|
THE PROPHET TURNED INTO IDOL The deceivers try to taunt the innocent faithful people, asking them such questions as ‘Can it be that you do not love Christ?’ ‘How can you deny the presence of Muhammad?’ In the face of such challenges, the candid people whose love for the prophet is not adulterated remain puzzled. To instill into the brains of ingenuous persons the idea of worshiping things other than God has been their secret aim. The traditionalist Islamist’s attempt at this has been writing books of baseless hadiths collected at random suiting their own ends. The verse explicitly points out that the Prophet is a human being like all of us and owes allegiance to what is revealed in the Book. TO ANTAGONIZE PROPHETSAccording to this verse of the Quran we are not allowed to set any of the prophets, such as Abraham, Moses, Noah and Christ, against each other. Nor are we allowed to utter that our Prophet is the greatest of all. Despite this explicit verse of the Quran, Muslims also erred in this as have the Jews and the Christians. They invented cock and bull stories, saying that had it not been for the Prophet, mankind would not have existed. It was thanks to him that we were created, etc. No such thing is written in the Quran. It was alleged that the Prophet’s substance was not of ours as it was pure light (nur), that he had bargained with God about the number of daily prayers that the faithful should perform. The Prophet was made into an object of sexual fantasies and it was said that he had the power to curse people to disable them. According to another fabricated hadith, while all the prophets would be in a panic in trying to save their skin on Doomsday, our Prophet’s concern would be limited to the salvation of his followers. Those that have contrived this so-called hadith have acted impiously and discriminated Muhammad against the other prophets. Some of them even went so far as to categorize the prophets. They classified the prophets as follows: 1. Muhammad; 2. Abraham; 3. Moses; and, last but not least, 4. Jesus Christ. According to this verse Muhammad seems to have been on the wrong path before the Quran was revealed to him. The same idea is also expressed in the following verse: Again some traditionalists claim that the Prophet was already Muslim even before he received the revelation, committing thereby a grave error. However, it is no surprise to see such extravagant ideas as these people cannot conceive of any other image than the one they have in their own minds. Another exaggeration is the allegation that among the ancestors of the Prophet there had been no pagans and that this genealogy went back as far as Adam. Yet, we read in the Quran that Abraham’s father had been an idolater. If we suppose that Abraham happened to be among the ancestors of Muhammad, we should conclude that the argument is wearing a bit thin. On the other hand, the traditionalist mentality in trying to prove its case dodges the issue and claims that Abraham’s father was in fact his stepfather or uncle, etc. This does not refute the explicit statement of the Quran in which it is said that it had been Abraham’s father. GOD PRAISES MUHAMMADThe point that the traditionalist Islamist fails to understand is that Muhammad has no need for such flattering. He is praised already in the Quran for his superior morals. The fact that God has appointed him His envoy and praised him in His Book is enough to make him a superior being. The fact that he had been on the wrong path before he received the revelation or that one of his forefathers had been an idolater does not in the least vilify him. It is written in the Quran that one is responsible for one’s own doings. The son of a prophet is no greater than any of his fellow creatures, nor is a person whose father had been a heathen discredited for that. The mentality that is inclined to evaluate people according to their genealogy has been led astray in this instance also. Muhammad has been praised in many instances in the Quran as in the following verses:One can see that the Prophet is praised in many an instance in the Quran. In Verse 107 of Sura The Prophets, he is qualified as being a mercy for all creatures. Had the legend according to which all the worlds had been created for the sake of the Prophet had been true, then it would have stated that our Prophet was mercy for all the world. HAIR WORSHIPAnother perversion is worshipping the hair of the Prophet. A single hair alleged to have been trimmed from the beard of the Prophet kept in mosques is to be exposed to the view of the faithful once a year during the month of Ramadan. The faithful are allowed to kiss the cloth in which it is wrapped. Those who level censure against Christians for their adoration of their icons, act in the same way.BEWARE OF BEING ONE OF THE HERDAn infinite number of so-called saints, sheikhs and ulama (legal Islamic scholars) have also been turned into idols, let alone the Prophet.By this the community is told not to address the Prophet saying “Guide us like the shepherd guides his flock.” Yet in actual practice, the sects expect the disciples to allow themselves to be guided by their sheikhs. The man that the Quran describes is he who thinks, employs his mind, embraces what is taught by the Quran; who loves the Prophet keeping him remote from all idea of partnership with God and who does not divide God’s power and distribute it between other entities. It is the duty of the Muslim to put God, the Quran and the Prophet into their proper places. Those who conferred the power to issue decrees (which belongs exclusively to God), to the Prophet, also falsely attributed the hadiths they fabricated to him, contributing to the adulteration of the religion. The result was the introduction into the religion of elements alien to the Quran, a good many of them conflicting with Its contents. The imagination of the fabricators ran so wild as to conceive such absurd fantasies as the one according to which the whole creation had come about for the sake of the Prophet. We feel confident that had Jesus witnessed the extravagant exaggerations about himself, he would have gone mad, so would have the Prophet, had he been imparted with the hadiths attributed to him and with the legend of Moses’ bargaining with God for his sake. |