Scotsman.com The Messenger: The Meanings Of The Life Of Muhammad
RUDYARD Kipling – not nowadays an author immediately associated with liberal approaches to issues of race and empire – was fond of quoting an Urdu proverb: « Where there are Muslims there is a comprehensible civilisation. »
Scroll forward three generations, and bedfellows as strange as Martin Amis, Jean-Marie le Pen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali pen indictments that imply that Islam is not a form of civilisation at all, but its polar opposite. Given the fractious and overheated tenor of much contemporary comment, what is sorely needed is calm explication of the beliefs of both sides.
As part of a more measured debate, Tariq Ramadan’s The Messenger is to be welcomed. In part it is a biography of Muhammad, with especial emphasis given to the moral meanings that can be adduced from his life. There are biographies already available in English – notably, from Karen Armstrong and Michael Cook – but one distinction Ramadan offers is that he is, as well as a diligent scholar, a practising Muslim.
This in itself may, unfortunately, be cause for further antagonism rather than the hoped-for clarification. Ramadan, who has been described as « a Muslim Martin Luther » by the Washington Post, was denounced as « more dangerous » than Abu Hamza by a British tabloid newspaper. He was invited to join a UK government task force on terrorism, but had his visa withdrawn by the US for supposedly « providing material support to a terrorist organisation ». Such contradictory responses seem indicative of the gulf of misunderstanding that infects any frank discussion of the history and future of Islam.
THE MESSENGER is important, readable and intelligent: in Christian theological terms, it might be described as a work of apologetics. For non-Muslim readers it gives an eloquent account of the religion’s founder and his core teachings, dispelling many of the accreted myths and misrepresentations.
For Muslim readers, it re-emphasises the difference between the permanent ideals and their historical manifestations, and does not shirk from problematic issues such as the wearing of the veil (originally, an injunction designed solely to protect the wives of the Prophet). It will take some particularly Machiavellian intellectual gymnastics on the part of Ramadan’s detractors to depict this as anything other than a sincere, conciliatory and positive contribution.
There are a number of ways in which Muhammad was a very different kind of prophet. He was born into a society that was already multicultural – a Jew and a Christian were among the first to attribute special significance to him, and his people, the Arab clan of the Quraysh, were polytheistic pagans. He had a career, as a merchant trader, before his religious calling (and Ramadan is acute on the contractual nature of the ethical code he promoted).
Unlike Jesus, he had sons and daughters, and also experienced the grief of losing six children. Unlike Moses, Elijah or Ezekiel, he performed no miraculous resurrections or transformations.
Throughout The Messenger, Ramadan takes pains to stress that Muhammad was an ordinary human being, with all the anxieties, temptations and emotions that make us human, albeit with an extraordinary message. When hectored by enemies about his failure to perform miracles, Muhammad retorted that the Qur’an – the text of which was revealed to him by the angel Jibra’el, and memorised, then transcribed, by his closest companions, since he was illiterate – was the miracle. The humanity of Muhammad is most evident in his relationships with allies and followers, many of whom felt free to ask if a particular strategy or plan was his personal opinion or a direct revelation. Similarly, Ramadan points to Muhammad’s encouragement of his followers to cultivate their own conscience and creativity.
Ramadan extrapolates from incidents in the life of the Prophet, and the Qur’anic verses relating to those events, on to modern moral dilemmas. He covers such topics as the treatment of prisoners of war and the proper relationship with believers of other religions; and in each case the message is one of forbearance, mutual respect and patience. Ramadan takes a term like jihad – often, erroneously, now made synonymous with ‘crusade’ – and shows the multiple meanings and the important contexts. In the first instance, jihad was the struggle against the self’s worst impulses. When it became a political struggle, it was against a genocidal campaign waged by the Quraysh. It was never an evangelical war of conversion.
What Ramadan’s book reveals most clearly is the difficulties for the curious non-Muslim individual in approaching Islam. The Qur’an is poetic, oblique and almost impossible to render in a language other than Arabic. It is only recently that accurate and adequately annotated versions have been readily available – indeed, the first and most frequently reprinted edition produced by Penguin in 1956 rearranged all the suras – like a Bible that opened with Ephesians and ended with Jonah.
Moreover, the Qur’an is not the « story » of Muhammad, in the way that the Gospels tell us about Jesus or the Pentateuch tells us about Abraham, Joseph and Moses. There is a distinguished and extensive amount of Islamic biography, almost none of which is available in English – including the first biography of the Prophet, the Al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah of Ibn Hisham. Likewise, it is relatively easy to buy quite esoteric works from other traditions (Meng-tzu, the Apocrypha, Plotinus’s Enneads), but you would have to search long and hard for paperback editions of al-Hamadhani, Nezami or Ibn Fadlan.
The Onion, the best satirical magazine in America, recently carried a story with the headline « Local Man Sure He’ll Never Understand the Difference Between Sunnis and Shias ». It’s easy to understand his difficulty. Although there have been some excellent recent books – Malise Ruthven’s Islam In The World, Barnaby Rogerson on the heirs of Muhammad, Bruce Lawrence on the Qur’an, Hugh Kennedy on the Abassids and Robert Irwin on Orientalism – anyone inspired by The Messenger would find thin pickings in terms of informative material.
« Islam » itself is sometimes translated as « submission »; and the negative connotations of this are prime material for critics like Hirsi Ali. Ramadan continually explains it as a kind of profound awe in the face of the Almighty. As the German poet Goethe wrote, when studying Muhammad: « If this be Islam, do we not all live in Islam? »
SOURCE : Scotsman.com
