Your Prophet is your Islam

Omid Safi

• Last Updated: November 20. 2009 9:47PM UAE / November 20. 2009 5:47PM GMT

Pep Montserrat for The National

I have spent the better part of the past 15 years speaking with diverse audiences about religious issues. These audiences have included Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus and atheists, among others. I often refer to teachings and stories from various religious traditions to acknowledge the diversity of our societies.

To find out what people already know, I ask people what they know about Jesus – they can aways point to specific teachings (love, forgiveness of one’s enemies) as well as very particular narratives and stories (Jesus on the cross, Jesus and the moneychangers, The Prodigal Son, etc.).

When I ask them about Moses, things get a bit fuzzier. There are not many spiritual teachings they recall, but they do identify Moses as the one who brought the Law (Torah) and delivered his people from bondage in Egypt.

When I ask them about Hindu exemplars, typically they can name only Gandhi. In this case there are no life narratives, and one teaching only: non-violence.

Over the years, I have noticed something interesting and profoundly disturbing whenever I ask them about the Prophet Mohammed: the response of non-Muslims is invariably one of deafening silence.

Simply put, the overwhelming majority of non-Muslims cannot name a single spiritual teaching that is traced back to the Prophet Mohammed. Not only that, they do not know any stories or anecdotes about the Prophet Mohammed.

This seems shocking, particularly in light of the fact that Islam has dominated the media headlines, at least since September 11, 2001, and probably going back to the 1978-1979 Iranian Revolution.

One would have to imagine a bizarre universe in which Christianity had dominated the headlines for 30 years, and yet most people knew nothing about Christ. This is precisely where we are with Islam.

It was for this reason that I have written the book Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters.

I spent years researching the life, legacy and teachings of the Prophet Mohammed in multiple Muslim contexts, from Arabic and Persian to Turkish, South Asian and western.

I was reminded time and again of how Muslims are great storytellers. Even when Muslims discuss the spiritual and ethical teachings of the Prophet, they never do so in the theoretical abstract, but always come to see those teachings as illuminated through particular stories of the Prophet’s life. For example, going back to the Quran, Muslims have come to see the Prophet as Rahmatun lil-‘alamin, “a mercy to all the worlds”.

In other words, the very being of the Prophet is seen as a source of mercy not just to this world, but to all the worlds. Yet that quality of mercy is best understood through the lens of specific episodes in the Prophet’s life. One of them is the zenith of the Prophet’s earthly success, his triumphant conquest of Mecca.

The Prophet was born as an orphan in the city of Mecca. Sixth century Arabia was a tribal society in which a person’s identity was not individual, but understood through the nobility of the clan and tribe to which one belonged. A child born as an orphan to a noble but impoverished family was already at a disadvantage. The Prophet Mohammed worked as a merchant, and earned the reputation as the Amin (Trustworthy One), and people trusted their affairs and possessions to him.

He spent a great deal of time meditating in the cave on the Mountain of Light, reflecting on the state of his society, its polytheism and injustices.

At age 40, the Prophet Mohammed heard the voice of God, mediated through the angel Gabriel. As the Prophet, he summoned his community to return to the monotheism that all the previous prophets had preached. This was soundly rejected by those who saw in his call a challenge to their tradition (“ways of the forefathers”), their religion (polytheism), their social structure (tribalism), and their economic status.

At the time, due to Mecca’s status as a centre of pilgrimage, the Kabah was filled with the idols of various tribes.

The Prophet Mohammed and his small group of followers were persecuted. A few were killed, some had their homes and property confiscated, and many were exiled.

The Prophet Mohammed and his followers undertook the risky migration to Medina, where they established the Muslim community.

Over the next 10 years, the Muslims in Medina and the pagans in Mecca engaged in several battles. It was not until the end of the Prophet’s life that he was able to summon the forces to return triumphantly to Mecca, and vanquish his former enemies.

This is the high point of the Prophet Mohammed’s political career, and the moment that the Muslim tradition has always looked back on to illustrate his quality of having been the “mercy to the worlds”.

The Prophet Mohammed inherited two grand traditions: the Arabic tradition and the Biblical tradition. The collective weight of both allowed him at the moment of having conquered his enemies to exact revenge, kill the men, enslave the women, and take their property as spoils of war.

In fact, we find many Biblical kings acted precisely in this fashion. To be more specific, the Prophet Mohammed possessed both the military and political might to exact revenge, as well as the weight of tradition to have justified such action.

And yet he did not. The Prophet Mohammed, the embodiment of divine mercy, declared complete and total amnesty for his former enemies, declaring their blood and property sacred.

His actions consisted of marching to the Kabah, and cleansing the Temple of Abraham of all icons and idols, re-enacting, as it were, Jesus chasing out the moneychangers in the Temple of Jerusalem. He won his enemies over by kindness, and welcomed them to the community of the faithful. In fact, many of the future leaders of Islam would come from the ranks of his former enemies. It is a powerful reminder of the power of forgiveness, transformation and redemption.

Up until now, I have emphasised how little non-Muslims actually know about the life and teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. And yet it is not just non-Muslims, but also many Muslims who need to remember Mohammed. Through my research, I discovered that Muslims’ own idea of the Prophet Mohammed has undergone a dramatic shift in the past few centuries.

For the first thousand years after the time of the Prophet, Muslims primarily understood the Prophet as the embodiment of mercy, as the “perfect human being” who mediates between humanity and the divine.

Then a dramatic shift occurred with the advent of modernity and the experience of colonialism. When Muslims, formerly the masters of the world, came to be dominated by Europeans, they looked back to the Prophet not to intercede for them with the divine, but rather to deliver them from the state of political weakness and powerlessness.

So the Prophet Mohammed came to be re-imagined as the “ideal Arab hero” and the “nation-builder”. As I jokingly say in the Memories of Muhammad, the Prophet, the mercy to all the worlds, became “Mohammed the UPS delivery man”, who delivers the Quran to humanity, checks to make sure that the package has been received faithfully, and bids us farewell.

Here is what I mean by this: how often have we heard modern Muslims insist that the Prophet Mohammed is “just a man, just a man”?

This would have been hard to imagine in a pre-modern context when the Prophet was not “just” a man, but rather the embodiment of a full and complete human being (Insan al kamil).

So in writing Memories of Muhammad, I came to see that Muslims, perhaps as much as non-Muslims, need to remember the Prophet Mohammed.

I think part of our challenge is that the legacy of the Prophet has been preserved in sources and texts that are written primarily in medieval Arabic and Persian sources, and in order to preserve and transmit the spiritual and ethical teachings of the Prophet, we need to translate these teachings.

By translation I am also speaking of translating from a medieval context to one that allows the teachings of the Prophet to be resonant with the lives and experiences of humanity in the 21st century.