Western Writers & Character-Assassination of the Holy Prophet of Islam

Western Writers & Character-Assassination of the Holy Prophet of Islam

A number of Western writers made extensive attempts for character-assassination of the Holy Prophet of Islam by merely highlighting one aspect of the Prophet's life i.e. martial elements of Islam. Whereas, the Prophet combined a number of roles in his person. The most important role he played was of a Prophetic mission for which he was summoned. In addition to that, he was also a state builder, a social reformer and a voice of protection for the less fortunate in the society. The only role that the West mischievously opted and associated with the Prophet was an imposed role by adversarial elements of Meccan people, for which he had no choice but to play under the guidelines drawn by the omnipotent God. When we deeply study various phases of his mission, we discover that during his stay at Mecca, he concentrated on establishing a theological foundation of the Islam with utmost soft and kindest possible words without any physical or verbal altercation. On the other hand, besides performing many administrative roles for which he had been chosen unanimously by all the religious and tribal sections of the Medina people, he had emerged as a propounder of social morality, proscribing consumption of alcoholic beverages and blood fueds, and as a coiner of the notions of social justice and human right, recognizing equality for all as a human being, legal status of women and special share for the poor section of the society in the wealth of  rich people. Today, in the era of internet when all the recourses of knowledge and information are available in the public domain, such Western thinkers should give up biased and preoccupied-mind approaches towards the study of Islam and its Prophet for the sake of subjectivity in the critical inquiry of knowledge and historal studies. In brief, my submission is that such writers have given much emphasis only on the martial aspects of Islam and deliberately skipped other aspects to sell their ideas to a particular portion who wished to see Islam as a barbarism and violence, however, they have committed a great injustice to ethos of critical enquiry of the history. To comprehend fully the Prophet's mission, we all need to cover all elements of 23 years of his Prophetic stay at Mecca and Medina. Then, we can come across a range of various aspects of Islam besides religion and military role, like his role in social, ethical and moral values etc. For that, we need to look into  the significance of many Quranic verses which deals with the above mentioned values. For instance, in chapter 4, Quran says " Be kind to your parents, to relatives, to orphans, to the needy, to neighbours near and far, to travellers in need, and to your slaves. God does not like arrogant, boastful people. -Sura An-Nisa', Ayah 36.