Ahmadiyya Times | News Staff | Excerpts | Book Review
Source & Credit: Al Islam.Org |Islam International Publications
By Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, Khaliftul Masih, IV
The preaching of Islam: two conflicting views
1. When every method of persuasion (over 13 years of preaching) had failed, the Prophet took to the sword… that sword removed evil and mischief, the impurities of the heart and the filth of the soul. The sword did something more. It removed their blindness—they could see the light of truth—and it also cured them of their arrogance; arrogance which prevents people from accepting the truth… stiff necks and proud heads bowed with humility.
These are two conflicting views about the way in which the message of Islam was conveyed to the world. Critics, especially orientalists, claim that the wars the Prophet of Islamsa fought were offensive wars and that people were converted by force. According to objective historians, however, this view is not upheld by the facts. The Prophet did not use force to preach and all the battles he fought were defensive. The expansion of Islam was due to the Prophet’ssa spiritual and moral power.
Nevertheless, the view that Islam was
spread by force is, unfortunately, held by some Muslim leaders. They, like the
orientalists, divide the life of the Prophet into Meccan and Medinite periods.
They maintain that at Mecca he was weak and powerless, hence that compromising
and submissive attitude of peaceful co-existence. Then, having gained some
power at Medina, he resorted to the sword, according to this school of thought.
Had he not done so there would have
been no spiritual revolution in Arabia and Islam would not have spread. The
late Maulana Abul Ala Maududi[1] was a leading proponent of this
view. In his book, Al-Jihad fil Islam, the Maulana
says:
The Messenger of Allahsa invited the Arabs to accept Islam for 13 years. He used every possible means of persuasion, gave them incontrovertible arguments and proofs, showed them miracles and put before them his life as an example of piety and morality. In short, he used every possible means of communication, but his people refused to accept Islam.
That sword removed evil mischief, the impurities of evil and the filth of the soul. The sword did something more—it removed their blindness so that they could see the light of truth, and also cured them of their arrogance; arrogance which prevents people from accepting the truth, stiff necks and proud heads bowed with humility.
The above statement is doubly
unfortunate because it was made by a Muslim scholar who claimed to be mizaj-shanasi-Rasul, the one who found himself in complete
harmony with the mind and heart of the Prophet, so much so that he acquires a
measure of authority in explaining the true meanings of the words and deeds of
the Prophet—a claim which, if accepted, would give the claimant as much or more
right to represent than the Holy Prophet enjoyed vis-à-vis
his understanding of the Word of God. This means that the Maulana’s
understanding is tragic beyond words—it has been made by a Muslim leader and
repeats a baseless assertion of Islam’s enemies. It is the biased orientalists
who accused the Prophet of converting people by force. The Maulana’s
phraseology appears to glorify Islam, but in reality it endorses the accusation
of the European critics of Islam. R. Dozy said: ‘Muhammad’s generals preached
Islam with a sword in one hand and the Quran in the other.’ Smith asserted that
it was not the generals but the Prophet himself who ‘preached with a sword in
one hand and the Quran in the other’. George Sale wrote: ‘When the followers of
the Prophet increased in number he claimed that God had allowed him to attack
the unbelievers so that idolatry be destroyed and true religion be
established.’
The Revd Dr C. G. Pfander, who was actively engaged in
missionary work among Indian Muslims during the latter part of the nineteenth
century, provoked great unrest by writing controversial tracts to expose, as he
put it, ‘The false Prophet of Islam’. In one such tract he said:
And after this introduction the Revd
Dr Pfander concluded: ‘You have to choose between Jesus, Word of God, and
Hazrat Muhammad, son of Abdullah; between one who devoted his life to acts of
piety and one who dedicated his life to the sword.[4]
Aloy Spranger, Henry Copey and many
other critics of Islam followed the same line of attack on both Islam and the
Prophetssa. Washington Irving went a step
further; printed on the title page of one of his books is an imaginary painting
of the Prophetsa with a sword in one hand and
the Quran in the other.[5]
If one compares all that has been
quoted above with the opening quotation of Maulana Maududi’s AI-Jihad fil Islam, one finds the Prophet’ssa critics in agreement. Both the Maulana and the
orientalists maintained that Islam had a violent nature. Yet, despite this
belief, the Maulana believed in Islam while they rejected it. Apart from the
wording, there is no difference between paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 of the quotation
from Maulana Maududi above and the quotation from Dr Pfander above. But one
shows the respect of a Muslim; the other, the sarcasm of a bitter critic.
The snide remarks of the orientalists
about the Prophet of Islamsa are as unsurprising
as they are hurtful. They are sometimes made out of ignorance, but mostly out
of malice. The hostility towards Islam colors the objectivity of even the most
balanced historian. But most hurtful of all are the writings of Muslims who
claim devoutly to follow the Prophetsa, yet
present him, either through ignorance or arrogance, as a barbarian who wielded
the sword to convert and conquer.
Maulana Mandudi was not convinced of
the inherent beauty of Islam or that it could conquer hearts by its spiritual
force alone, either in the past or present. He said:
Human relations and associations are so integrated that no state can have complete freedom of action within its own principles, unless those same principles are in force in a neighboring country. Therefore, Muslim groups will not be content with the establishment of an Islamic state in one area alone. Depending on their resources, they should try to expand in all directions. On one hand, they will spread their ideology and on the other they will invite people of all nations to accept their creed, for salvation lies only in it. If their Islamic state has power and resources it will fight and destroy non Islamic governments and establish Islamic states in their place.[6]
Maulana Maududi supports Sir William
Muir’s twisted views of the Prophetsa and of
Islam. In his biography of the Prophetsa, which
he wrote to expose ‘the false Prophet of Islam’ [7]
at the request of Dr Pfander, Sir William Muir said: ‘The sword of Mahomet, and
the Coran are the most fatal enemies of civilization, liberty and truth which
the world has yet known.’ [8]
The great Hindu leader, Gandhi ji, in
his earlier days, must have been influenced by a distorted picture of Islam
such as this when he said: ‘Islam was born in an atmosphere of violence. At
that time its determining force was the sword and even today it is the sword.’
But Gandhi ji was an observer of great insight and subsequently he corrected
himself and wrote in Young India: ‘The more I study
the more I discover that the strength of Islam does not lie in the sword.’
Read the entire excerpt here: [Murder in the Name of Allah, Ahmad, Hadhrat Mirza Tahir, Islam International Publication, Ch. 2]
Read the entire excerpt here: [Murder in the Name of Allah, Ahmad, Hadhrat Mirza Tahir, Islam International Publication, Ch. 2]
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ENDNOTES
- Maulana Abul AlaMaududi, the amir (head)of Jamaati Islami until his death, spent his early life in the former princely Indian state of Hyderabad. The young Maududi left school before completing his secondary education because of his father’s death. For some time he worked as editor of the Al-Jamiyat of Delhi, the newspaper of the Jamiyat Ulamai Hind. In 1927 he resigned his editorship and, having worked so long with the Deoband ulema, he decided to devote himself to the study of theology. He was self-taught in theology, Arabic and English. Despite his great learning, immense knowledge and forceful style of Urdu, which has all the ingredients of scholarship, his critics—especially ulema of the Deoband and Lucknow schools—say that his lack of training in theological discipline was his great weakness. In 1941 the Maulana founded the Jamaati Islami and assumed its leadership. He criticized the Jamiyat Ulamai Hind for its composite nationalist theory which exposed Muslim India to the gave dangers of religio-cultural absorption into Hinduism, and at the same time assailed Qaid-i-Azam’s Muslim nationalism as no less dangerous than Congress nationalism. To him, it made no difference whether the irreligious Muslims of India survived in the form of Pakistan or not ( Musalman our Maujudah Siyasi Kashmakash , Pathankot, 1946, 6–7).
- Al-Jihad fil Islam , 137–8.
- Revd Dr C. G. Pfander, Mizanul Haq , 648, 499
- Revd Dr C. G. Pfander, Tatimma Mizanul Haq
- Washington Irving, Mahomet and His Successors , 2 vols. (New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1868).
- Haqiqat-i-Jihad (Lahore: Taj Company Ltd, 1964), 64; emphasis added.
- For details of Dr Pfander’s campaign against Islam, see ‘The Mohammedan controversy’, The Calcutta Review (Calcutta, July–December 1845), Vol. IV, 420.
- Sir William Muir, The Life of Mahomet (London: Smith Elder & Co., 1859), Vol. l, 111.
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