Muhammad, A Very, Very Nice Guy
Review by Sheryl Ga Feldman

In the Footsteps of the Prophet
Tariq Ramadan
Oxford University Press
241pp

With a mild intention to raise me as a Protestant, my California parents sent me off to the Orinda Community Church Sunday School where I crayoned pictures of a kindly looking Jesus, seated on a rock, birds cooing from his shoulders and curly haired children gathering round his knees.  “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” the caption read, quoting the good man.

Later, joining our parents for the closing of service, we might sing “Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature,” which led me to add the smell of fresh cut grass to my religious gestalt – which wasn’t revised until I began to read history.

In the meantime, Jesus remained in heaven, sitting in a warm sun, patting my head.

And to be fair, my idea wasn’t inconsistent with the quality of man he seems to have been.

Now, in Egypt, among Muslims who love the founder of their religion as much as Christians do Jesus, I’ve had to wonder why I wasn’t developing a comparable feeling for Muhammad.

 I knew Muhammad heard the voice of God, reported the Qur'an and, against unlikely odds, established a religious and social community of believers. He announced the five pillars of the faith.

Impressive.  Yes, Awesome.  Exceptionally competent.  But not touching.

The fact that images of Muhammad aren’t permitted didn’t help me: no pictures of him with kids. The poetry of the Qur'an in Arabic - said to melt the hardest of hearts - was inaccessible and when I start to ask questions of many Muslims in the US, they were a bit suspicious and besides they were overloaded trying to protect themselves from being tagged as terrorists.

With this said, I am genuinely grateful to Tariq Ramadan for his In the Footsteps of the Prophet.  He gave me for Islam what Sunday school teachers had given for Christianity: A soft, warmhearted understanding of another great spiritual leader; one who illustrated, among many other things, how a profoundly good man dealt with conflict, greed, betrayal and all the rest.

This short book, written by one of the best know apologists of Islam in Europe, has no intention of being a definitive biography of Muhammad – there are many of those already available, he says.  Instead his purpose to “get to know the prophet himself’ and, by the way of “immersion, sympathy and, essentially, love,” to “recapture the spirit that infused his mission…”

Exactly.

Ramadan is selective in the stories he tells and sometime his interpretations of events seem forced or off center.  For example, he related how it happened that Muhammad not only frees his slave, Zayd, but makes him his own son and heir.  From this he concludes that Muhammad was “simple, meditative, and courteous… he expressed constant respect toward all women, men and children…”

As it turns out, Muhammad does show all these qualities, but Ramadan's spin here and in other spots makes him unnecessarily suspect.

Tactition of Peace

As the stories unfold, so does Muhammad’s character.  For example, contrary to the western perception that he and his followers were warlike, we read that the original Muslims were patient, quiet and extremely accommodating for the first 13 years of their history.  It wasn’t until they were chased out of Mecca to Medina that they were faced with the choice of fighting for community of faith or abandoning it that they faced the prospect of using violence.  Unable to discover better solutions, Muhammad chose war.

But he also dealt with conflict with sheer wit and strategic diplomacy.  In some instances, in a pre-emptive strike for later peace, he went out of his way to show respect for the enemy dead and, in another, he had the spoils of war given back to those from whom they had been taken.

Us and Other

For a man who had grown up in tribal society, Muhammad had an astonishingly open attitude toward people outside his community of followers.  One story goes that he was sitting with friends when a funeral for a Jewish man passed on the road.  Muhammad stood, as he would for a Muslim procession, provoking his followers to ask why he stood for a Jew.

“He has a human soul, hasn’t he?”

His hospitality toward others was warm, respectful and wise.  He left each person to their own decision about whether to become Muslim.  As he and his followers encountered different people, he taught his own to observe carefully so as to learn to distinguish between what belonged to Islamic principle and what came from as local culture.  He encouraged his Companions to consider the practices of other cultures so as to become wiser in managing their own.

This process, it is said, gave  women the privilege of speaking back to their husbands – unthinkable in the Mecca of the time.)

Great and Small

Unlike Jesus, who preached for only three years, Muhammad had four decades for his character to be publicly revealed.  Plenty of time, in other words, to make mistakes – which he admittedly did.

But in all that time, he remained thoughtful and respectful of his people.  He was unfailing in his concern for the poor; constant in serving justice with mercy, spontaneously compassionate and attune to beauty.

He lived humbly, prayed hard, was tender, generous and kind and – bringing my circle of meaning full round – was known to carry his grandchildren on his back while prayed.

See also:
New York Times on Tariq Ramadan
New York Times Book Review

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