“His giving himself out as a prophet of God was, in the first instance, not only sincere, but probably correct in the sense in which he himself understood it. He felt that he had thoughts of God which it deeply concerned all around him to receive, and he knew that these thoughts were given him by God, although not, as we shall see, a revelation strictly so called. His mistake by no means lay in his supposing himself to be called upon by God to speak for Him and introduce a better religion, but it lay in his gradually coming to insist quite as much on men’s accepting him as a prophet as on their accepting the great truth he preached. He was a prophet to his countrymen in so far as he proclaimed the unity of God, but this was no sufficient ground for his claiming to be their guide in all matters of religion, still less for his assuming the lordship over them in all matters civil as well. The modesty and humility apparent in him, so long as his mind was possessed with objective truth, gradually gives way to the presumptuousness and arrogance of a mind turned more to a sense of its own importance. To put the second article of the Mohammedan creed on the same level as the first, to make it as essential that men should believe in the mission of Mohammed as in the unity of God, was an ignorant, incongruous, and false combination. Had Mohammed known his own ignorance as well as his knowledge, the world would have had one religion the less, and Christianity would have had one more reformer.” (Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ, p. 17.)
(4) Thomas Carlyle, in his lecture, “The Hero as Prophet,” says:—
“Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments—nay, on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest, his common diet barley-bread and water; sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; something better in him than hunger of any sort—or these wild Arab men fighting and jostling three and twenty years at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not have reverenced him so! These were wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right, worth, and manhood, no man could have commanded them. They called him Prophet, you say? Why, he stood there face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any mystery, visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes, fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them, they must have seen what kind of a man he was, let him be called what you like! No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During three and twenty years of rough actual trial, I find something of a veritable Hero necessary for that of itself.
“His last words are a prayer, broken ejaculations of a heart struggling-up in trembling hope towards its Maker. We cannot say his religion made him worse; it made him better; good, not bad. Generous things are recorded of him; when he lost his daughter, the thing he answers is, in his own dialect, everyway sincere, and yet equivalent to that of Christians: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ He answered in like manner of Said, his emancipated well-beloved slave, the second of the believers. Said had fallen in the war of Tâbûc, the first of Mahomet’s fightings with the Greeks. Mahomet said it was well, Said had done his Master’s work, Said had now gone to his Master; it was all well with Said. Yet Said’s daughter found him weeping over the body; the old gray-haired man melting in tears! What do I see? said she. You see a friend weeping over his friend. He went out for the last time into the mosque two days before his death; asked, If he had injured any man? Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any man? A voice answered, ‘Yes, me; three drachms, borrowed on such an occasion.’ Mahomet ordered them to be paid. ‘Better be in shame now,’ said he, ‘than at the Day of Judgment.’ You remember Kadîjah, and the ‘No by Allah!’ Traits of this kind show us the genuine man, the brother of us all, brought visible through twelve centuries, the veritable son of our common Mother.” (Lectures on Heroes, p. 66.)
(5) The Rev. Dr. Badger remarks:—
“With respect to the private as distinct from the public character of Muhammad, from the time of his settlement at al-Madīnah, it does not appear to have deteriorated, except in one particular, from what it had been prior to the flight from Mecca. He was still frugal in his habits, generous and liberal, faithful to his associates, treasured up the loving memory of absent and departed friends, and awaited his last summons with fortitude and submission. That he entertained an excessive passion for women, was lustful, if you will, cannot be denied; but the fourteen wives whom from first to last he married, and his eleven (? two: see [MUHAMMAD’S WIVES]) concubines, figure favourably by the side of David’s six wives and numerous concubines ([2 Sam. v. 13]; [1 Chron. iii. 1–9]; [xiv. 3]), Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines ([1 Kings xi. 3]), and Rehoboam’s eighteen wives and sixty concubines ([2 Chron. xi. 21]), a plurality expressly forbidden to the sovereign of Israel, who was commanded not to multiply wives to himself. ([Deut. xvii. 17].)
“It is not so much his polygamy, considering all the circumstances of the case, which justly lays Muhammad open to reproach, but his having deliberately infringed one of his own alleged divine revelations, which restricted the number of wives to ‘four and no more’ ([Sura iv. 3]); also, for having in the first instance dallied with Zainab, the wife of his freedman and adopted son Zaid-ibn-Harithah, who complacently divorced her in order that she might espouse the Prophet. In this case, moreover, as has already been related, he adduced the authority of God as sanctioning on his behoof first, and thenceforth in the behoof of all Muslims, the marriage of a man with the divorced wife of his adopted son, which up to that time had been considered incestuous. Whatever apology may be adduced for Muhammad in this matter of polygamy, there is no valid plea to justify his improbity and impiety in the case of Zainab.”
(6) Sir William Muir says:—
“I would warn the reader against seeking to portray in his mind a character in all its parts consistent with itself as the character of Mahomet. The truth is, that the strangest inconsistencies blended together (according to the wont of human nature) throughout the life of the Prophet. The student of the history will trace for himself how the pure and lofty aspirations of Mahomet were first tinged, and then gradually debased by a half-unconscious self-deception, and how in this process truth merged into falsehood, sincerity into guile, these opposite principles often co-existing even as active agencies in his conduct. The reader will observe that simultaneously with the anxious desire to extinguish idolatry, and to promote religion and virtue in the world, there was nurtured by the Prophet in his own heart, a licentious self-indulgence, till in the end, assuming to be the favourite of Heaven, he justified himself by ‘revelations’ from God in the most flagrant breaches of morality. He will remark that while Mahomet cherished a kind and tender disposition, ‘weeping with them that wept,’ and binding to his person the hearts of his followers by the ready and self-denying offices of love and friendship, he could yet take pleasure in cruel and perfidious assassination, could gloat over the massacre of an entire tribe, and savagely consign the innocent babe to the fires of hell. Inconsistencies such as these continually present themselves from the period of Mahomet’s arrival at Medîna, and it is by the study of these inconsistencies that his character must be rightly comprehended. The key to many difficulties of this description may be found, I believe, in the chapter ‘on the belief of Mahomet in his own inspiration.’ When once he had dared to forge the name of the Most High God as the seal and authority of his own words and actions, the germ was laid from which the errors of his after life freely and fatally developed themselves.” (Life of Mahomet, new ed. p. 535.)
(7) Mr. Bosworth Smith, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, says:—