[Sidenote: Indictment against Mohammad.]
36. What the opponents of Mohammad can possibly say against his mission
is his alleged moral declension at Medina. They accuse him of
cruelty and sensuality during his sojourn in that city after
he had passed without any blame more than fifty-five years of his age, and had led a pious missionary life for upwards of fifteen years. These moral stains cannot be inconsistent with his office of being a prophet or reformer. It is no matter if a prophet morally degrades his character under certain circumstances, or morally degrades his character at the end of his age—after leading for upwards of fifty-five years a life of the highest moral principles, and as a paragon of temperance and high-toned living—while he has faithfully conveyed the message, and has sincerely and honestly preached religious reforms, and the sublimity of his preachings have in themselves the marks of divine truth.
If the said prophet defends his stains or immoral deeds by professed
revelations, and justifies himself in his flagrant breaches of morality
by producing messages from heaven, just and equally as he does when he
teaches the purer theology and higher morality for which he is
commissioned, then and from that time only we will consider him as an
impostor, guilty of high blasphemy in forging the name of God for his
licentious self indulgences.
But in the case of Mohammad, in the first place, the charges of cruelty
and sensuality during a period of six or seven years towards the end of
his life, excepting three years, are utterly false; and secondly, if
proved to have taken place, it is not proved that Mohammad justified
himself by alleging to have received a divine sanction or command to the
alleged cruelties and flagrant breaches of morality. The charges of
assassinations and cruelties to the prisoners of war and others, and of
the alleged perfidy and craftiness enumerated by Sir W. Muir, have been
examined and refuted by me in this book. Vide pp. 60-73 and pp. 76-97. The cases of Maria, a slave-girl, and Zeinab not coming directly under the object of this book have been treated separately in Appendix B, pp. 211-220 of this work.
Mohammad, in his alleged cruelties towards his enemies, is not
represented by Sir W. Muir to have justified himself by special
revelation or sanction from on high, yet the Rev. Mr. Hughes, whose work
has been pronounced as having "the rare merit of being accurate," makes him (Mohammad) to have done them under the sanction of God in the Koran.
"The best defenders of the Arabian Prophet are obliged to admit that the matter of Zeinab, the wife of Zeid, and again of Mary, the Coptic slave, are 'an indelible stain' upon his memory; that he is untrue once or twice to the kind and forgiving disposition of his best nature; that he is once or twice unrelenting in the punishment of his personal enemies, and that he is guilty even more than once of conniving at the assassination of inveterate opponents; but they do not give any satisfactory explanation or apology for all this being done under the supposed sanction of God in the Qurán."
Such is the rare accuracy of Mr. Hughes' work. It is needless for me to
repeat here that none of these allegations are either true or facts, or
alleged to have been committed under the sanction of God in the Koran.
The Rev. Marcus Dods writes regarding the character of Mohammad:—
"The knot of the matter lies not in his polygamy, nor even in his occasional licentiousness, but in the fact that he defended his conduct, when he created scandal, by professed revelations which are now embodied as parts of the Koran. When his wives murmured, and with justice, at his irregularities, he silenced them by a revelation giving him conjugal allowances which he had himself proscribed as unlawful. When he designed to contract an alliance with a woman forbidden to him by his own law, an inspired permission was forthcoming, encouraging him to the transgression."