Understanding Muhammad: we need a more informed approach
Alongside Western scholars, Muslim writers opened the critical study of Muhammad’s life, far removed from the ideological approach that was common in the medieval age in both the Muslim and Christian worlds. Some successfully published their works without any fear, such as Iraqi writer Ma’rouf Rasafi and, more recently, Tunisian academic Hichem Djaït. Some others have stopped their projects, such as Egyptian writer Sayyid Al-Qemany, after receiving threats from al-Qaeda and other jihadi movements.
But despite some remarkable works about Muhammad, such as Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina by Scottish historian William Montgomery Watt, academic research on many aspects of his life is still lacking.
What the wider public need to know is that the understanding of Muhammad’s life — as in any other studies of ancient history — requires precise research using a variety of expertise such as historical linguistics and critiques of literature and historical anthropology. There is also a need to enrich this field with archaeological excavations and other modern research methods.
By ignoring this academic principle, one may fall into the trap of cherry-picking some interpretations of Muhammad’s life. Often these are taken out of the historical context from not necessarily reliable sources to support biased presuppositions influenced by current political issues.
Muslims’ view of Muhammad
The other approach to understanding Muhammad is the phenomenological study of his presence in “the consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness” of Muslims. In this approach, a variety of Muhammads exist among Muslims.
There is no similarity between al-Qaeda’s interpretation of Muhammad and the Muhammad of a Sufi Muslim. The latter feels Muhammad in a part of the soul where “life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be” in the “condition of peace or wholeness”.
Muhammad for Muslims is “the most perfect of God’s creatures … like a ruby among ordinary stones” and, in the same vein as Christianity, “all virtues are associated with the Prophet.”
Not just in writing, but also in plenty of depictions, artworks, and even various dances, Muslims express their devotion to Muhammad in celebration of his birthday and other religious occasions. In many Muslims’ houses, different kinds of depictions of Muhammad exist, which connect them to the spiritual world.
The prohibition of pictures of Muhammad is not a common belief among Muslims. Rather, it existed in early Islamic societies as part of the opposition to idolatrous images. Now, it is promoted by fundamentalists in the opposition of cultural traditional Islam.
In Sydney over the weekend, about 1,500 Muslims gathered at Olympic Park to celebrate Muhammad’s birthday. The ceremony started with expressions of pride at being Australian. Attendees called for gender equality, better education and peace, and rejected all kinds of extremism and terrorism.
Muslim and anti-Muslim extremists share an image of Muhammad that they want to impose on the majority of Muslims, who have developed a humanitarian image of their prophet over a long period in their local cultures.
Ali Mamouri is Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University. This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives).
