If the said prophet defends his stains or immoral deeds by professed revelations, and justifies himself in his flagrant breaches of morality by producing messages from heaven, just and equally as he does when he teaches the purer theology and higher morality for which he is commissioned, then and from that time only we will consider him as an impostor, guilty of high blasphemy in forging the name of God for his licentious self indulgences.
But in the case of Mohammad, in the first place, the charges of cruelty and sensuality during a period of six or seven years towards the end of his life, excepting three years, are utterly false; and secondly, if proved to have taken place, it is not proved that Mohammad justified himself by alleging to have received a divine sanction or command to the alleged cruelties and flagrant breaches of morality. The charges of assassinations and cruelties to the prisoners of war and others, and of the alleged perfidy and craftiness enumerated by Sir W. Muir, have been examined and refuted by me in this book. Vide pp. [60]-73 and pp. [76]-97. The cases of Maria, a slave-girl, and Zeinab not coming directly under the object of this book have been treated separately in [Appendix B], pp. 211-220 of this work.
Mohammad, in his alleged cruelties towards his enemies, is not represented by Sir W. Muir to have justified himself by special revelation or sanction from on high, yet the Rev. Mr. Hughes, whose work has been pronounced as having "the rare merit of being accurate," makes him (Mohammad) to have done them under the sanction of God in the Koran.
"The best defenders of the Arabian Prophet[141] are obliged to admit that the matter of Zeinab, the wife of Zeid, and again of Mary, the Coptic slave, are 'an indelible stain' upon his memory; that he is untrue once or twice to the kind and forgiving disposition of his best nature; that he is once or twice unrelenting in the punishment of his personal enemies, and that he is guilty even more than once of conniving at the assassination of inveterate opponents; but they do not give any satisfactory explanation or apology for all this being done under the supposed sanction of God in the Qurán."[142]
Such is the rare accuracy of Mr. Hughes' work. It is needless for me to repeat here that none of these allegations are either true or facts, or alleged to have been committed under the sanction of God in the Koran.
The Rev. Marcus Dods writes regarding the character of Mohammad:—
"The knot of the matter lies not in his polygamy, nor even in his occasional licentiousness, but in the fact that he defended his conduct, when he created scandal, by professed revelations which are now embodied as parts of the Koran. When his wives murmured, and with justice, at his irregularities, he silenced them by a revelation giving him conjugal allowances which he had himself proscribed as unlawful. When he designed to contract an alliance with a woman forbidden to him by his own law, an inspired permission was forthcoming, encouraging him to the transgression."[143]
Both of these alleged instances given above are mere fabrications. There was no revelation giving Mohammad conjugal allowances which he had himself proscribed as unlawful, nor any permission was brought forward to sanction an alliance forbidden to him by his own law. This subject has been fully discussed by me in my work "Mohammad, the True Prophet," and the reader is referred to that work.[144] A few verses on the marital subject of Mohammad are greatly misunderstood by European writers on the subject, and Dr. Dods shares the generally wrong idea when he says:—
"He rather used his office as a title to license from which ordinary men were restrained. Restricting his disciples to four wives, he retained to himself the liberty of taking as many as he pleased." (Page 23.)