Mohammad's Betrayal of Islam: A Biography and Analysis

By G Guild

G. Guild has provided a comprehensive biography of Mohammad’s life: from his youth, through his development, with his learning of faith as received from a Nestorian Monk and a myriad of Jews and Christians, through his ‘enlightenment’ and subsequent teachings to Arabs of his determination of what purity and faith should

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dragon's Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781949276350

Book preview

Included in this book are extensive excerpts from a Biography Lesson Book used in English school History curriculums by:

THE ERA OF MAHOMET

A.D. 527 TO 629

Written by:

G. Lathom Browne, Esq.

This book was published under the direction of

The Committee of General Literature and Education,

appointed by

The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

In 1856 in London.

Mahomet, The Fanatic

A.D. 569 – 632

Chapter I. ---

THE ARABS AND THEIR FAITH

Their Descent from Ishmael – The Two prevailing Creeds, the Sabaean and Magian – Their Idolatry – The effect of Jewish and Christian Tenets

Chapter II. ---

THE ADVENTURER

The Family and Birth of Mahomet – His early Career – Meetings with Christian Monks – Marriage with Cadijah – High Position in Mecca – His Fasts and Mortifications in the Cave of Hara – Announcement of his Mission

Chapter III. ---

THE PROPHET IN DANGER

His Persecutions by the Koreishites – Gradual Progress of his Teaching – New Converts, Ali, Hamza, and Omar – Destruction of the Decree against him – Death of Cadijah, and Marriage with Ayesha – The Hegira, or Flight to Medina

Chapter IV. ---

THE SWORD OF THE PROPHET

His Position in Medina – First Mosque – His early Doctrines – The Sword is the Key of Heaven and Hell – Rupture of the Holy Month – Victory of Beder

Chapter V. ---

THE TREATY OF MECCA

The Progress of Conversion – Vengeance on the Jews – The Defeat of Ohod – The Battle of the Moat of Medina – Pilgrimage to Mecca – Treaty of Mecca – Fall of Khaibar – The poisoned Food

Chapter VI. ---

THE PURIFICATION OF THE CAABA

The Progress of Conquest – Missions to Heraclius, Chosroes, and the King of Egypt – Rupture of the Truce of Mecca, and Advance on the City – Capture of Abu Sofian, and Surrender of Mecca – Triumphant Entry, and Destruction of the Idols – Return to Medina

Chapter VII. ---

MAHOMET, THE CONQUEROR

The Defeat of the Confederates at Mutas – Capture of Tayef, and Destruction of its Idol – March against Roman Syria – Its Success – Mission of Ali to Mecca, with the Declaration of War against Unbelievers

Chapter VIII. ---

THE FINAL PILGRIMAGE

The Effect of the Poison of Khaibar – The two Rival Prophets – The Last Days – Mahomet in the Burying-ground and the Mosque – His Appeal to his Followers – His Death

Chapter IX. ---

THE CHARACTER AND CREED OF MAHOMET

Mahomet as he made himself to be, and Mahomet as others made him – His Repudiation of Miracles – His Monomania – His mixed Character – The Faith of Islam; its Theories and its Practices

Chapter I.

THE ARABS AND THEIR FAITH.

And Abraham said unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee! And God said, As for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make of him a great nation. With these words of holy writ, the Arabian legends of the origin of their tribes correspond with tolerable accuracy. Claiming for them a descent from Joctan, the fourth from Shem, whose posterity spread over the southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula and along the margin of the Red Sea, they relate that Ishmael married into the race of Joctan’s posterity. He grafted a vigorous branch onto the old Arabian stock, which eventually spread into twelve tribes that overran or expelled the aboriginal inhabitants.

Of the race which thus sprang up, two widely differing portions are commemorated – that which lived in towns and held castles and fortified places and that which, as the prophet Jeremiah says, dwelleth without care, which have neither gates nor bars, which dwelleth alone. The distinction thus hinted at between the nomad and the settled Arab has obtained ever since, and the difference between the Arab son of commerce and the Arab son of the desert is nearly as wide as between distinct races. The latter, however, of the two classes is the true type of the real Ishmaelite, and it was from that stock that came the fierce and fanatic warriors who went so readily to the death for God and his prophet. The division and subdivision of these tribes under various heads, Shiekhs or Emirs, as well as the prevalence of blood feuds between such as were almost of the same blood, no doubt operated favorably for Mahomet in the prosecution of his designs. As we follow his extraordinary career, we shall see how the pride of race often saved him from defeat and death, and ensured him the protection of the one as the natural consequence of the enmity of its rival.

The religion of the Arabs previous to the rise of Mahomet, partook largely of the two creeds known as the Sabaean and the Magian. The former, derived by some from Sabi, the son of Seth, and by others traced to the Hebrew title of the stars (Saba), whose good and evil influences the Assyrian shepherds had watched in their starlit plains, till they regarded them as the ministers of the Deity in his dealings with man, if not deities themselves, was supposed to be more ancient even than the faith of the Egyptians. In its original state their faith was no doubt a pure and spiritual worship of the one God, whose name they feared to mention, to whom they dared not even to address their prayers, except through the mediation of the angels and spirits, and whose habitation they believed to be in the stars of heaven. This worship of God through intermediate agencies, rapidly and naturally degenerated into the worship of those agencies in the place of God, until at last so numerous did these minor deities become, that every tribe had its own star or planet, and the idols of the Arabians were more numerous than those which crowded the temples of Rome in the decadence of her idolatry. Combined with this degrading creed, equally degrading practices prevailed, and infanticide, and human offerings to the idols, became at last the common custom of the once comparatively spiritual Sabaeans.

The Magians, on the other hand, the fire-worshipping followers of Zoroaster, though they too had so far degenerated from the original teaching of their first master as to worship the sacred fire as God itself, and not, as he had taught, as the mere symbol of his all-pervading power, had kept their temples free from the multitude of idols in which Sabaean reveled, and confined their idolatry to the holy flame alone. The basis of their creed was the existence and perpetual rivalry of two principles, that of Good and that of Evil, the one represented by Ormusd, the angel of light, the other by Ahriman, the principle of Evil. These they held, had formed the world out of a mixture of their own natural and opposed elements, and were constantly engaged in a perpetual struggle for the management of it and its inhabitants. Such, they held, would the struggle continue till the last day of judgment and resurrection, when Ormusd should finally triumph and Ahriman be banished to an abode of gloom and horror. The simplicity of their primitive rites had long since degenerated before the age of Mahomet, and, except in the number of the objects of their idolatry, the Magians were then hardly a whit less idolatrous than the image-worshipping Sabaeans.

Of these two great sects the Sabaean ruled in central Arabia, whilst the Magian prevailed on its Persian borders. Besides these, Judaism had crept down from Palestine, and in later years St. Paul himself had brought the Gospel into Arabia, and many a Christian hermit in the wilds and deserts, testified to the success of his mission. Thus, in political, social, and religious habits, the Arabs were discordant and disunited, lying ready for that hand which was to unite them under one creed, and animate them in one common cause.

Chapter II.

THE ADVENTURER.

The founder of the Mahometan faith was born in Mecca, an important city of Northern Arabia, in the April of the 569th year of the Christian era. By descent he was of that branch of the tribe of Koreish to which the custody of the Caaba – the great shrine of Arabian worship – was confided, being the great grandson of its patriarch, the chief Haschem. In his earliest infancy he was left an orphan with but a poor inheritance of five camels, a few sheep, and a female slave, and was indebted to the charity of a poor Bedouin shepherd’s wife for the food and nursing which his carewarn mother was unable to afford him. In his seventh year his mother died also, and the care of the boy fell on his aged grandfather for the next two years, until on his death bed he entrusted Mahomet to the special protection of his eldest son, Abu Taleb, his eventual successor in the guardianship of the Arabian Jerusalem. In his twelfth year, Mahomet, evidently a boy of striking intelligence, accompanied his uncle in the caravan for Syria. During the journey the traders arrived at Bosra, a town of Nestorian Christians on the confines of Syria, and once a Levite city in the country of the tribe of Manasseh. In the convent of Bosra, Abu Taleb and his nephew met with hospitality, and the youth imbibed from one of its monks much of that hatred to idolatry in every form, which constituted so important a portion of the Nestorian faith, and which still forms one of the leading features of that reformation of the old Arabian demonology which the prophet of Islam projected. The Gospel narrative is too evidently the groundwork of Mahomet’s fiction, not to warrant us in ascribing considerable influence to the teaching of the Nestorian monk, which in all probability was oft repeated during the numerous journeys to Syria taken in after years by the young trader. His occupation gave him constant opportunities of conversing with sectaries of almost every form of religion, and enabled him to accumulate that varied information, and acquire that shrewd insight into human character of which he made so effective an use during the earlier struggles of his mission.

In his twenty-fifth year the clever trader, by his marriage with the rich Cadijah, obtained at once a fortune and a position among his brethren of the Koreish. For some time as her steward, Mahomet had conducted the caravans of the widow, and performed his duties with an earnestness of purpose, an acuteness of mercantile skill, and a trustworthiness that not only increased her wealth, but won for him the love of his mistress. Though the widow was full forty years of age, Mahomet did not hesitate to accept the offer, which, though apparently suggested by a third party, in reality emanated from Cadijah herself. The few difficulties, raised rather for form sake than with any intention of preventing the alliance, were easily overcome, and a brilliant feast celebrated the nuptials amid the rejoicings of the tribe.

Mahomet was now no longer a mere clever, well-born adventurer, but a man of wealth, of position and weight in his native city. The natural advantages which he now won, were increased by his undoubted moral worth, and gave him an influence more than commensurate with his birth or rank. Between his fellow-citizens he was the frequent and popular arbiter; and when the chiefs of the various tribes were disputing who should replace the sacred stone in the wall of the Caaba, and chance gave to Mahomet the post of arbiter, they never even murmured when he bade four of them raise it on a cloth to the proper level, and with his own hands performed the office about which they had contended with almost internecine violence. Though still engaging himself in the same mercantile pursuits as before his marriage, the wealth to which he had succeeded freed him from the necessity of laboring for his bread, and left him leisure to indulge that religious turn of mind which his early intercourse with fugitive Jews and Christians had excited. The idolatry of the Arabian religion of his day had long been a stumbling-block with Mahomet, and had led him to seek out what was the nature of the faith of his ancestors. Rapid, indeed, had been the downward course of the old faith in Arabia from the days of Abraham. The Sabaeans, whose sect chiefly prevailed, had commenced the adulteration of the worship of the one God by peopling the heavenly bodies with intelligences or angels, to whom, out of profound fear for the one great God, they addressed their supplications, -- not, indeed, at first as minor deities, but as intercessors with the Supreme Being. Long, however, before the days of Mahomet, this reverence of the angels had degenerated into a worship of minor deities, whom they believed to inhabit not only the stars, but every portion of the universe, and to whose images propitiatory sacrifice and prayer was offered in the temples and groves where they were enshrined. Every tribe, and almost every neighboring country, had contributed to the ever-growing race of Arabian idols; and in the Caaba alone – the great temple of the Arabian faith – as many idols were enthroned as there were days in the year, and even Abraham and Ishmael were represented with divining arrows in their hands, and adorned with symbols of