By Roy Oksnevad
One of the issues that comes up when you engage with a Muslim is the Christian understanding of Muhammad. Muslims venerate him, and any demotion of his miraculous and sinless prophethood is met with scorn.[1] This veneration of Muhammad is reflected in blasphemy laws in Pakistan. But have Muslims always elevated Muhammad as they do today?
Point in case, Pakistan’s blasphemy laws were only codified by India’s British rulers in 1860. In 1986 a separate clause was inserted to punish blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad and the penalty recommended was “death, or imprisonment for life,” in that order.[2] The data coming from Pakistan provided by National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) shows a total of 633 Muslims, 494 Ahmadis, 187 Christians, and 21 Hindus have been accused under various clauses of the blasphemy law since 1987. Often the laws are used to settle personal scores and have little or nothing to do with religion.[3]
Have Muslims always considered any portrayal of Muhammad as blasphemous? Professor Hugh Goddard, director of the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at the University of Edinburgh, says Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), whose teachings paved the way for Wahhabism, was a key figure in the prohibition of images of Muhammad. This debate about Muhammad has significantly changed over the last 200-300 years.[4] On the other side are the Shia Iranian Muslims who have images of Muhammad hanging in homes and shops with no prohibition on these pictures even today.
Professor Tarif Khalidi has written an excellent book to help us understand the metamorphosis of Muhammad within the Muslim community across fifteen centuries.[5] He explores the construction and reconstruction of the life of Muhammad. Biographies morph over time, and the same phenomenon has happened with the narratives of the life of Muhammad.
Definitions: The Sira (meaning the path through life) is the biography of Muhammad. The Sira contains the sunna, Muhammad’s customary or normative behavior. Sira is the outward facts of his life. The sunna is the ethical/legal content. The sunna was eventually collected in a standardized form in the Hadith (traditions of Muhammad). The earliest Sira is Ibn Ishaq (d. 767). Sirat Rasul Allah was translated into English by Guillaume in 1955. The second genre of biography of which you might not be aware is the tabaqat. Tabaqat means “a generation” and is the biography of the companions of Muhammad.
Timeline: According to Khalidi the four founding biographers of Muhammad’s life, Sira, are Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa’d, al-Baladhuri, and al-Tabari. During this early history, the biographical recorders were marked by primitive devotion. Their methodology was to include any reports of the life of Muhammad, no matter how slight or offensive it was to the sensibilities of Muslims. Myth and reality were mixed together. This mixture of myth and reality are reflected in Guillaume’s cautionary statements throughout his work, with phrases like, “only God knows,” “alleged,” “God save me from attributing to the apostle words which he did not say,” and “so I am told.” Ibn Ishaq, in his intellectual integrity and literary thoroughness, even reports rival versions of a story, with an explanatory comment of, “only God knows what really happened.” When two conflicting stories are told, Ibn Ishaq uses the phrase, “God knows best.” Guillaume expects a book written in the eighth century to include embellishments of Muhammad and the religion of Islam.
The next age of biographies took a critical look at the first generation of Sira, as Khalidi notes, “in order to prune it of superstition and heresy.”[6] This time period can be described as canonical, moral, exclusivist, and rationalizing. Muslims believe that the pruning during this time renders the Sira as usable by believers as a guide to moral conduct. Khalidi notes that “Muhammad’s superhuman qualities—his pre-eternity, miraculous powers, and sinlessness—are asserted in order to fortify the faith of his followers, but as an object of love and devotion he remains humanly imitable.” Khalidi mentions the Sira of Andalusian al-Qadi ‘Iyad (d. 1149) as typifying this genre of biography, but I have not found it in English.
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, we see a new version of the Sira, the polemic. These were written to defend Muhammad’s reputation against the attacks of European Orientalists. They are defensive, polemical, and global in structure and argument.
Khalidi notes two exceptions in the late twentieth century, Ma’ruf al-Rusafi[7] (1875-1945) and Ali Dashti (1896-1982), whose Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad was published in English in 1994. They seek to demythologize the Sira of Muhammad. They find most problematic the alleged stories of the tree stump that moaned after Muhammad, the night journey Miraj on the winged horse Burak and the ascension to Heaven, his sexual exploits, and his spirit of vengeance.
Over the course of fifteen centuries, the various biographies have various reasons for accepting the versions of events that they chose to accept as well as the versions they chose to ignore, combat, or abbreviate. Christian apologists or polemicists typically go to the earliest known Sira of Muhammad and deposit the problematic issues squarely in the laps of Muslims in efforts to prove the unreliability of their historical sources.
The chapters of Khalidi’s book are: 1) The Turning Point: Muhammad in the Qur’an, 2) The Legislator: Muhammad in Hadith, 3) The Master Narrative: Muhammad in the Sira, 4) The Teacher of Manners: Muhammad in Adab, 5) The Light of the World: Muhammad in Shiite Biographies, 6) The Model Mystic: Muhammad in Sufi Literature, 7) The Prophet Canonized: Muhammad’s Sira in the New Canonical Age, 8) The Universal Model: Muhammad in Later Medieval Biography, 9) The Hero: Muhammad in Modern Biography, 10) The Liberator: Muhammad in Contemporary Sira.
How do the biographies of Muhammad shape the perception of Muslims in their defense of Muhammad? If Muslims are reading the more polemic and defensive biographies written in the third period, it would not be unreasonable to believe that this defensive posturing would influence how Muslims so readily come to the defense of Muhammad and his reputation. This defensive posturing is also built on the Muhammad of devotion in the second period, which again is founded upon the Muhammad of awe in the early period. Though there is a time to unmask the image Muslims have constructed of Muhammad, it may be better to invite them into the history of Jesus. Let them be awed at the life and times of Jesus the Messiah and drawn in to the hope of the gospel message.
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[1] See our three part series entitled Muslim Devotion to Muhammad Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
[2] “Have pictures of Muhammad always been forbidden?” By John McManus, BBC News, January 15, 2015
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30814555
[3] “What are Pakistan’s blasphemy laws?” BBC News, November 6, 2014 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-12621225
[4] “Have pictures of Muhammad always been forbidden?” By John McManus, BBC News, January 15, 2015
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30814555
[5] Tarif Khalidid. Images of Muhammad: Narratives of the Prophet in Islam Across the Centuries, (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
[6] Ibid, p. 17.
[7] I am not aware of his work published in English.