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Western polemics flared up, above all, around the person and the life of Muhammad.. To the Christian Middle Ages he was what he still is to some Christian theologians: the deceitful heretic, the false prophet. One of the Fathers of the Church, the Greek John of Damascus, saw Muhammad as the Anti-Christ; Dante called him the 'seminator di scandalo e di scisma'. Muhammad is described as the first of the accursed ones: Whilst eagerly I fix on him my gaze, He eyed me, with his hands laid his breast bare, And cried, "Now mark how I do rip me: lo! How is Mohammed mangled: before me Walks Ali weeping, from the chin his face Cleft to the forelock; and the others all, Whom here thou seest, while they lived, did sow Scandal and schism, and therefore thus are rent." (136:1) Luther saw in the "Turk" a creation of the Devil. "The difference in belief is surely insufficient", writes the orientalist Fueck, "to explain the raging hatred which the Christian Middle Ages harboured against Muhammad. The reason for this hatred is rather to be found in all the bitterness, fear and misery which the Western world, threatened in its existence by this unexpected rival, felt against the man who, by his appearance, had set such a revolution in motion." For the thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment who were hostile to religion, Muhammad was a deceiver and his religion-- as Voltaire said-- "a web of charlatanism and stupidity". In his drama "Mahomet", he makes the prophet commit the most horrifying atrocities. That a camel-driver should cause a tumult and claim to have received an incomprehensible book, each page of which "makes reason shudder", is something which one "who is not a born Turk" could not defend, wrote the great scoffer who, to be sure, wrote in a similar way about Christ and Moses.
(136:2)
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