UNDERSTANDING THE HUMANITY OF PROPHET MUHAMMAD AND JESUS: A WESTERN PEACEBUILDING PHASE TOWARDS ISLAM.

• Author: Al-Olaqi, Fahd Mohammed Taleb Saeed

1. Introduction

   The peacebuilders have positive understanding and constructive arguments about Islam and Messenger Muhammad (Peace and Blessing Upon Him) (570-633). One of the widespread arguments that Muhammad (PBUH) was a righteous person who donated his lifetime to serve the pagans of the Arabian Peninsula by appealing Prophethood. This opinion is apparently natural but censoriously oversees his generation triumphs and his power on the antiquity of human race. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish writer and Nobel laureate, had studied Prophet Muhammad as an amazing man, and he had found him away from provoking Jesus the Christ. He stated that the Prophet must be so-called 'the Saviour of Humanity'. (1) Uundoubtedly Armstrong has formed an image of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) that is obviously more compassionate and less prejudiced than any other non-Muslim researcher did. She succeeds to expose his compassionate and subtle character. For instance, Karen Armstrong's Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1992) seems a tremendous resource to study the lifespan and traditions of Muhammad (PBUH) without the usual Western bias.

   The Western library nowadays contains authentic Islamic information. Making a straightforward image of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is part of facts. Therefore, Craig Considine and Karen Armstrong became controversial social commentators since they stand for Western prejudice against Prophet Muhammad. Considine is the first Western writer who used Hadiths from authentic Sunni sources. The return to reason, freedom, and tolerance perspective, Christians and Muslims can reach to a peace ground in it to live together in harmony. For non-Muslims, Craig Considine's Writings is a guide to understand Muhammad and Islam.

   Islam is free of the blasphemy. Islam means 'submission to God'. The term 'Muslim' means 'submitted' to the Deity, the Creator. The Qur'an reports this meaning that "It was appropriate to apply it to Abraham, who along with his son whom God had told him to sacrifice' surrendered himself (to God)" (The Glorious Qur'an, 37: 103). Islam is the corresponding verbal noun with the meaning 'surrender' (to God) and is a good name for a religion. Islam is the trust in only One Divinity, whose title is Allah, 'God, the Creator'. Islam has the same revelation assumed to all the prophets, starting from Adam to Noah passing to Abraham and his offspring Moses and Jesus, and lastly to Muhammad, the last messenger (Peace and Blessings be Upon Them). They all carried the similar communication: worship truly and only Allah the Maker.

   Western anti-Muhammad is an exclusively aggressive and biased move. Evan gelic terms to tab Muslims and Islam like Mohammedans and Mohammedanism are pejorative but escaped the modern Western diction. Likewise, for many centuries Islam is terrorism in the West. Since the seventh century, the Western religious institutions had proposed Islam and its Messenger Muhammad (PBUH) as a theological challenge. Christian authors slanted the reputation of the Prophet with offensive titles such as anti-Christ, impostor, and devil. Because of conversion to Islam, Norman Daniel states that for past centuries "Christians have defended their faith in the Trinity and Incarnation from Muslim attack; and they have in turn at tacked Islam for accepting the claim of Muhammad to be the vehicle of Revelation" (Daniel 1993: 275). William Watt finds out the same judgments and remarks that "none of the great figures of history is so poorly appreciated in the West as Muhammad" (Watt 1953: 52).

   The writings of the greatest dominant Western authors such as Norman Daniel, Thomas Walker Arnold, William Watt and William Muir, provide reliable knowledge for bibliophiles which made non-Muslims and Muslims to come together against all methods of misrepresentation, and to compete against all manifestations of errors along with academic investigations to admit a new-fangled methodology as a significant phase to an actual understanding the Prophethood of Muhammad (PBUH). A critical evaluation of the perception of the image of Islam is in the Western discourse. Craig Considine works on his Christian audience to teach them about Christian-Muslim relations. The humanity of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is part of Jesus message. It is a modest challenge to bring into light the information about Islam with an investigation to the accounts of Western travellers. It is an examination of the reasons of incessant misinterpretation of Western writers in their portrayal of the image of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). For example, Jack D'Amico has detected:

   The problem of containing Islam, politically and intellectually, was made more difficult by those respects in which Islamic culture was actually superior. ... A more potent and seductive foe, Islam had to be represented as a dangerous distortion of the true Church, a parody of civilization, its Muhammad a false prophet, its Jihad a perversion of the Crusade, its book, the Koran, a collec tion of errors and lies that mocked the Bible (Vitkus 1999: 271). This negative insincerity brands the expansion of Islam as a divine religion unconceivable. The European historian Lamartine writes positively about Muhammad (PBUH) as a "Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conque ror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images; the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire, that is Muhammad. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask, is there any man greater than he?" (Lamartine 1854: 276-277). Likewise, Gibbon and Ocklay's History of the Saracen Empire (1870), remark on the Prophet saying, "I believe in One God and Mahomet the Apostle of God' is the simple and invariable profession of Islam. The intellectual image of the Deity has never been degraded by any visible idol; the honours of the prophet have never transgressed the measure of human virtue, and his living precepts have restrained the gratitude of his disciples within the bounds of reason and religion." (Gibbon and Ocklay 1870: 54).

2. Modern West admired Prophet Muhammad

   Prophet Muhammad has been appreciated in modern history. He is one, if not for many the first of the great human beings who changed the world. Human history has never acknowledged such a comprehensive conversion of a nation or a country before and ever since. For the past fourteen centuries, some high rank scholars admired Islam. There are many scholars, truth-seekers, researchers, professors, and each a radiant star in our knowledgeable flora and fauna, have a respect and admiration to the human mission of Prophet Muhammad compared to Jesus Christ. The modern Western academic awareness such as the enlightening writings of Robert Burton's Pilgrimage to Meccah and Madina (1893), John Byng Wavell's A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca (1918), and Watt's Muhammad's Mecca (1953) and Muhammad's Medina (1964) established a novel atmosphere in on behalf of Muhammad as a Prophet for human beings. They enlightened the West from the outdated farfetched views and the principal radical and sacred prejudice against Muhammad. They sought objective and accurate knowledge and scholarly works.

   Modern writers such as Craig Considine and Karen Armstrong think it is impossible to argue that Muslims have been since Muhammad's death, remain in error. Therefore, their understanding of Islam and its prophet improves the Western presentation of Muhammad (PBUH) as a...