Chapter 2
FROM
THE HISTORICAL PAST
It
is not difficult to reproduce a further dozen or more eulogies by the
admirers and critics of Muhammad
(pbuh). Despite all their
objectivity, jaundiced minds can always conjure up some aspersions.
Let me take my
readers deep down in past
history.
It
was Friday the 8th of May, 1840, that is about a hundred and fifty
years ago, at a time when it was a
sacrilege to say anything good
about Muhammad (pbuh), and the Christian West was rained to hate the
man Muhammad
(pbuh) and his religion, the same way as dogs were at one stage
trained in my country to hate all
black people. At that time in
history, Thomas Carlyle, one of the greatest thinkers of the past
century delivered a
series of lectures under the theme - "Heroes
and Hero-worship."
DEVELOPED
SICKNESS
Carlyle
exposed this blind prejudice of his people at the beginning of his
talk. He made reference to one of
the literary giants a Dutch
scholar and statesman, by the name of Hugo Grotius,
[From page 57 of the book -
"On Heroes
Hero-worship and the Heroic in History" by Thomas Carlyle,
London 1959.] who had
written a bitter and abusive
invective against the prophet of Islam. He had falsely charged that
the Holy Prophet
had trained pigeons to pick out peas from his ears, so that he could
by this trick bluff his people that
the Holy Ghost in the shape of a
dove was revealing God's Revelation to him, which he then had them
recorded in his Bible the Qur’ân.
Perhaps Grotius was inspired into this fairy-tale from his reading
of his own Holy
Scriptures: 'Then, Jesus, when he had been baptized (by John the
Baptist in the Jordan River), came up
immediately from the water; and
behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God
Descending Like A Dove and alighting upon him. (Emphasis added)
Matthew 3:16
WHERE'S
THE AUTHORITY
Pococke,
another respected intellectual of the time, like "doubting
Thomas" (John 20:25), wanted proof about
Muhammad (pbuh), the pigeons, and
the peas? Grotius answered "THAT THERE WAS NO PROOF!" He
just felt
like inventing this story for his audience. To him and his audience
the "pigeons and peas" theory was
more plausible than that of the
Archangel dictating to Muhammad (pbuh). These falsities wringed the
heart of Carlyle. He cried: "THE LIES, WHICH WELL-MEANING ZEAL
HAS HEAPED ROUND THIS MAN, ARE
DISGRACEFUL TO OURSELVES ONLY."
Thomas Carlyle
To Be Continued....
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