clergyman at the New Town police station, in Rawalpindi.

According to the police report, Khan received some text messages on his mobile phone with insulting language towards Muhammad’s mother from an unregistered but visible number, which he kept in the phone’s memory. At the police station, he said that if the agents did not open an investigation for blasphemy under article 295-C of the Penal Code, his organisation would take matters in its own hands.

The affair is full of holes however, including the charges against the Christian minister. Offenders who violate Article 295, Sections B and C, of the Penal Code could get the death penalty. However, insulting the prophet’s mother falls under Article 295, Section A, which entails lighter sentences.

Police arrested Rev Bhatti on 16 July and his sister-in-law Nasreen Bibi. In custody, the pastor was physically abused and tortured to extract a confession but he stood his ground, rejecting the accusation and insisting on his innocence.

His wife turned to All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA), an associated founded by Shahbaz Bhatti, asking for justice. Today, a court hearing is expected to rule on his demand for release on bail.

“Zhaffar Bhatti is innocent,” said Khalid Jill, of APMA. “We are going to fight for his release.” In his view, police began a case against him under “pressure,” but we “are going to appeal because he was charged under the wrong article of the law.”

Mgr Rufin Anthony, bishop of Islamabad-Rawalpindi, is of the same opinion. “How can police be sure” about the offender’s identity? “It is clear that it is a case of personal animosity,” probably in connection with some land.