Hating Muhammad echoes of a medieval polemic

(GETTY IMAGES)

Speaking at a lecture on Muhammad titled The Hero as Prophet, Scottish satirist Thomas Carlyle noted: “Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor…that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to anyone. The lies which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man are disgraceful to ourselves only”.

It’s a strange irony of fate that Muhammad, having shown the utmost respect in his lifetime for Jesus, is today the object of fear and loathing by some Christians. As sketchy details surface about one person who has been alleged on a US website to be the director of Innocence of Muslims, and a recent French cartoon depicting Muhammad in a postmodern satirical form, both filmmaker and cartoonist join a long list of Muhammad-baiting Islamophobes, and in my opinion are guilty of resurrecting familiar prejudices of the Middle Ages about Muslims.

Having read and studied the works of Orientalists, I believe much of the character assassination of Muhammad in cinema and literature is rooted in the anti-Muhammad archives of Europe that have echoed for millennia. The historical trail of European fables present Muhammad-or ‘Mahound’ the bogey man-as an archetypal whipping-boy. A licence to be defamatory towards Muhammad could be found in the Spanish Reconquista movement of the 9^th century and the same motifs influenced the intellectual ferment across the European continent.

In later centuries, we find Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which speaks of encountering Muhammad in the 8^th circle of hell, informing a vast European readership. Voltaire also courted controversy with his play Mahomet ou le Fanatisme, depicting Islam’s founder as a bloodthirsty savage and conniving despot. For centuries, monastic libraries and chronicles preached child-sex, brigandage and forced conversions as hallmarks of Muhammad’s prophethood. Everyone from Protestant reformer Martin Luther to Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant chimed in with trademark invectives towards him, and this medieval polemic has survived the ages.

It’s widely accepted that the portrait of Muhammad as a brute was borne out of a fear among European Christendom that the Byzantine Empire was being overrun by the Muslim monolith. The Turkish triumph in Constantinople refocused Christian discussions on whether Muhammad was in fact the Antichrist spoken of by St Paul and St John. Owing to the clergy’s fear-mongering which took gone with the wind proportions, many Christians felt their faith was teetering at the edge of an abyss. With the Ottoman capture of Gallipoli and their advancement into the southern shores of the Mediterranean signalling the presence of Muslim rule in Europe, the spectre of Islam extending its sphere of influence across the continent haunted the western conscience, and does so today.

I think it’s reasonable to claim that the recent provocations against Muhammad were contained by the very dominating frameworks that compelled terrified and credulous Europeans to castigate the Prophet of Islam. It would be naïve of me to believe that the assumptions inherited by the cartoonist and the filmmaker were borne out of an authentic study of Muhammad’s life. The trending art of lampooning Muhammad to gratuitous effect is likely to have derived inspiration from the biased biographical accounts of his life that held sway for centuries, almost always admitting no source for its prejudice.

The charges of rape, extortion and unlimited concubinage were used unsparingly in the anthology of western writings that sought to stigmatize Muhammad to the core. This, I feel, is the common thread lurking beneath the malicious propaganda of Muhammad satirists. Like the fictitious image of Muhammad constructed by fearing Christians of the past, the unchanging portrayal and legacy of mistrust towards a resurgent Islam still prickles the conscience of some westerners. History repeats itself as Muhammad once again becomes a casualty in this warring context and Islamic history converted into a theatre for modern western representations of the other.

I don’t see why reading events of the past week in light of this medieval backdrop is a historical misrepresentation. As Edward Said opined, large chunks of history is filled with Eurocentric falsehoods about Islam, where the idea of Christians recovering their strategic inheritance from Muslims enjoyed an unchallenged popularity. But Said also reminds us of the ‘hidden elements of kinship’ which identified sympathetically with Muslims. And I would rather we reach a stage in our perceptions of Muhammad and Muslims by engaging the voices of Mozart and Napoleon Bonaparte, who were favourably disposed to the Orient.

Mozart flatteringly depicted Turkish idioms in his symphonies and didn’t capitulate to imperial ambitions of empire and Napoleon showed adulation for Muhammad’s statesmanship and civilising mission. We find English apologists like George Sale also locating a magnanimous form of humanity in Muhammad. Resurrecting these pioneering reappraisals of Muhammad’s life by parting with clichés is crucial for a sober reading of the Orient. Maybe then the medium of film can be used to mitigate and not open hostilities.

But efforts to arrive at a dispassionate inquiry will not succeed if we insist on indulging the age-old bigotry. I cannot see us making the least headway in bridging the Occident-Orient divide vis-à-vis Muhammad, unless we divest ourselves from the old heritage. Otherwise, things will continue to be lost in translation, with often fatal consequences as recent events illustrated. I like many Muslims, have no qualms if Islam is critiqued with nuance and integrity. For me, a religion can only benefit from a respectful dialectic, where self-censorship need not enter the discussion at all. But I can’t swallow the suggestion that caricatures of Muhammad as a demon-possessed paedophile are penned with the intention of including Muslims in a satirical tradition and not excluding them. The responsibility is ours to ensure a wilful distortion of Muhammad’s life never rears its ugly head like it did so tragically.

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• thomasgoodey

  Its.

• Raimo Kangasniemi

  Religious freedom? Or killing of the apostates? Nothing makes the latter right, it is just how dominant religions protected their status.

• JohnBEllis

  I think you’ve offered a very fair and accurate assessment of the situation overall, and there’s nothing in it with which I wouldn’t endorse. I particularly agree with your third paragraph. I’ve followed the tensions in the middle east since the time of Suez, when I was just a kid and caught caught up, as kids of that age tend to be, with all the patriotic hype that surrounded the UK/British/Israeli action; but it’s only in relatively recent times that I’ve picked up on the expulsions/strongly “encouraged” emigrations of Jews from predominantly Islamic countries during the years following the establishment of the state of Israel. I think those occurred pretty much below the radar, at least as far as media reporting in this country was concerned.

  And your point about the confessional “cauldron” in Iraq is particularly well made – though I’d still want to argue that the US carries a degree of responsibility for lifting the cauldron’s lid for no substantial reason. One of the factors which has played no small part in creating this situation is the arbitrary carving up, by UK and French diplomats, politicians and pundits in the aftermath of the First World War, of the “Arab” parts of the Ottoman Empire into statelets which were delineated as a consequence of their own strategic interests and horse-trading, and without any real consideration of the tribal and confessional loyalties which existed in the area: an arrogance compounded in succeeding years with an obsession about maintaining the unity and integrity of these artificial constructs in the interests of “regional stability”, when in reality the stresses within these contrived political entities virtually guaranteed an ongoing instability.

  I was really primarily concerned, in my comment on this thread, to dispel the illusion which seems to be gaining currency within “liberal” circles in the UK and in the west in general that the prevailing historic ethos of the Muslim caliphates and princedoms was one of indulgent tolerance towards religious minorities, and that the default position in Christian territories was persecution. I first got involved with the study of this in university days and have kept an interest ever since, and my own impression is that there’s little in practice to choose between them; you find episodes of tolerance and intolerance in pretty much equal measure in both.

  The only concrete difference which I’ve been able to discern is that Islam does institutionalize a degree of intolerance, in that the inferior status of non-Muslims is explicit in Islam’s doctrinal title-deeds in a way that isn’t true of Christianity. While Judaism has strains of both: there’s the notion of “cherem”, but that’s modified by the injunction “Do not mistreat or oppress a stranger; you know how it feels to be a stranger,
  because you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” – even though the sojourner will probably hold to a different religion. But in practice, peoples and rulers seem to me to exhibit pretty much the same shifts between tolerance and persecution combinations of tolerance and persecution, regardless of religion and ideology.

• JohnBEllis

  That’s exactly the position at which I’ve arrived myself – ruefully, after over thirty years as a practising believer, having come to faith, idealistically and hopefully, in my teens! – and northern Ireland is, as you say, very much an illustration of the principle. Zandeman, who posts regularly, and for me with much good sense, on these threads and who comes originally from the north of Ireland, asserted in a recent post that Scottish – and some English – settlers on the “plantations” in the north of Ireland were carefully chosen back in the early 17th century for their extreme protestant opinions, and given positions of social and economic privilege in order to cement British control of Ireland.

  If that’s so, and he’s better placed to know the details of the history over there than I am, even in the beginning religion was the incidental tool, rather than the actual cause, of the two-tier society with northern Ireland became, right down into modern times.

• http://www.facebook.com/janni.tor.3 Janni Tor

  Well,when you see Muslims burning poppies after your Grandad fought in a war that had nothing to do with their crackpot religion..I wouldn’t expect anyone to feel as if they had just left a day spa.