11 - 17 October 2001
Issue No.555
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 October 2001 Issue No.555 |
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An unnecessary defence?
Muhammad in Europe: A Thousand Years of Western Myth-making, Minou Reeves, London: Garnet Publishing, 2001. pp318
When Europe woke up to the unpleasant reality of having a rival to Christianity -- both militarily and as a faith -- it was discovered that there was little to take exception to in Islam. Islam recognised past prophets in the Judaic tradition, gave more or less the same moral teachings and preached a belief in an afterlife not unlike that of Christianity. Additionally, it was found on examination of its holy book that Islam held in high esteem both Christ and his mother, though it did not agree that Christ had met his death by crucifixion and found altogether unacceptable the proposition that Christ was the son of God. Such a dangerous threat to Christianity must be countered, must somehow be shown to be wholly erroneous, the work of Satan himself in order to delude Christians and lead them into another faith. It became clear to those in the Church directly threatened by this new religion that no better way presented itself than to launch attacks against the personality of the Prophet himself, a man so different from the central figure of Christianity.
The present book, by an Iranian ex- diplomat who now lives in England, deals with just this subject: the portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad in Europe from the earliest times up till today. Thus the first three chapters of the book are given to providing a brief synopsis of the Prophet's life as found in Islamic sources: the Qur'an itself, the works of such historians as Ibn Ishaq and Al-Waqidi and the various collections of Hadith. However, these pages contain no material that is not readily available elsewhere, and it might be thought that such basic knowledge could have been taken for granted in any potential reader of the present book. Much of the space devoted to the historical facts of the Prophet's life is in fact given up to mere "preaching" by the writer, often in an unnecessarily simplistic and unctuous tone.
She is, for instance, at pains to show that the Prophet was not a sensualist, this being the main platform on which his early Christian detractors concentrated their attacks. Like several other Muslim writers in the recent past, the writer, anxious to defend the Prophet against such criticism, panders to the Christian view that there is something reprehensible about sex and seeks to show that the Prophet was not a sensual man. She excuses the several marriages he entered into after the death of Khadija on the grounds that, as she puts it, "some feminine companionship was desirable both for his personal equilibrium, and for the smooth running of his household." The writer herself admits that "in the present century some Muslims have been affected by the Western view even to the extent of denying that his later marriages were ever consummated." It would seem that she too has been influenced by Western opponents of the Prophet, for she makes the dubious point that it is remarkable that in the course of ten years living in Medina with nine wives, all of whom were of child-bearing age, there was no further issue. She proposes rather naively that "on this evidence Muhammad seems to have been highly abstemious in his conjugal relationships..." Can she not see, as was summed up in a book recently reviewed in these pages that "the acceptance of sexuality as a healthy aspect of life is a decisive cultural difference between Arabic and Western religious thinking"?
When dealing with the Coptic girl Marya, the author tells us that she bore the Prophet a son "who died in infancy." In fact, though, Ibrahim was some seven years old when, to the great grief of his father, he died. About Marya the writer says, with no evidence to support her assertion, that she did not receive the title of Mother of the Faithful "probably because she did not want it."
What this book does provide, however, is information about the so-called "Satanic Verses," those few verses, later rejected by the Prophet, which gained sudden prominence on the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel of the same name. It is pointed out that many Muslims strongly deny the whole story of these rejected verses of the Qur'an, as if acceptance of them would be damaging to the reputation of the Prophet. However, the writer comments that the Prophet comes out of the story honourably and that "Muslims should not fear its truth any more than their enemies should hope for it to be true." The brief account given here is of interest to anyone wishing to understand the background against which Rushdie wrote his novel, and the final dozen pages of the present book are devoted to giving a summary of that novel.
The topic of the Minou Reeves' study has already been adequately dealt with by such scholars as R W Southern in his Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages and the works of Norman Daniel (whose books, strangely, do not appear in the bibliography). Thus, with no fresh material on the subject in hand with which to fill the 300 pages of her book, the author roams far and wide, giving us potted resumés on matters that seem to have little relevance to her subject. These overlong summaries include Sufism, the Balfour Declaration and Zionism, Napoleon's military expeditions in the Islamic world, the Muslim Brotherhood, the writings of Nietzsche, Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, even Marxism and Darwinism. The book abounds with naive tautology. Thus: "The language of the Qur'an is Arabic. It is the language in which God's word was articulated to Muhammad. It symbolizes the truth of Muhammad's religion...To the Muslim ear it is the sound of creation itself." One or other of the numerous persons mentioned at the beginning of the book as having helped with it should surely have not allowed someone "to give reign" (sic) to his imagination.
Muhammad in Europe quite simply covers too much ground and ploughs too shallow a swathe in doing so.
Reviewed by Denys Johnson-Davies
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