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Back to the Forum 2006
Archives There has been a lot of noise from the arab world recently about some alleged insults against their prophet Mohammed. Some guy in Europe did some cartoons about this guy Mohammed who has been dead for several centuries. He kicked off in ad-632. It seems this prophet was so great there is some kind of religious law about creating likenesses of him. Americans and other Westerners have some difficulty getting a handle on this idea. We are quite used to making and seeing cartoons and jokes about everything and everybody. To us, nothing is immune, nothing is sacred. Hey, it's the way we are. Democracy, freedom of speech, and all of that, don't you know. I would like to discuss this issue of insulting Mohammed, but before I do, I think we need to look at some definitions and details. First off, Islam is a religious philosophy created and taught by the prophet Mohammed. A Muslim is one who believes in the Islamic religion and in the prophet Mohammed. Most of these folks are Arabs. So, a Muslim is much like a Christian with the same God, but a different second banana and a different bible. Christians use one or another version of the Christian bible while Muslims follow the teachings of the Koran. The Koran is, in theory, the revealed word of God. This was revealed to Mohammed by God speaking through the angel Gabriel. Before you decide that is far fetched, consider how your own bible came to be. For example, do you know that the gospels were recorded several centuries after the deaths of the principals? That's true. The Gospel according to Matthew was not written by Matthew. It was recorded decades after his death. It is really nothing more then hearsay evidence. The same is true of the other three gospels Regardless of the alleged veracity, in God's world we have at least three books I know about that are the revealed word of God. These are the Koran, the Torah, and the Christian bible. There are probably more and I'm sure there are more in th East. The Ramayana and the Upanishads are two. The lord works in mysterious ways, I guess. It is important to make clear that the three religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are really the same religion with the same God. It is only the bit players under God who are different. Mohammed is the top guy, next to God, in Islam and what he told his followers is divine law to the true believer Muslims. Christians, of course, have Jesus as the intermediary who intercedes for them with the big guy in the sky. So far as I know, the Jews don't have a go-between. They just go heads up with the top guy. Currently America is engaged in an undeclared war with much of the Arab world. Although Americans claim this to be a war on terrorism, much of the Arab world sees it as a war by Christians and Jews against Islam and Muslims. There is some history to this that goes way back to before the birth of Jesus. In fact, we could go back to Noah and the great flood. That was the time, according to Hebrew scriptures, that the human race started over. Things had got to such a state that God sent the great flood to wipe out humanity except for a favored few. These few were Noah and his sons. One of the sons was a guy named Shem. Again, according to scriptures, Shem was the patriarch of the entire Semite race. It seems this ancestry includes almost all of the dwellers of the Arabian peninsula around 2500 BC. Included, one way or another, are the Arabs, Akkadians, Assyrians, Canaanites, and Hebrews. That's a big gang of people. Well, out of this big mess the Hebrews became big players by moving out of Mesopotamia (Iraq) and into Palestine. Along the way, the illegitimate son of Abraham, Ishmael was born then kicked out of the tent when Isaac, the legitimate son, was born. Well, Isaac became the patriarch of the 12 tribes of Israel while Ishmael became the patriarch for the twelve Arab tribes. From this kind of history, or mythology if you prefer, we can see that the Hebrews and the arabs might not be the best of friends. Since Christianity came out of the Hebrew tradition, this enmity gets rather naturally extended to Christians, especially in the eyes of the so-called extreme element of Islam. It seems that was also the attitude of Mohammed. Even a spot reading of the Torah reveals a rather scathing contempt for the Christians and the Jews. It is not that he had no exposure to the different religious philosophies of his time. Before he became enlightened, Mohammed worked the caravan trade routes as a camel driver. We can be sure he encountered Christianity, Judaism, and of course the paganism of the Arabs. Like may folks who are exposed to many different mythologies, he probably began to notice the dichotomies, not only between, but within the mythologies. Given that, It is not improbable that he decided he could do a better job of laying it all out. He is not the only man in history who did that. So, however the details came about, Mohammed ended up in a cave when he was about 40 when who should show up but Gabriel. That was when God spoke through Gabriel to lay it all out for Mohammed, the chosen prophet. Mohammed had no choice but to take it all in, remember it, and begin to teach it. He went to Mecca and started to teach. Unlike Jesus, Mohammed at first ran a covert operation to avoid what happened to JC. Once he figured he had enough followers he came out of the closet and began teaching openly. That turned out to be premature. The pagan religious bigshots got annoyed with him. They began to persecute his followers, many of whom fled to Ethiopia. Mohammed took the discretionary path and left town with about 300 of his followers. It is not clear if he went to Jerusalem or not, but he did end up in Medina, If course you realize, this means war. A civil war ensued in the Arab world with Mohammed on one side and the Arab Pagans on the other. There were a few battles and a lot of Meccans were killed off. Thee were also some Jews butchered at a place called Qurayza where 800 people were beheaded according to the records. There was another massacre of Jews at a place called Khaybar. The reason for this is not clear, but it seems Mohammed had simply changed his mind. Until then he had been making overtures to the Jews to gain recognition as a prophet. It is possible he finally realized that was not likely to happen. That realization precipitate the break and what we can call the big turn around. In the beginning, he had his followers facing Jerusalem when they prayed. Then, if we want to believe it, he had a revelation and from then on the Muslims faced Mecca in prayer. How bout that? After a great deal of struggle Mohammed won out and returned
to Mecca in triumph. From then on, he began propagating Islam
throughout the Arab world. The message was simple. "There
is no god but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger." The
philosophy took and spread, not only throughout the Arab world,
but much of Africa, Indonesia, an Central Asia. Worldwide there
are about 1 billion Muslims. So, when we poke fun at Mohammed,
we'd best be prepared to have about a billion people ticked off
at us. That's a lot of enemies in any language. So much for Mohammed.
I'‘ll get to the insult in another essay.
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