The Love of the Prophet (PBUH) - Imam Suhaib Webb

Muslimah Media - The Firsts - Umm Ma'Baad

Peace be upon the Prophet - Nouman Ali Khan - Quran Weekly

The compassion of the Prophet towards those who abused him

Prophet Muhammad started the message of Islam in Arabia at a time when human rights had no meaning, might was right and the society was entrenched in paganism. In this environment Prophet Muhammad  taught a message of justice, peace, human rights, animal rights and even environmental rights as ordained by God, the One True Creator of all that is in the universe.

God has shown us in the character of Prophet Muhammad  the model of a companionate person. He treated every one, friends and foe, man and woman, young and old, with kindness and respect.

Even when the pagan Arabs reacted to the message of the Prophet with extreme hatred he showed love and kindness.

The following examples from the life of the Prophet show us how we should react when faced with hatred.

We can see one of the most patient and tolerant aspects of the Prophet's character in the incident of an old woman who made a habit of throwing trash in the way of the Holy Prophet Muhammad  whenever he passed by her house.

The story related about this incident, mentions a neighbor of the Prophet that tried her best to irritate him by throwing garbage in his way every day. One day, when he walked out of his home there was no garbage. This made the Prophet inquire about the old woman and he came to know that she was sick. The Prophet went to visit her and offer any assistance she might need. The old woman was extremely humbled and at the same time ashamed of her actions in light of the concern that the Prophet showed her.

By seeing the example of compassion of Prophet Muhammad , she became convinced that Islam must be a true religion that the Prophet was preaching. ¹

Another incident that is reported from the life of the Prophet is when the Prophet traveled to a neighboring town of Taif. 

In Taif he thought he might find people who might be respectable to the message of Almighty God. The people of Taif turned out to be as hateful as the people of Makkah. The elders of the town planned an organized campaign to ridicule the Prophet. To escalate their disapproval of the Prophet and prevent him from preaching Islam, they set a group of children and vagabonds behind him. They pestered him and threw stones at him. Tired, forsaken and wounded, he sought refuge in a nearby garden. It belonged to Atabah and Shaibah, two wealthy chiefs of Quraish.

They were both there when Prophet Muhammad  entered and sat under a distant tree. The Prophet raised his face towards heaven and prayed: "O Almighty! I raise unto you my complaint for my weakness, my helplessness, and for the ridicule to which I have been subjected. O Merciful! You are the Master of all oppressed people, You are my God! So to whom would You consign me? To the strangers who would ill-treat me, or to the enemies who have an upper hand over me? If whatever has befallen me is not because of Your wrath, then I fear not. No doubt, the field of Your security and care is wide enough for me. I seek refuge in Your light which illuminates darkness and straightens the affairs of this world and hereafter, that Your displeasure and wrath may not descend upon me. For the sake of Your pleasure, I remain pleased and resigned to my fate. No change in this world occurs without Your Will."

Atabah and Shaibah were watching. They sent for their servant named Adaas and gave him a plate full of grapes. "Take this to that man under the tree," they ordered. So he brought the grapes to Prophet Muhammad .

As the Prophet  picked the grapes he said: "Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahim" (In the Name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate). Adaas had never heard this before. He was impressed by it, because the Prophet was invoking mercy and compassion of Almighty in spite of all the hardship he was subjected to.

"Who are you?" Adaas asked. Muhammad  replied, "I am the Prophet of God. Where do you come from?"

The servant said: "I am Adaas, a Christian. I come from Nainava."

"Nainava? You come from a place where my brother Yunus bin Mati (Jonah son of Mati) lived," the Prophet  said. 

Adaas was surprised to hear the name.

"What do you know of Yunus? Here no one seems to know him. Even in Nainava there were hardly ten people who knew his father's name."

The Prophet  said: "Yes, I know him because just like me, he was a Prophet of Almighty God."

Adaas fell on his knees before the Prophet , kissed his hand and embraced him.

It is further reported that after the Prophet took refuge from the stone throwing mob, Angel Jibrael came to the Prophet and asked him if he so wished Jibrael would give the command to bury the city between two mountains. Although the prophet  had suffered a great deal at the hands of these people, he replied that he did not wish destruction for the people of Taif because maybe their offspring would proclaim the religion of truth. ²

The Islamic scholar Imam Ghazali (1058 - 1111 C.E.) summarizes the information he collected in the hadith regarding our Prophet's compassionate attitude to all those around him as follows:

"He was far from knowing anger and quickly showed compassion for things. He was the most loving of men toward other people. He was the most auspicious of men and did the most good to others, and the most useful and beneficial to others." ³

The Quran says that Prophet was sent as mercy to humankind. If we are to honor the Prophet , it will be by adopting the sublime character of our Prophet and not through the emotions of anger and hate.

1. Abdul Wahid Hamid, (2004) Islam the Natural Way. UK: Muslim Education and Literary Services.

2. Al-Bukhari and Muslim

3. (Imam Ghazali, Ihya'u Ulumiddin, Vol. 2)

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Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

The history of a religious tradition is a continuous dialogue between a transcendent reality and current events in the mundane sphere. The faithful scrutinize the sacred past, looking for lessons that speak directly to the conditions of their lives. Most religions have a figurehead, an individual who expresses the ideals of the faith in human form. In contemplating the serenity of the Buddha, Buddhists see the supreme reality of Nirvana to which each of them aspires; in Jesus, Christians glimpse the divine presence as a force for goodness and compassion in the world. These paradigmatic personalities shed light on the often dark conditions in which. most of us seek salvation in our flawed world. They tell us what a human being can be. 

Muslims have always understood this. Their scripture, Qur'an, gave them a mission: to create a just and decent society, in which all members were treated with respect. The political well being of the Muslim community was, and is, a matter of supreme importance. Like any religious ideal, it is almost insuperably difficult to fulfill, but after each failure, Muslims have tried to get up and begin again. Many Islamic rituals, philosophies, doctrines, sacred texts, and shrines are the result of frequently anguished and self-critical contemplation of the political events of Islamic society. 

The life of the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632 CE) was as crucial to the unfolding Islamic ideal as it is today. His career revealed the inscrutable God's activity in the world, and illustrated the perfect surrender (in Arabic, the word for "surrender" is islam) that every human being should make to the divine. Beginning during the Prophet's lifetime, Muslims had to strive to understand the meaning of his life and apply it to their own. A little more than a hundred years after Muhammad's death, as Islam continued to spread to new territories and gain converts, Muslim scholars began to compile the great collections of Muhammad's sayings (ahadith) and customary practice (sunnah), which would form the basis of Muslim law. The sunnah taught Muslims to imitate the way Muhammad spoke, ate, loved, washed, and worshipped, so that in the smallest details of their daily existence, they reproduced his life on earth in the hope that  they would acquire his internal disposition of total surrender to God. 

At about the same time, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the first Muslim historians began to write about the life of the Prophet Muhammad: Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d. 767); Muhammad ibn 'Umar al-Waqidi (d. c. 820); Muhammad ibn Sa'd (d. 845); and Abu Jarir at-Tabari (d. 923). These historians were not simply relying on their own memories and impressions, but were attempting a serious historical reconstruction. They included earlier documents in their narratives, traced oral traditions back to their original source, and, though they revered Muhammad as a man of God, they were not entirely uncritical. Largely as a result of their efforts, we know more about Muhammad than about nearly any other founder of a major religious tradition. These early sources are indispensable to any biographer of the Prophet. 

The work of Muhammad's first biographers would probably not satisfy a modern historian. They were men of their time and often included stories of a miraculous and legendary nature that we would interpret differently today. But they were aware of the complexity of their material. They did not promote one theory or interpretation of events at the expense of others. Sometimes they put two quite different versions of an incident side by side, and gave equal weight to each account, so that readers could make up their own minds. They did not always agree with the traditions they included, but were trying to tell the story of their Prophet as honestly and truthfully as they could. There are lacunae in their accounts. We know practically nothing about Muhammad's early life before he began to receive what he believed were revelations from God at the age of forty. Inevitably, pious legends developed about Muhammad's birth, childhood, and youth, but these clearly have symbolic rather than historical value.

There is also very little material about Muhammad's early political career in Mecca. At that time, he was a relatively obscure figure, and nobody thought it worthwhile to make note of his activities. Our main source of information is the scripture that he brought' to the Arabs. For some twenty-three years, from about 610 to his death in 632, Muhammad claimed that he was the recipient of direct messages from God, which were collected into the text that became known as the Qur'an. It does not contain a straightforward account of Muhammad's life, of course, but came to the Prophet piecemeal, line by line, verse by verse, chapter by chapter. Sometimes the revelations dealt with a particular situation in Mecca or Medina. In the Qur'an, God answered Muhammad's critics; he reviewed their arguments; he explained the deeper significance of a battle or a conflict within the community. As each new set of verses was revealed to Muhammad, the Muslims learned it by heart, and those who were literate wrote it down. The first official compilation of the Qur'an was made in about 650, twenty years after Muhammad's death, and achieved canonical status.

The Qur'an is the holy word of God, and its authority remains absolute. But Muslims know that it is not always easy to interpret.  Its laws were designed for a small community, but a century after their Prophet's death, Muslims ruled a vast empire, stretching from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees. Their circumstances were entirely different from those of the Prophet and the first Muslims, and Islam had to change and adapt. The first essays in Muslim history were written to address current perplexities. How could Muslims apply the Prophet's insights and practice to their own times? When the early biographers told the story of his life, they tried to explain some of the passages in the Qur'an by reproducing the historical context in which these particular revelations had come down to Muhammad. By understanding what had prompted a particular Qur'anic teaching, they could relate it to their own situation by means of a disciplined process of analogy. The historians and thinkers of the time believed that learning about the Prophet's struggles to make the word of God audible in the seventh century would help them to preserve his spirit in their own. From the very start, writing about the Prophet Muhammad was never a wholly antiquarian pursuit. The process continues today. Some Muslim fundamentalists have based their militant ideology on the life of Muhammad; Muslim extremists believe that he would have condoned and admired their atrocities. Other Muslims are appalled by these claims, and point to the extraordinary pluralism of the Qur'an, which condemns aggression and sees all rightly guided religions as deriving from the one God. We have a long history of Islamophobia in Western culture that dates back to the time of the Crusades. In the twelfth century, Christian monks in Europe insisted that Islam was a violent religion of the sword, and that Muhammad was a charlatan who imposed his religion on a reluctant world by force of arms; they called him a lecher and a sexual pervert. This distorted version of the Prophet's life became one of the received ideas of the West, and Western people have always found it difficult to see Muhammad in a more objective light. Since the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, members of the Christian Right in the United States and some sectors of the Western media have continued this tradition of hostility, claiming that Muhammad was irredeemably addicted to war. Some have gone so far as to claim that he was a terrorist and a pedophile. 

We can no longer afford to indulge this type of bigotry, because it is a gift to extremists who can use such statements to "prove" that the Western world is indeed engaged on a new crusade against the Islamic world. Muhammad was not a man of violence. We must approach his life in a balanced way, in order to appreciate his considerable achievements. To cultivate an inaccurate prejudice damages the tolerance, liberality, and compassion that are supposed to characterize Western culture. 

Strangely, events that took place in seventh-century Arabia have much to teach us about the events of our time and their underlying significance-far more, in fact, than the facile sound bites of politicians. Muhammad was not trying to impose religious orthodoxy- he was not much interested in metaphysics-but to change people's hearts and minds. He called the prevailing spirit of his time jahiliyyah. Muslims usually understand this to mean the "Time of Ignorance," that is, the pre-Islamic period in Arabia. But, as recent research shows, Muhammad used the term jahiliyyah to refer not to an historical era but to a state of mind that caused violence and terror in seventh-century Arabia. Jahiliyyah, I would argue, is also much in evidence in the West today as well as in the Muslim world. 

Paradoxically, Muhammad became a timeless personality because he was so rooted in his own period. We cannot understand his achievement unless we appreciate what he was up against. In order to see what he can contribute to our own predicament, we must enter the tragic world that made him a prophet nearly fourteen hundred years ago, on a lonely mountain top just outside the holy city of Mecca.

Excepted from "Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time" by Karen Armstrong.

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