Muhammad, in a peaceful lull, said, “Let it be.”

I’ve often said that every time I open the Koran at random, looking for edification so to speak, I almost always find, after maybe a line or two about the wonderful paradise destined for the believers, an extended passage gleefully promising hideous tortures to the unbelievers. In my desultory method of Koran reading, I never seem to come upon the Meccan suras, in which Muhammad was telling his followers to tolerate non Muslims, I always come upon the Medinan suras, in which all non-Muslims are sub-humans deserving to have the skin flayed off the bodies and to be forced to drink scalding acid for eternity. However, below is a beautiful and uplifting passage in the Koran, which I found in William Muir’s Life of Mahomet (abridged edition, 1876, p. 128). It is from Sura 6, and deals with the period just before Muhammad and his followers left Mecca for Medina. I begin with Muir’s lead-in:

There was now a lull at Mecca. Mahomet despaired, by the simple influence of preaching and persuasion, of effecting further progress there. His eye was fixed upon Medina, and he waited patiently until succour should come from thence. Meanwhile, at home offensive measures were abandoned. Islam was for the moment no longer to be aggressive. And the Coreish, congratulating themselves that their enemy had tried his worst and now was harmless, relaxed their vigilance and opposition. For his new course of action, Mahomet, as usual, had divine authority:—

Follow that which hath been revealed unto thee by thy Lord:—there is no God but he:—and retire from the Idolators.
If God had so desired, they had not followed idolatry; and We have not made thee a keeper over them, neither are thou unto them a guardian.
And revile not them whom they invoke besides God, lest they revile God in enmity in lack of knowledge.
Thus have We rendered attractive unto every people their own doings; then unto the Lord
Shall be their return, and He shall declare unto them that which they have wrought.

Instead of forcing yourself on the idolators and trying to convert them, Allah is telling Muhammad to retire from them, to ignore them. All things are from God, and if people have false belief, God has allowed that too, and you’re not responsible for other people’s errors. Don’t attack their false gods, lest they attack the true God. Allah has made humanity such that all people naturally like and enjoy their own ways. Ultimately the truth will work out, and people will get the just consequences of their mistakes, but that is not your concern.

Imagine that the whole Koran offered wise and noble, or, at least, pacific, teachings like these, instead of being filled with commands for unending war against humanity—commands that, issued in Medina, supersede the peaceful and tolerant verses revealed earlier in Mecca. But of course if the Medinan suras had not been written, Islam would not have conquered Arabia and then half the world, and would not still be striving today, through deception, demographic infiltration, and terror, to subdue us all under the tyrannical sharia law.

You can read the above passage of Life of Mahomet at Google Books.

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Anthony Damato writes:

Interesting how tolerant Muhammad suddenly became when it seemed that his movement was about to be crushed.

This message from his god concerning his need for a strategic withdrawal from fire and brimstone preaching couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment.

This tactic is widely used throughout Islamic history in the form of truces, which according to Islamic jurisprudence cannot exceed a ten year period.

LA replies

But that’s what’s interesting and unusual here. Muir explains that the Koreish were leaving Muhammad alone at this point. While Muhammad’s peaceful teaching came in a moment of despair, as Muir says, he was not actually being attacked and thus was not under any immediate pressure to show himself as tolerant so as to get his enemies to leave him alone or drop their guard. In this regard, the passage seems unique.

RB writes:

You’ve touched on a contradiction that has perplexed many of us who have delved into Islam’s origins. It is, indeed, puzzling as to how the earnest, though perhaps annoying, Warner of Mecca metamorphosed into a bloody-minded and ruthless warlord. It is almost as if two different men went by the same name.

The modern Hindu sage Vivekananda had the following thought regarding this (Raja Yoga, New York, 1955).

The yogi says that there is a great danger in stumbling upon this state (the superconscious). In a good many cases there is the danger of the brain’s being deranged; and as a rule you will find that all those men, however great they were, who stumbled upon this superconscious state without understanding it groped in the dark and generally had, along with their knowledge, some quaint superstitions. They opened themselves to hallucinations. Mohammed claimed that the Angel Gabriel came to him in a cave one day and took him on the heavenly horse Harak to visit the heavens. But with all that, Mohammed spoke some wonderful truths. If you read the Koran, you will find the most wonderful truths mixed with superstitions. How will you explain it? The man was inspired, no doubt, but that inspiration was, as it were, stumbled upon. He was not a trained yogi and did not know the reason for what he was doing. Think of the good Mohammed did to the world and think of the great evil that has been done through his fanaticism! Think of the millions massacred through his teachings—mothers bereft of their children, children made orphans, whole countries destroyed, millions upon millions of people killed!

You have referred to Muhammad as a successful Hitler, and, indeed he might have turned out that way. But, unlike Hitler, Muhammad did not appear to steep himself in evil thoughts since childhood. In a sense Muhammad is an almost tragic figure; a man of great personal gifts and enormous spiritual energy who fell onto what some have termed the “left-hand path” or in more recent popular imagery the “dark side.” He may be a classic illustration of what Gurdjieff and Ouspensky term a “wrong crystallization.”

Unlike other great world teachers Muhammad appears to have succumbed to temptation. Thus, the devil taunts Jesus in an attempt to make him use his powers and offers him all of the kingdoms of the world. In the end Jesus must accept his death; a fate that he could easily have avoided. The temptation of worldly power, however, was too much for Muhammad. Similarly, Gautama sitting under the Bodhi tree was tempted by Mara the Evil One who paraded before him three voluptuous female divinities and their tempting female attendants. Mara follows with threats of death and destruction. Lastly, Mara offers Gautama immediate entrance into Nirvana. The Buddha withstood all of these temptations and Mara was banished. However, the temptations of sex and personal gratification were not ones that Muhammad was able to resist. Socrates, the great founder of our modern philosophical tradition refused the means of escape that was offered to him and, like Jesus, elected to accept his execution in affirmation of his principles. Muhammad’s principles, on the other hand, appeared to be rather more elastic.

LA replies:

I think there is something to what you’re saying, though I would not be so sympathetic to Muhammad as you are. I think he was a man who consciously chose the way of power, war, hatred, and self-aggrandizement. As always, I highly recommend William Muir’s great and comprehensive biography. Muir admires many things about Muhammad, he says that Muhammad had some kind of genuine revelation, but that Muhammad went bad, began manufacturing revelations to serve his personal convenience and so on. And certainly the evil that Muhammad embraced, the evil that he injected into the world in the form of a sacred call on his followers to wage ruthless war against all humanity to the end of time, is such a great evil that it is wrong, it is out of the question, to call his story “tragic.” If Muhammd is merely “tragic,” then there is no such thing as evil. (And let me remind readers that tragedy and evil are mutually exclusive concepts.)

As reader A. wrote to me tonight:

Thanks for sending those Koranic passages again. Every time I read them it makes my skin crawl. Muhammad was the most evil man in history by far. Stalin, Hitler, Mao—they were small fry. They killed a large number of people and they disappeared into the history books and their movements disappeared soon after. But that M man, he left behind a cancer that will keep killing people so long as there is mankind.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 04, 2008 12:58 PM | Send