Prophet Muhammad Short Quotes

In ten short years since the hijrah, Muhammad had irrevocably changed the political and spiritual landscape of Arabia.

At the end of my first attempt to write a biography of Muhammad, I quoted the prescient words of the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Writing in the mid-twentieth century shortly before the Suez Crisis, he observed that a healthy, functioning Islam had for centuries helped Muslims cultivate decent values which we in the West share, because they spring from a common tradition. Some Muslims have problems with Western modernity. They have turned against the cultures of the People of the Book, and have even begun to Islamize their new hatred of these sister faiths, which were so powerfully endorsed by the Qur’an. Cantwell Smith argued that if they are to meet the challenge of the day, Muslims must learn to understand our Western traditions and institutions, because they are not going to disappear. If Islamic societies did not do this, he maintained, they would fail the test of the twentieth century. But he pointed out that Western people also have a problem: “an inability to recognize that they share the planet not with inferiors but with equals.”   Unless

Muhammad’s numerous wives have occasioned a good deal of prurient interest in the West, but it would be a mistake to imagine the Prophet basking decadently in sensual delight, like some of the later Islamic rulers. In Mecca, Muhammad had remained monogamous, married only to Khadija, even though polygamy was common in Arabia. Khadija was a good deal older than he, but bore him at least six children, of whom only four daughters survived. In Medina, Muhammad became a great sayyid (chief), and was expected to have a large harem, but most of these marriages were politically motivated.

Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert to the religion of the Quran, but Muslims, pagans and Jews all belonged to one ummah, could not attack one another, and vowed to give each other protection. News of this extraordinary new ‘supertribe’ spread, and though at the outset nobody thought that it had a chance of survival, it proved to be an inspiration that would bring peace to Arabia before the death of the Prophet in 632, just ten years after the hijrah.

The violent secularism of al-Nasser had led Qutb to espouse a form of Islam that distorted both the message of the Quran and the Prophet’s life. Qutb told Muslims to model themselves on Muhammad: to separate themselves from mainstream society (as Muhammad had made the hijrah from Mecca to Medina), and then engage in a violent jihad. But Muhammad had in fact finally achieved victory by an ingenious policy of non-violence; the Quran adamantly opposed force and coercion in religious matters, and its vision—far from preaching exclusion and separation—was tolerant and inclusive. Qutb insisted that the Quranic injunction to toleration could occur only after the political victory of Islam and the establishment of a true Muslim state. The new intransigence sprang from the profound fear that is at the core of fundamentalist religion. Qutb did not survive. At al-Nasser’s personal insistence, he was executed in 1966. Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influenced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology.

THE PROPHET (570-632) During the month of Ramadan in 610 C.E., an Arab business-man had an experience that changed the history of the world. Every year at this time, Muhammad ibn Abdallah used to retire to a cave on the summit of Mount Hira, just outside Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz, where he prayed, fasted and gave alms to the poor. He had long been worried by what he perceived to be a crisis in Arab society. In recent decades his tribe, the Quraysh, had become rich by trading in the surrounding countries. Mecca had become a thriving mercantile city, but in the aggressive stampede for wealth some of the old tribal values had been lost.

After the loss of so much of the learning of the past, the destruction of manuscripts and the slaughter of scholars, it was more important to recover what had been lost than to inaugurate more change. Because the Mongol military code made no provision for civil society, the ulama continued to govern the lives of the faithful, and their influence tended to be conservative. Where Sufis such as Rumi believed that all religions were valid, by the fourteenth century the ulama had transformed the pluralism of the Quran into a hard communalism, which saw other traditions as irrelevant relics of the past. Non-Muslims were forbidden now to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and it became a capital offence to make insulting remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The trauma of the invasions had, not surprisingly, made Muslims feel insecure. Foreigners were not only suspect; they could be as lethal as the Mongols.

Social life was similarly affected by the teachings of the Koran. At a time when in Christian Europe an epidemic was regarded as a scourge of God to which man had but to submit meekly - at that time, and long before it, the Muslims followed the injunction of their Prophet which directed them to combat epidemics by segregating the infected towns and areas. And at a time when even the kings and nobles of Christendom regarding bathing as an almost indecent luxury, even the poorest of Muslim houses had at least one bathroom, while elaborate public baths were common in every Muslim city (in the ninth century, for instance, Córdoba had three hundred of them): and all this in response to the Prophet’s teaching that ‘Cleanliness is part of faith’. A Muslim did not come into conflict with the claims of spiritual life if he took pleasure in the beautiful things of material life, for, according to the Prophet, ‘God loves to see on His servants an evidence of His bounty’. In short, Islam gave a tremendous incentive to cultural achievements which constitute one of the proudest pages in the history of mankind; and it gave this incentive by saying Yes to the intellect and No to obscurantism, Yes to action and no to quietism, Yes to life and No to ascetism. Little wonder, then, that as soon as it emerged beyond the confines of Arabia, Islam won new adherents by leaps and bounds. Born and nurtured in the world-contempt of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity, the populations of Syria and North Africa, and a little layer of Visigothic Spain, saw themselves suddenly confronted with a teaching which denied the dogma of Original Sin and stressed the inborn dignity of earthly life: and so they rallied in ever-increasing numbers to the new creed that gave them to understand that man was God’s vicar on earth. This, and not a legendary ‘conversion at the point of the sword’, was the explanation of Islam’s amazing triumph in the glorious morning of its history. It was not the Muslims that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great. But as soon as their faith became habit and ceased to be a programme of life, to be consciously pursued, the creative impulse that underlay their civilisation waned and gradually gave way to indolence, sterility and cultural decay.

Al-Saʿdī said: “Life is short so do not shorten it with worries, grief, and sadness.

Umar, despite his strong character and impressive personality, had lost control of himself for a short while, his emotions seizing him so strongly that it brought out a heretofore unsuspected fragility, causing him to react like a child refusing the ruling of God, of reality, of life. By contrast, Abu Bakr, who was normally so sensitive, who wept so abundantly and so intensely when he read the Quran, had received the news of the Prophet’s death with deep sorrow but also with extraordinary calm and unsuspected inner strength. At that particular moment, the two men’s roles were inverted, thus showing that through his departure the Prophet offered us a final teaching: in the bright depths of spirituality, sensitivity can produce a degree of strength of being that nothing can disturb. Conversely, the strongest personality, if it forgets itself for a moment, can become vulnerable and fragile. The

Never has a man proposed for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a goal more sublime, since this goal was beyond measure: undermine the superstitions placed between the creature and the Creator, give back God to man and man to God reinstate the rational and saintly idea of divinity in the midst of this prevailing chaos of material and disfigured gods of idolatry. Never has a man accomplished in such a short time such an immense and long lasting revolution in the world. - Alphonse de Lamartine

once heard a short saying about Jesus, comparing him to the other religious leaders. It stuck in my head and goes something like this: “Founders of other religions claim they are a prophet to help you find God. Jesus came to say, ‘I am God come to find you.’ ” The Hindu Vedas say, “Truth is one, but the sages speak of it in many different ways.” Buddha said, “My teachings point the way to attainment of the truth.” Muhammad said, “The truth has been revealed to me.” Jesus said,“I am the truth.

Forced to govern as well as preach, Muhammad in Medina was a prophet with exceptional civil power, given that the umma was a polity as well as a congregation.

When asked a general question about his Hashimite cousin, Abu Sufyan began to belittle him, and said: “Let him not cause thee any anxiety; his importance is less than thou hast heard it to be,” but the Emperor immediately cut him short with more particular questions, and having received a precise answer on every point, he summed up his conclusion as follows: “I asked thee about his lineage, and thou didst affirm that it was pure and of the best amongst you; and God chooseth no man for prophet save him who is of the noblest lineage. Then I asked if any of his kinsmen had made claims the like of his, and thou saidst nay. Then I asked them if he had been dispossessed of sovereignty and had made this claim for the sake of recovering it, and again thine answer was nay. Then I asked thee about his followers, and thou said they were the weak and the poor and young slaves and women, and such have been the followers of the prophets in all times. Then I asked if any of his followers left him and thou saidst none. Even so is the sweetness of faith: once it hath entered the heart, it departeth not away. Then I asked if he were treacherous, and thou didst answer nay; and verily if what thou hast told me of him to be the truth, he will vanquish me here where now I stand, and I would I were with him, that I might wash his feet. Go ye now about your business.