Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today, by John V. Tolan (review) (original) (raw)

Impostor or lawgiver? Muhammad through European eyes in the 17th and 18th centuries

Christiane Gruber & Avinoam Shalem, eds., The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation, 2014

For centuries, Muhammad has been at the center of European discourse on Islam. Medieval polemicists and chroniclers often portrayed him as a shrewd heresiarch who had worked false miracles to seduce the Arabs away from Christianity: as such, the root of Saracen error and an implicit justification of wars of conquest against Saracens. This medieval polemical image proved tenacious; in slightly modified forms, it provided the dominant European discourse on Muhammad the “impostor” in the seventeenth century. In 1697, Humphrey Prideaux, Anglican minister and Oxford-educated doctor of theology, published The True nature of The Imposture Fully Display'd in the Life of Mahomet. Prideaux casts a critical eye on many of the legendary elements concerning the prophet that had been popular in medieval and early modern polemics; he claims to present, in lieu of fables, the "true nature" of Muhammad's "imposture". Yet in fact he relies heavily on the works of medieval polemicists such as Riccoldo da Montecroce. Beginning in the eighteenth century, some European authors present the prophet in a favorable light: as an inspired religious reformer and great legislator. Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, wrote a Vie de Mahomet which was published posthumously in 1730. He presents the prophet at a divinely-inspired messenger through whom God confounded the bickering oriental Christians, liberated the Orient from the despotic rule of the Romans and Persians, and spread the knowledge of the unity of God from India to Spain. Emmanuel Pastoret has a similar view of the prophet in his Zoroaster, Confucius and Muḥammad (1787), in which he presents the lives of these three "great men", "the greatest legislators of the universe". Napoleon Bonaparte presents the prophet as a model conqueror and legislator. This image of Muḥammad as a "great man", a statesman and conqueror, is a common trope in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. It allowed a relatively objective and irenic appreciation of the importance of the prophet and of Islam on the stage of world history, avoiding the bitter religious polemics that had so often colored European discourse on Islam. Yet by presenting Muḥammad as first and foremost a political and military leader, his role as an envoy of God and a model for Muslims was willfully avoided.

Re-Evaluation of Prophet Mohammed's Image in Victorian Literature

مجلة الممارسات اللغوية, 2013

The following study is about the re-evaluation and reconsideration of the Prophet Mohammed's life in the Victorian literature. Prior to the nineteenth century, when Islam constituted a threat to Europe, westerners perpetuated many stereotypes about the Prophet. However, during the Victorian era, some writers did not only abandon the old misconceptions, they even went further by denouncing and correcting them. Hence, from the impostor, anti-Christ, subjugator of women, and a heretic, Muhammed became a hero and a model leader in the writings of Carlyle, Bosworth Smith and others.

Falsifying the Prophet: Muhammad at the Hands of His Earliest Christian Biographers in the West

Character Assassination Throughout the Ages, edited by Martijn Icks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2014

Arguably there is no better way to appreciate character assassination as practiced by medieval Christians than to consider early Christian biographies of Muhammad. One might think Muhammad would have rivals for this distinction among the Jews and the heretics, the two religious categories aside from Islam that played the biggest role in shaping early Christian identity. But as common as Christian treatises against the Jews were, their prophets were immune from Christian censure due to their perceived indispensability in corroborating Jesus's identity as the Messiah; Muhammad, whose prophecies postdated the Incarnation, was not afforded the same consideration. And while Christian writers regularly excoriated heresiarchs like Arius and Nestor, the reactions that Muhammad evoked were still more visceral, for, unlike Arius's innovation, Muhammad's never went away, and unlike Nestor's, it was linked to a polity that threatened to swallow Greek and Latin Christendom altogether. These circumstances combined to assure Muhammad the lion's share of attention from medieval Christian character assassins. It took some time after the Muslim conquests before Christian biographies of Muhammad began to appear, but once they did, they never abated, appearing in all parts of the medieval Christian world, including those that ended up under Muslim rule. In fact it is among the lives of Muhammad written and manipulated by Christian dhimmis that we find the widest range of polemical strategies for discounting Islam by denigrating its prophet. In this chapter I will consider and contextualize two Latin portraits of Muhammad from early M. Icks et al. (eds.), Character Assassination throughout the Ages