Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society
Chapter 3
MUHAMMAD’S
PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER AND SIDELIGHTS ON SOME REFORMS
PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER:
Mohammad was of middle height, rather thin but broad of
shoulder, wide of chest, strong of bone and muscle. His head was massive,
strongly developed. Dark hair, slightly curled, flowed in a dense mass almost
to his shoulders; even in advanced age it was sprinkled with only about twenty
grey hairs, produced by the agonies of his ‘Revelations’. His face was
oval-shaped, slightly tawny of colour. Fine long arched eye-brows were divided
by a vein, which throbbed visibly in moments of passion. Great black restless
eyes shone out from under long heavy eyelashes. His nose was large, slightly
acquiline. His teeth, upon which he bestowed great care, were well set,
dazzling white. A full beard framed his manly face. His skin was clear and
soft, his complexion ‘red and white’. His hands were as ‘silk and satin’, even
as those of a woman. His step was quick and elastic, yet firm as that of one
who steps ‘from a high to a low place’. In turning his face, he would also turn
his whole body. His whole gait and presence was dignified and imposing. His
countenance was mild and pensive. His laugh was rarely more than a smile.
“In his habits he was extremely simple, although he bestowed
great care on his person. His eating and drinking, his dress and his furniture
retained, even when he had reached the fullness of power, their almost
primitive nature. The only luxuries he indulged in were arms, which he highly
prized, and a pair of yellow boots, a present from the Negus of Abyssinia.
Perfumes, however, he loved passionately, being most sensitive to smells.
Strong drink he abhorred.
“… He was gifted with mighty powers of imagination, elevation
of mind, delicacy and refinement of feeling.” ‘He is more modest than a virgin
behind her curtain’, it was said of him. He was most indulgent to his
inferiors, and would never allow his little page to be scolded whatever he did.
‘Ten years’, said Anas, his servant, ‘I was about the Prophet, and he never
said as much as ‘uff’ to me’. He was very affectionate towards his family. One
of his boys died on his breast in the smoky house of the nurse, a blacksmith’s
wife. He was very fond of children; he would stop them in the streets and pat
little heads. He never struck anyone in his life. The worst expression he ever
made use of in conversation was, ‘What has come to him? May his forehead become
darkened with mud!’ When asked to curse someone he replied, ‘I have not been
sent to curse, but to be a mercy to mankind’. ‘He visited the sick, followed
any bier he met, accepted the invitation of a slave to dinner, mended his own
clothes, milked the goats, and waited upon himself,’ relates summarily another
tradition. He never first withdrew his hand thus, out of another man’s palm,
and turned not before the other had turned.
“He was the most faithful protector of those he protected,
the sweetest and most agreeable in conversation. Those who saw him were
suddenly filled with reverence; those who came near him loved him; they who
described him would say, ‘I have never seen his like either before or after’.
He was of great taciturnity, but when he spoke it was with emphasis and
deliberation and no one could forget what he said.
“He lived with his wives in a row of humble cottages
separated from one another by palm-branches, cemented together with mud. He
would kindle the fire, sweep the floor, and milk the goats himself. The little
food he had was always shared with those who dropped in to partake of it.
Indeed outside the Prophet’s house was a bench or a gallery, on which were always
found a number of poor who lived entirely upon his generosity, and were hence
called ‘the people of the bench’. His ordinary food was dates and water, or
barley bread; milk and honey were luxuries of which he was fond, but which he
rarely allowed himself. The fare of the desert seemed most congenial to him
even when he was sovereign of Arabia.
“There is something so tender and womanly, and withal so
heroic, about the man, that one is in peril of finding the judgment
unconsciously blinded by the feeling of reverence, and well-nigh love, that
such a nature inspires. He who, standing alone, braved for years the hatred of
his people, is the same who was never the first to withdraw his hand from
another’s clasp; the beloved of children, who never passed a group of little
ones without a smile from his wonderful eyes and kind word for them, sounding
all the kinder in that sweet-toned voice. The frank friendship, the noble
generosity, the dauntless courage and hope of the man, all tend to melt
criticism into admiration.
“He was an enthusiast in that noblest sense when enthusiasm
becomes the salt of the earth, the one thing that keep men from rotting whilst
they live. Enthusiasm is often used despitefully, because it is joined to an
unworthy cause, or falls upon barren ground and bears no fruit. So was it not
with Muhammad. He was an enthusiast when enthusiasm was the one thing needed to
set the world aflame, and his enthusiasm was noble for a noble cause. He was
one of those happy few who have attained the supreme joy of making one great
truth their very life-spring. He was the messenger of the one God, and never to
his life’s end did he forget who he was or the message which was the marrow of
his being. He brought his tidings to his people with a grand dignity sprung
from the consciousness of his high office together with a most sweet humility
…”[1]
“His (i.e., Muhammad’s) politeness to the great, his
affability to the humble, and his dignified bearing to the presumptuous,
procured him respect, admiration and applause. His talents were equally fitted
for persuasion or command. Deeply read in the volume of nature, though entirely
ignorant of letters, his mind could expand into controversy with the acutest of
his enemies, or contract itself to the apprehension of the meanest of his
disciples. His simple eloquence, rendered impressive by the expression of a
countenance wherein awfulness of majesty was tempered by an amiable sweetness,
excited emotion of veneration and love; and he was gifted with the
authoritative air of genius which alike influences the learned and commands the
illiterate. As a friend and a parent, he exhibited the softest feelings of
nature; but, while in possession of the kind and generous emotions of the
heart, and engaged in the discharge of most of the social and domestic duties,
he disgraced not his assumed title of an apostle of God. With all that
simplicity which is so natural to a great mind, he performed the humblest
offices whose homeliness it would be idle to conceal with pompuous diction, even
while Lord of Arabia, he mended his own shoes and coarse woollen garments,
milked the ewes, swept the hearth, and kindled the fire. Dates and water were
his usual fare and milk and honey his luxuries. When he travelled he divided
his morsel with his servant. The sincerity of his exhortations to benevolence
was justified at his death by the exhausted state of his coffers.”[2]
“Mohammed … despised grandeur, and lived on principle an
extremely frugal life, though he was no ascetic… He is reputed to have behaved
very simply, and there is no reason for not supposing that he did. He performed
the most menial tasks with his own hands, and was essentially puritan, saying
the Divine revelation forbade him to wear either gold or silk .”[3]
“His deportment, in general, was calm and equable; he
… was grave and dignified, though he is said to have possessed a smile of
captivating sweetness. His complexion was more ruddy than is usual with Arabs,
and in his excited and enthusiastic moments there was a glow and radiance in
his countenance, which his disciples magnified into the supernatural light of
prophecy.
“His intellectual qualities were undoubtedly of an
extraordinary kind. He had a quick apprehension, a retentive memory, a vivid
imagination and an inventive genius.
“He was sober and abstemious in his diet, and a rigorous
observer of fasts. He indulged in no magnificence of apparel, the ostentation
of a petty mind; neither was his simplicity in dress affected but a result of
real disregard for distinction from so trivial a source.
“In his private dealings he was just. He treated friends and
strangers, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, with equity, and
was loved by the common people for the affability with which he received them,
and listened to their complaints.
“His military triumphs awakened no pride nor vain glory, as
they would have done had they been effected for selfish purposes. In the time
of his greatest power he maintained the same simplicity of manners and
appearance as in the days of his adversity. So far from affecting a regal
state, he was displeased if, on entering a room, any unusual testimonials of
respect were shown to him. If he aimed at universal dominion, it was the
dominion of the faith, as to the temporal rule which grew up in his hands, as
he used it without ostentation, so he took no step to perpetuate it in his
family.”[4]
“Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was
not a sensual man … His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water;
sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They
record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak …
careless of what vulgar men toil for … something better in him than hunger of
any sort, or these wild Arab men, fighting and jostling three and twenty years
at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not have reverenced him
so! They were wild men, bursting ever and anon with quarrel, with all kinds of
fierce sincerity; without right worth and manhood, no man could have commanded
them … No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own
clouting. During three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial, I find something
of a veritable hero necessary for that myself.”[5][6]
“His (i.e., Muhammad’s) memory was capacious and retentive,
his wit easy and social, his imagination sublime, his judgment clear, rapid and
decisive. He possessed the courage of both thought and action; and … the first
idea which he entertained of his divine mission bears the stamp of an original
and superior genius.”[7]
“Head of the State as well as of the Church”, remarks
Bosworth Smith, “he was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope’s
pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar. Without a standing army,
without a body-guard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue, if ever any
man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Mohammad,
for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. He
rose superior to the title and ceremonies, the solemn trifling, and the proud
humility of court etiquette. To hereditary kings, to princes born in the
purple, these things are naturally enough as the breath of life; but those who
ought to have known better, even self-made rulers, and those the foremost in
the files of time—a Caesar, a Cromwell, a Napolean, have been unable to resist
their tinsel attractions. Mohammad was content with the reality; he cared not
for the dressings of power. The simplicity of his private life was in keeping
with his public life. ‘God’, says AlBokhari, ‘offered him the keys of the
treasures of the earth, but he would not accept them’.”[8]
“Never has a man set for himself, voluntarily or
involuntarily, a more sublime aim, since this aim was superhuman: to subvert
superstitions which had been interposed between man and his Creator; to render
God unto man he and man unto God; to restore the rational and sacred idea of
divinity amidst the chaos of the material and disfigured gods of idolatry, then
existing. Never has a man undertaken a work so far beyond human power with so
feeble means, for he (Muhammad) had in the conception as well as in the
execution of such a great design no other instrument than himself, and no other
aid, except a handful of men living in a corner of the desert. Finally, never
has a man accomplished such a huge and lasting revolution in the world, because
in less than two centuries after its appearance, Islam in faith and in arms,
reigned over the whole of Arabia, conquered, in God’s name, Persia, Khorasan,
Transoxania, Western India, Syria, Egypt, Abyssinia, all the known continent of
Northern Africa, numerous islands of the Mediterranean, Spain, and a part of
Gaul.
“If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astounding results are the three criteria of human genius, who could dare to compare any great man in modern history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples and dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world, and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls.
On the basis of a Book, every letter of which has become law, he created a spiritual nationality which blended together peoples of every tongue and of every race. He has left for us as the indelible characteristic of this Muslim nationality the hatred of false gods and the passion for the One and Immaterial God. This avenging patriotism against the profanation of Heaven formed the virtue of the followers of Muhammad; the conquest of one-third of the earth to his dogma was his miracle, or rather it was not the miracle of a man but that of reason. The idea of the Unity of God, proclaimed amidst the exhaustion of fabulous theogonies, was in itself such a miracle that upon its utterance from his lips it destroyed all the ancient temples of idols and set on fire one-third of the world.
His life, his meditations, his heroic revilings against the
superstitions of his country, and his boldness in defying the furies of
idolatry, his firmness in enduring them for fifteen years at Makka, his acceptance
of the role of public scorn and almost of being a victim of his fellow
countrymen; all these and, finally, his flight, his incessant preaching, his
wars against odds, his faith in his success and his superhuman security in
fortune, his forbearance in victory, his ambition, which was entirely devoted
to one idea and in no manner striving for an empire; his endless prayers, his
mystic conversations with God, his death and his triumph after death: all these
attest not to an imposture but to a firm conviction which gave him the power to
restore a dogma. This dogma was two-fold, the unity of God and the immateriality
of God; the former telling what God is, the latter telling what God is not; the
one overthrowing false gods with the sword, the other starting an idea with the
words.
“Philosopher, orator, apostle,
legislator, warrior, conqueror 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?”[9]
“… These Arabs, the man Mahomet and that one century,—is it
not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black
unnoticeable sand; but lo! the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high
from Delhi to Grenada; I said the Great Man was always as lightning out of
heaven, the rest of the men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would
aflame.”[10]
“It is impossible for anyone who studies the life and
character of the great Prophet of Arabia, who knows how he taught and how he
lived, to feel anything but reverence for that mighty Prophet, one of the great
messengers of Supreme.”[11]
[1] Stanley Lane-Poole: The Speeches and Table-Talk of the Prophet
Mohammad, Introduction, pp. 27-30.
[2] John Davenport: An Apology for Mohammad and the Koran, pp. 52-53.
[3] A. C. Bouquet: Comparative Religion, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, 1954, pp. 269-270.
[4] Washington Irving: Mahomet and his Successors, London 1909; pp.
192193, 199.
[5] Thomas, Carlyle: On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History,
p.
[6] .
[7] Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, London 1838, vol. V, P. 335.
[8] Bosworth Smith: Mohammad and Mohammadanism, p. 92.
[9] Lamartine: Histoire de la Turquie, Paris 1854, Vol. 2, pp. 276-277.
(Italics are the present writer’s).
[10] Thomas Carlyle: op. cit., p. 311.
[11] Annie Besant: The Life and Teachings of Muhammad, Madras 1932, p.
4.
to be continued . . . . .
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