Moving on to the 94th surah, the next chronologically, Maududi explains: "No sooner had Muhammad started preaching Islam than the same society which had esteemed him, turned hostile. The relatives and friends, clansmen and neighbors, who treated him with respect, began to shower him with abuse. No one in Mecca was prepared to listen to him; he was ridiculed and mocked in the street, so the initial stage was very discouraging. That is why surah 94 was sent down to console him." Before we dive into the surah I'd like to share a Hadith from Ibn Ishaq to demonstrate how reluctant Muhammad was to discuss the relationship he had formed with his demonic spirit. Ishaq:117 "Three years elapsed from the time that Muhammad concealed his state until Allah commanded him to publish his religion according to information that has reached me. 'Proclaim what you have been ordered and turn away from the polytheists.' [Qur'an 15:94] 'Warn your family, your nearest relations.' [Qur'an 26:214] When these words came down to the Apostle he said, 'Allah has ordered me to warn my family and the task is beyond my strength. When I make my message known to them I will meet with great unpleasantness so I have kept silent. But Gabriel has told me that if I do not do as ordered my Lord will punish me.'" This Hadith is injurious to Islam. The surahs it references (15 and 26) were not among the first fifty revealed, so the timing is impossible. Further, Khadija was the first Muslim and Ali was the third. Muhammad's only other family members were daughters, and in Islam, they don't count. So what "great unpleasantness" was he afraid of? Moreover, imagine a revelation so feeble, the prophet has to be threatened to deliver it. Muslims deserve something better than this. Qur'an 94:1 "Have We not opened up your chest and removed your burden which left you hopeless?" Muhammad claimed that the Sharh Sadr occurred on three occurred on three occasions. According to Islamic theory, his chest was cut open by the angels; his heart was removed, washed, and then reinserted. Tabari VI:75 "'Messenger, how did you first know with absolute certainty that you were a prophet.' He replied, 'Two angels came to me while I was somewhere in Mecca.... One angel said, "Open his breast and take out his heart." He opened my chest and heart, removing the pollution of Satan and a clot of blood, and threw them away. Then one said, "Wash his breast as you would a receptacle." He summoned the Sakinah , which looked like the face of a white cat, and it was placed in my heart. Then one said, "Sew up his breast." So they sewed up my chest and placed the seal between my shoulders.'" While none of this occurred, Islam doesn't escape the operation unscathed. If God wished to cleanse a man's spirit of sin, he wouldn't do open heart surgery. Qur'an 94:4 "We have exalted your fame, raising high the esteem in which you are held." While I'm convinced that Islam was all about exalting Muhammad, this verse should be troubling for Muslims. First, theirs was the only egotistical prophet. Second, every Qur'anic verse revealed during this period says Muhammad was ridiculed, mocked, and tormented by his neighbors. Either god hasn't been attentive and doesn't know what's going on, or he has a rather demented view of esteem. But Muslims miss the foolishness simply because the first surahs revealed are at the end of the book. And by the end of Muhammad's life, he had plundered his way to prosperity. The "Opening Up" surah ends saying: Qur'an 94:5 "With every difficulty, there is relief. Therefore, when you are free from whatever you're doing, make your Lord your exclusive object." In context, this is absurd. Muhammad had nothing else to do. In fact, he had made a career of ditching responsibility. As soon as he became an adult he married money and started hanging out in caves. The self-proclaimed prophet reluctantly began to recite dribs and drabs of the Qur'an publicly. But while the poetry may have sounded decent, the message was indecent. Collectively, almost universally, the people of Mecca became outraged. According to the Qur'an, Muhammad's friends called him: a "liar" and a "magician" They accused him of being "possessed by devils." His kin called him an "insane plagiarizing poet." He was characterized a "sorcerer," "lunatic," "farfetched forger," "fool," and "specious pretender." I was not the first to see Muhammad as a money-grubbing, self-aggrandizing, plagiarizing fraud. His own clan, his own family, his contemporaries, saw right through his act. "The unbelievers said: 'He is a deceiving sorcerer, turning many gods into one deity.'" "There must be a motive behind the Qur'an. It is surely a fabrication." "They laugh at the Qur'an and say, 'Should we abandon our gods for the sake of an insane poet?'" "Allah has not sent down anything. You are only speaking lies." "When Our clear revelations are read out to them, they say, 'This is nothing but a fabricated lie. This is nothing but pure sorcery.'" "What sort of Prophet is this? Why was no angel sent to him?" Then, from surah 21: "Yet they say: 'These are only confused dreams. He has invented them. Let him therefore bring a miracle to us as the earlier prophets did.'" Muhammad was called a fraud more than a hundred times in the Qur'an. At least twenty times, his clan accused him of being the only prophet who couldn't do a miracle. In the 11th surah: "They say of the Prophet, 'He has forged the Qur'an.'" From the 10th: "We find you full of folly and a liar to boot." Then in the 9th we see the completed equation: "There are some among them who talk ill of the Prophet. For those who offend Allah's Apostle there is a painful punishment. Have they not realized that anyone who opposes Allah and His Prophet will abide in hell forever?" Before we turn the page on Muhammad's opening Qur'anic salvo I'd like to share my perspective on Islam's beginnings. I believe the Hadith and Qur'an. I believe Muhammad was running away from responsibility, as they claim. Solitude became dear to him. He was searching for God in all the wrong places. As a result, he encountered a demon. It terrified him, just as it would have you or me. Then it possessed him. Panicked, he ran home and confessed, but his social-climbing wife would have none of it. Khadija said that the demonic spirit was Allah. Ironically, she may have been right. She founded Islam by bequeathing the family business, the Ka'aba Inc., Qusayy's religious scam, to her recluse husband and employee. "The Lord" became Muhammad's ambition. The Qur'an became a tool, one used to claim his prize. God was created in Muhammad's image. He was tortured, illiterate, covetous, delusional, and demented. |
