Muhammad Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===European appreciation=== <!------------ PLEASE NOTE: The consensus to include images of Muhammad emerged after extensive months-long discussions and efforts on both sides to balance multiple competing interests. Please do not remove or reposition these images because you feel they are against your religion. Please do not add more images or reposition the current ones to prove a point. To avoid pointless revert-warring, blocking and page protection, please discuss any prospective changes on the talk page. Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia. -------------> <div class="depiction"> [[File:La.Vie.de.Mahomet.jpg|thumb|upright|Muhammad in ''La vie de Mahomet'' by M. Prideaux (1699). He holds a sword and a crescent while trampling on a [[globe]], a [[Christian cross|cross]], and the [[Ten Commandments]].]] </div> [[Guillaume Postel]] was among the first to present a more positive view of Muhammad when he argued that Muhammad should be esteemed by Christians as a valid prophet.{{sfn|Buhl|Welch|1993}}<ref>{{Cite book |publisher=[[Prometheus Books]] |isbn=978-1-61592-020-4 |last=Warraq |first=Ibn |title=Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism |date=2007 |page=147 |quote=Indeed, [Postel's] greater tolerance for other religions was much in evidence in Πανθενωδια: ''compostio omnium dissidiorum'', where, astonishingly for the sixteenth century, he argued that Muhammad ought to be esteemed even in Christendom as a genuine prophet.}}</ref> [[Gottfried Leibniz]] praised Muhammad because "he did not deviate from the [[natural religion]]".{{sfn|Buhl|Welch|1993}} [[Henri de Boulainvilliers]], in his ''Vie de Mahomed'' which was published posthumously in 1730, described Muhammad as a gifted political leader and a just lawmaker.{{sfn|Buhl|Welch|1993}} He presents him as a divinely inspired messenger whom God employed to confound the bickering Oriental Christians, to liberate the Orient from the despotic rule of the [[Byzantine Empire|Romans]] and [[Sasanian Empire|Persians]], and to spread the knowledge of the unity of God from India to Spain.{{sfn|Brockopp|2010|p=240–2}} Voltaire had a mixed opinion on Muhammad: in his play ''[[Mahomet (play)|Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète]]'' he vilifies Muhammad as a symbol of fanaticism, and in an essay in 1748 he calls him "a sublime and hearty charlatan". But in Voltaire's historical survey ''Essai sur les mœurs'', he presents Mohammed as a legislator and conqueror and calls him an "enthusiast".{{sfn|Brockopp|2010|p=240–2}} [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]], in his ''[[The Social Contract|Social Contract]]'' (1762), "brushing aside hostile legends of Muhammad as a trickster and impostor, presents him as a sage legislator who wisely fused religious and political powers".{{sfn|Brockopp|2010|p=240–2}} [[Claude-Emmanuel de Pastoret|Emmanuel Pastoret]] published in 1787 his ''Zoroaster, Confucius and Muhammad'', in which he presents the lives of these three "great men", "the greatest legislators of the universe", and compares their careers as religious reformers and lawgivers. He rejects the common view that Muhammad is an impostor and argues that the Quran proffers "the most sublime truths of cult and morals"; it defines the unity of God with an "admirable concision". Pastoret writes that the common accusations of his immorality are unfounded: on the contrary, his law enjoins sobriety, generosity, and compassion on his followers: the "legislator of Arabia" was "a great man".{{sfn|Brockopp|2010|p=240–2}} [[Napoleon Bonaparte]] admired Muhammad and Islam,<ref>[https://archive.org/stream/talkofnapoleonat007678mbp#page/n321/mode/2up ''Talk Of Napoleon At St. Helena''] (1903), pp. 279–80.</ref> and described him as a model lawmaker and conqueror.{{sfn|Brockopp|2010|p=244}}<ref>{{cite book |last=Younos |first=Farid |title=Islamic Culture |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NUEaAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT31 |series=Cambridge Companions to Religion |date=2010 |publisher=AuthorHouse |page=15 |isbn=978-1-4918-2344-6}}</ref> [[Thomas Carlyle]] in his book ''[[On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History]]'' (1841) describes "Mahomet" as "A silent great soul; he was one of those who cannot ''but'' be in earnest".<ref>{{cite book |first=Thomas |last=Carlyle |date=1841 |title=On heroes, hero worship and the heroic in history |url=https://archive.org/details/onheroesherowor08carlgoog |page=[https://archive.org/details/onheroesherowor08carlgoog/page/n95 87] |publisher=James Fraser |place=London}}</ref> Carlyle's interpretation has been widely cited by Muslim scholars as a demonstration that Western scholarship validates Muhammad's status as a great man in history.<ref>{{cite book |author=Kecia Ali |title=The Lives of Muhammad |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-oWYBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA48 |date=2014 |publisher=Harvard UP |page=48 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150904001211/https://books.google.com/books?id=-oWYBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA48 |archive-date=4 September 2015 |isbn=978-0-674-74448-6 }}</ref> [[Ian Almond]] says that [[German Romantic]] writers generally held positive views of Muhammad: "[[Goethe]]'s 'extraordinary' poet-prophet, [[Johann Gottfried Herder|Herder]]'s nation builder (...) [[Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel|Schlegel]]'s admiration for Islam as an aesthetic product, enviably authentic, radiantly holistic, played such a central role in his view of Mohammed as an exemplary world-fashioner that he even used it as a scale of judgement for the classical (the dithyramb, we are told, has to radiate pure beauty if it is to resemble 'a Koran of poetry')".<ref>Ian Almond, ''History of Islam in German Thought: From Leibniz to Nietzsche'', Routledge (2009), p. 93.</ref> After quoting [[Heinrich Heine]], who said in a letter to some friend that "I must admit that you, the great prophet of Mecca, are the greatest poet and that your Quran... will not easily escape my memory", [[John V. Tolan|John Tolan]] goes on to show how Jews in Europe in particular held more nuanced views about Muhammad and Islam, being an [[ethnoreligious]] minority feeling discriminated, they specifically lauded [[Al-Andalus]], and thus, "writing about Islam was for Jews a way of indulging in a fantasy world, far from the persecution and [[pogroms]] of nineteenth-century Europe, where Jews could live in harmony with their non-Jewish neighbors".<ref>Tolan, John. "The Prophet Muhammad: A Model of Monotheistic Reform for Nineteenth-Century Ashkenaz." ''Common Knowledge'', vol. 24 no. 2, 2018, pp. 256–279.</ref> Recent writers such as [[William Montgomery Watt]] and [[Richard Bell (Arabist)|Richard Bell]] dismiss the idea that Muhammad deliberately deceived his followers, arguing that Muhammad "was absolutely sincere and acted in complete good faith"<ref>Watt, Bell (1995) p. 18.</ref> and Muhammad's readiness to endure hardship for his cause, with what seemed to be no rational basis for hope, shows his sincerity.{{sfn|Watt|1974|p=232}} Watt, however, says that sincerity does not directly imply correctness: in contemporary terms, Muhammad might have mistaken his subconscious for divine revelation.{{sfn|Watt|1974|p=17}} Watt and [[Bernard Lewis]] argue that viewing Muhammad as a self-seeking impostor makes it impossible to understand Islam's development.<ref>Watt, ''The Cambridge History of Islam'', p. 37.</ref><ref>Lewis (1993), p. 45.</ref> [[Alford T. Welch]] holds that Muhammad was able to be so influential and successful because of his firm belief in his vocation.{{sfn|Buhl|Welch|1993}} Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page