|
However, at that time, there were already thinkers who did more justice to Muhammad. Even if they refused to call him a prophet, they saw in him one of the greatest men who had ever lived. He is described as a wise and enlightened law-giver who created a sensible religion to replace the doubtful dogmas of the Jewish and Christian Faiths. Savary saw in Muhammad's religion a universal teaching which only contains what is reasonable: the belief in on God, in the rewarding of virtue and the punishment of crime. That Muhammad made his appearance as "Messenger of God" seemed to him to be a pious fraud dictated by reasons of prudence. The nineteenth-century Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, too, opposed the interpretation according to which Muhammad was an impostor and in the last century the historian Heinrich Leo expressed the following opinion: "But those who call a man like Muhammad a deceiver have a very paltry inner experience and poor understanding. They know nothing of that power of the spirit which motivates communities, and raises the leader of true communities to heights which have been inaccessible at all times to the common mind." (137:1) Whereas representatives of Christian orthodoxy still describe Muhammad as a "liar-prophet" and the religion founded by him as an "abortion from hell" and "opium of the people" a more objective historical outlook, which considers the prophet of Arabia in the light of and with the methods of general religious history, does him more justice. His uprightness, the self-denial with which he struggled to carry out his mission in the face of a hostile world, his genuine conviction that he was an instrument in the hand of the Almighty, the depth of his belief are fully recognized today: "A man of unusual quality, a fearless and selfless champion of a great Cause who led his people out of the darkness of barbarism to the light of civilization and of higher moral consciousness"; this is what the Roman orientalist Francesco Gabrieli writes about him.
(137:2)
|