“Of all the world’s greatest men none has been so much maligned as Muhammad. It is easy to see how this has come about. For centuries Islam was the great enemy of Christendom, for Christendom was in direct contact with no other organized states comparable in power to the Muslims.” [William Montgomery Watt]

“Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister figure. During the 12th century, Christians were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims, even though Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. The scholar monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who established the false religion of Islam by the sword. They also, with ill-concealed envy, berated him as a lecher and sexual pervert at a time when the popes were attempting to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy. Our Islamophobia became entwined with our chronic anti-Semitism; Jews and Muslims, the victims of the crusaders, became the shadow self of Europe, the enemies of decent civilisation and the opposite of “us”. [Karen Armstrong]

“The greatest crime, the greatest ‘sin’ of Mohammad in the eyes of the Christian West is that he did not allow himself to be slaughtered, to be ‘crucified’ by his enemies. He only defended himself, his family and his followers; and finally vanquished his enemies. Mohammad’s success is the Christians’ gall of disappointment: He did not believe in any vicarious sacrifices for the sins of others.” [Edward Gibbon]

“No great religious leader has been so maligned as Prophet Mohammed. Attacked in the past as a heretic, an impostor, or a sensualist, it is still possible to find him referred to as ‘the false prophet’. A modern German writer accuses Prophet Mohammed of sensuality, surrounding himself with young women. This man was not married until he was twenty-five years of age, then he and his wife lived in happiness and fidelity for twenty-four years, until her death when he was forty-nine. Only between the age of fifty and his death at sixty-two did Prophet Mohammed take other wives, and most of them were taken for dynastic and political reasons. Certainly the Prophet’s record was better than the head of the Church of England, Henry VIII.” [Geoffrey Parrinder, Professor of comparative religion at King’s College London]

“Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times ‘by the sword’ to get them to abandon their faith.” [Uri Avnery, Israeli journalist]

“It was the West, not Islam, which forbade the open discussion of religious matters. At the time of the Crusades, Europe seemed obsessed by a craving for intellectual conformity and punished its deviants with a zeal that has been unique in the history of religion. The witch-hunts of the inquisitors and the persecution of Protestants by the Catholics and vice versa were inspired by abstruse theological opinions which in both Judaism and Islam were seen as private and optional matters. Neither Judaism nor Islam share the Christian conception of heresy, which raises human ideas about the divine to an unacceptably high level and almost makes them a form of idolatry. The period of the Crusades, when the fictional Mahound was established, was also a time of the great strain and denial in Europe. This is graphically expressed in the phobia about Islam.” [Karen Armstrong – Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet]

Know More About Prophet Mohammed (SAW):

• The Last Sermon of Prophet Muhammad
• Prophet Muhammad: His Wives
• Major Events in The Life of Prophet Muhammad
• Prophet Muhammed’s Miracles
• Prophet Muhammad’s Letters & Covenants
• Prophet Mohammad in Their Eyes
• Prophet Muhammad: His Companions
• Misconceptions
• The Outward Appearance of the Prophet
• Why Muhammad Didn’t Die for Muslims’ Sins