muslim1 wrote:
Quote:The Qu'ran was written by a man. Mohammad was a man ,was he not?
It is a fact of history that prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) was an illiterate. This fact is sufficient to prove that prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) is not the author of the Holy Qur'an, but that it is a revelation from almighty God.
Almighty God said:
"And thou wast not (able) to recite a Book before this (Book came), nor art thou (able) to transcribe it with thy right hand: In that case, indeed, would the talkers of vanities have doubted."
[Holy Qur'an 29:48]
Mohammed's reaction to the Quranic trance
The first person to doubt the genuineness of the Quranic "revelations" was Mohammed himself. This was at the very beginning of his career, when during his Ramadhân retreat outside Mecca in AD 610, he had an audio-visual experience in which he both heard and saw the archangel Gabriel, calling upon him to "Recite!" (Iqrâ', from Qara'a, whence Qur'ân). Upon receiving his first "revelation", Mohammed thought he was going mad, or in the parlance of those days, that he was getting possessed by an evil spirit.
He didn't want to spend the rest of his life as Mecca's village idiot, and so, preferring death to disgrace, he decided to throw himself from a high rock: "Now none of God's creatures was more hateful to me than an ecstatic poet or a man possessed: I could not even look at them. I thought, Woe is me poet or possessed -- Never shall Quraish [i.e. his fellow tribesmen of the Quraish tribe] say this of me! I will go to the top of the mountain and throw myself down that I may kill myself and gain rest." (Ibn Ishâq's Sîrat Rasûl Allâh, tra. Alfred Guillaume: The Life of Mohammed, p.106/153)
The history of Islam could have ended there and then, with Mohammed escaping the spell of the alleged evil spirit by jumping to his death. But the ghost himself came to the rescue, as Mohammed testified: "So I went forth to do so and then, when I was midway on the mountain, I heard a voice from heaven saying, ?'O Mohammed! Thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel.'" (ibid.)
So, the vision repeated itself. We don't know if that was sufficient to reassure Mohammed about his sanity, but then another and more decisive factor intervened to save him: "And I continued standing there, neither advancing nor turning back, until Khadija sent her messengers in search of me and they gained the high ground above Mecca and returned to her while I was standing in the same place; and he [i.e. Gabriel] parted from me and I from him, returning to my family." (ibid.)
It was indeed his wife Khadija who saved him and helped him to accept the trance states as they became a recurring and then a regular feature of his life. Later on, she supported him when others doubted his prophetic claims: "By her, God lightened the burden of His prophet. He never met with contradiction and charges of falsehood, which saddened him, but God comforted him when he went home. She strengthened him, lightened his burden, proclaimed his truth, and belittled men's opposition." (Ishaq/Guillaume:111/155) But more importantly, she supported and soothed Mohammed in the crucial phase when he himself entertained the deepest doubts about his own sanity.
This is how she did it. When Mohammed came home, he told her: "Woe is me poet or possessed." But she replied: "I take refuge in God from that, o Abû'l Qâsim [i.e. "father of Qâsim", after Mohammed's first son Qâsim]. God would not treat you thus since he knows your truthfulness, your great trustworthiness, your fine character, and your kindness. This cannot be, my dear. Perhaps you did see something." And Mohammed answered: "Yes, I did." (Ishaq/Guillaume: 106/153)
Certainly Mohammed had seen something, meaning that his sensory nerves had indeed produced a visual sensation. But was it a false sensation, or in the parlance of the day, the impact of ghost-possession? Khadija and her Christian cousin Waraqa b. Naufal eagerly embraced the idea that Mohammed had had a genuine vision and had been invested with the mantle of prophethood, but Mohammed himself, with his skeptical-Pagan background, still had his doubts. Fortunately, his loving wife knew a way to decide the matter and convince him of both his sanity and his new prophetic mission.
She asked him to notify her when his visitor returned, so that they could verify whether he really was the archangel Gabriel or an ordinary demon. "So when Gabriel came to him, as he was wont, the apostle said to Khadija, ?'This is Gabriel who has just come to me.' ?'Get up, o son of my uncle', she said, ?'and sit by my left thigh.' The apostle did so, and she said, ?'Can you see him?' ?'Yes', he said. She said, ?'Then turn round and sit on my right thigh.' He did so, and she said, ?'Can you see him?' When he said that he could, she asked him to move and sit in her lap. When he had done this, she again asked if he could see him, and when he said yes, she disclosed her form and cast aside her veil while the apostle was sitting in her lap. Then she said, ?'Can you see him?' And he replied, ?'No.' She said, ?'O son of my uncle, rejoice and be of good heart, by God he is an angel and not a Satan." (Ishaq/Guillaume: 107/154)
In modern language, this account relates how Mohammed's vision of the Archangel waned and disappeared as his wife turned up the heat of sexual arousal. Narrator Ibn Ishaq adds a second tradition (through Khadija's daughter Fatima, her son Husayn, his daughter Fatima, her son Abdullah b. Hasan) which is even more explicit in this regard, viz. that "she made the apostle of God come inside her shift, and thereupon Gabriel departed, and she said to the apostle of God, ?'This verily is an angel and not a satan.'" (ibid.) The underlying assumption appears to be that a lustful demon, the kind who might take possession of a man's soul, would have stayed around to enjoy the sight of Mohammed and Khadija's sexual intercourse; whereas an angel with his ethos of renunciation would politely withdraw from the scene.
After his wife had provided him with this experimental proof of the genuineness of his meeting with the Archangel, Mohammed was cured of his doubts. He could now safely embark upon his career as God's exclusive spokesman and frequent recipient of Gabriel's messages, which were written down by a secretary and later collected into a book, the Qur'ân. Only on one occasion would the doubt briefly reappear, viz. during the episode of the "Satanic verses".
the next bit might explain why he would be interested in marrying 9 year olds :-
"It is only in a very few cases later on in his career that both contemporaries and later scholars of Islam have found reason to cast doubt on the genuineness of certain instances of his Quranic trance. These are the cases where the divine messages received during wahi were just a little too convenient not to look like Mohammed's self-serving fabrications. The best-known instance is when Mohammed received permission from Allah to marry Zaynab, the repudiated wife of his adopted son Zayd. Under Arab customary law, this union was prohibited, but in a timely revelation (Q.33:37, 33:50), Allah exempted Mohammed from this law. Christian polemicists against Islam have often cited the Zaynab episode as proof of Mohammed's insatiable lust, but in fact its indication of self-serving manipulation of the wahi by Mohammed is more damaging to the Islamic belief system."
