Voltaire,
Rousseau, Henri de Boulainvilliers and Napoleon all commented on
Prophet Muhammad. The Enlightenment in France had changed the way they
thought of him.
Islamic scholars have traditionally categorized the enemies of Islam during the time of Prophet Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam)
into two categories. The first are those who vehemently opposed Islam,
to the point where they were willing to sacrifice their own pre-Islamic
values in their efforts to put down Prophet Muhammad, his followers, and
his mission. In this category one may find, for example, Abu Jahl ibn
Hishām or Umayyah ibn Khalaf, and they along with many others in this
category perished in the Battle of Badr. But in the second category were
those who opposed Islam and persecuted/fought the Muslims but they
remained noble in character and held on to certain admirable pre-Islamic
values, not trampling all over them in trying to subdue the Islamic
movement. In this category one may find, for example, Khālid ibn
al-Walīd or ‘Amr ibn al-‘Ās, and even ‘Umar ibn al-Khattāb (radiAllahu anhum ajma‘īn). It is noteworthy that Allah (subhānahu wa ta‘āla) eventually guided most, if not all, of the people in this category to Islam. [1]
Another area of historical study where this categorization of the
opponents of Islam can be applied is in the perception of Prophet
Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam) in European intellectual
thought. For most of European history after the dawn of Islam, Prophet
Muhammad has been demonized by Christian scholars, including the famous
reformer Martin Luther, for example. This has not been because a
critical understanding of the Prophet’s life was acheieved by European
intellectuals – for the most part, they didn’t even try. Thus, more
often than not it was preferable to them (and “they” at this time was
the Roman Catholic Church) to utterly demonize Prophet Muhammad, because
by doing so they could pinpoint him as the man who embodied everything
that they, as Christians living the tough life in medieval Europe, ought
to hate about the Muslims, be they Muslims in Spain, Sicily, or
Anatolia.
By the 18th century, however, the situation had changed drastically.
Muslims were no longer the rulers of Spain or Sicily, and even in
Anatolia the power of the once feared Ottoman Empire was starting to
decline. But even more importantly, the Renaissance (c. 14th-17th
centuries) and Protestant Reformation (c. 1517-1648) had occurred in
Europe, leaving the Roman Catholic Church with a lot less influence over
the European population than it once had. Intellectuals could now
independently challenge beliefs that had been unquestioned in European
society for centuries, and the long-held negative perception of Prophet
Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam) in Europe finally began
to be challenged as well. This period of intellectual rethinking came to
be known as the Age of Enlightenment (c. 1620s-1780s), and was
particularly popular in France (where it would culminate in the French
Revolution in 1789).
Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) was a French nobleman and
historian, inspired by the famous philosophers René Descartes and John
Locke, and an Enlightenment-era intellectual who wrote on physics,
philosophy, theology and, of course, on history. In one of his more
famous works, titled Vie de Mahomed (The World of Muhammad), he
defended Prophet Muhammad against common allegations that he was
inspired by a Christian assistant, that his doctrine was irrational, and
that he was an imposter. Instead, Henri argued, Muhammad was a
divinely-inspired messenger whom God had sent to liberate the Near East
from the despotic rule of the Romans and Persians and to spread the
message of tawhīd, or God’s indivisible unity, from India to
Spain. Muhammad’s success, said Henri, was such that it “could only be
from God.” About Islam, Henri said that Muhammad’s doctrine merely
removed all that was irrational and undesirable about Christianity as it
was practiced at the time. Muhammad “seems to have adopted and embraced
all that is most marvelous in Christianity itself,” wrote Henri, “so
that what he retrenched, relates obviously to those abuses alone, which
it was impossible he should not condemn.” Henri de Boulainvilliers’ work
was banned in Catholic France but was published in 1730, after his
death, in Protestant Amsterdam and London. [2]
Henri de Boulainvilliers’ historical representation of Prophet Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam)
had an effect on other Enlightenment-era thinkers, particularly the
French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778). Voltaire, a renowned poet,
essayist, playwright and also a historian, is most famous for his
attacks on the established Roman Catholic Church, his advocacy of
freedom of religion and of expression, and his advocacy of secularism.
His opposition to Islam and his demonization of Prophet Muhammad,
however, was carried out even more vehemently than his attacks on the
Church and the Pope. In 1736, he wrote a play called Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete (Fanaticism,
or Muhammad the Prophet) and it was first staged in 1741. As the name
suggests, it portrayed the Prophet as “an impostor desiring
self-glorification and beautiful women who is willing to lie, to kill,
and even to wage war against his homeland to get what he desires.” [3]
He expressed similar views about the Prophet in two of his letters, one
to Frederick II of Prussia in 1740 and the other to Pope Benedict XIV in
1745. Sometime after 1745, however, he read Boulainvilliers’ Vie de Mahomed, and it seems to have had a lasting impact on his perception of Prophet Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam). Later in life, particularly in his historical writings such as the Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations
(1756), Voltaire praised the Prophet as an effective and tolerant
leader and a successful conqueror, though he still maintained that
Prophet Muhammad was not divinely inspired but was “so carried away [by
his success as a leader] that he believed himself inspired by God.” [4]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was yet another Enlightenment-era
French philosopher who couldn’t help but comment on Prophet Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam), and that too in his magnum opus, The Social Contract (1762).
Muhammad, he said, was neither an imposter nor a sorcerer, but an
admirable legislator who successfully combined spiritual and worldly
power. [5] In 1787, Claude-Emmanuel Pastoret (1755-c. 1830), a French
author and politician, published his Zoroaster, Confucius and Muhammad,
in which he compared and contrasted the careers of the three Eastern
religious “great men”, “the greatest legislators of the universe.” He
defended Prophet Muhammad against the allegations commonly made against
him, and praised the Qur‘ān for the way it upholds the unity of God (tawhīd). [6]
Henri de Boulainvilliers, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Claude-Emmanuel Pastoret all lived during the Enlightenment and all were
French intellectuals, but Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), another
Frenchman who was very interested in Prophet Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam), came to the stage after
the French Revolution and is remembered far more as a military and
political leader than as an intellectual or historian. In May 1798, he
set out towards the Egypt and Syria leading 55,000 men of the French
navy in an effort to challenge British control over the area, which was
officially still part of the Ottoman Empire. On July 1, 1798, before
landing at Alexandria, he sent the following written declaration to the
Egyptian people:
“In the name of God the Beneficent,
the Merciful. There is no other God than God, [and] He has neither son
nor associate to His rule. On behalf of the French Republic founded on
the basis of liberty and equality, the General Bonaparte, head of the
French Army, proclaims to the people of Egypt that for too long the beys
[i.e. Ottoman governors] who rule Egypt insult the French nation and
heap abuse on its merchants; the hour of their chastisement has come.
For too long, this rabble of slaves brought up in the Caucasus and in
Georgia [i.e. the ruling-class Mamluks of Egypt] tyrannizes the finest
region of the world; but God, Lord of the worlds, [the] All-Powerful,
has proclaimed an end to their empire. Egyptians, some will say that I
have come to destroy your religion. This is a lie, do not believe it!
Tell them that I have come to restore your rights and to punish the
usurpers; that I respect, more than do the Mamluks, God, His prophet
Muhammad and the glorious Qur‘ān… Qādī, shaykh, shorbagi, tell the
people that we are true Muslims. Are we not the one who has destroyed
the Pope [during the Italian Campaign of 1796-97] who preached war
against Muslims? Did we not destroy the Knights of Malta, because these
fanatics believed that God wanted them to make war against the Muslims?” [7]
This definitely sounds very much like the self-serving,
propagandistic rhetoric that is always used by imperialists, but it
shows Napoleon’s cultural and historical awareness and the way he used
it to his advantage. It also shows that, far from vilifying Prophet
Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam) and trying to convince
the Egyptian people that Islam was the cause of the tyrannical
leadership from which he was supposedly here to liberate them, he
actually used Islam to legitimize his cause. But nevertheless, this was
most probably mere lip service. But many years later, as he was exiled
to the remote island of Saint Helena after having lost the Napoleonic
Wars, he wrote down his thoughts on Prophet Muhammad in his memoirs.
Since there was no conceivable ulterior motive by this point for him to
be saying about Prophet Muhammad what he did not actually believe, the
following passage from his memoirs may show his genuine admiration for
Prophet Muhammad:
“Arabia was idolatrous when Muhammad,
seven centuries after Jesus Christ, introduced the cult of the God of
Abraham, Ishmael, Moses and Jesus Christ. The Arians and other sects
that had troubled the tranquility of the Orient had raised questions
concerning the nature of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Muhammad declared that there was one unique God who had neither father
nor son; that the trinity implied idolatry. He wrote on the frontispiece
of the Qur‘ān: “There is no other god than God.”
He addressed savage, poor peoples,
who lacked everything and were very ignorant; had he spoken to their
spirit, they would not have listened to him. In the midst of abundance
in Greece, the spiritual pleasures of contemplation were a necessity;
but in the midst of the deserts, where the Arab ceaselessly sighed for a
spring of water, for the shade of a palm where he could take refuge
from the rays of the burning tropical sun, it was necessary to promise
to the chosen, as a reward, inexhaustible rivers of milk, sweet-smelling
woods where they could relax in eternal shade, in the arms of divine
hūrīs with white skin and black eyes. The Bedouins were impassioned by
the promise of such an enchanting abode; they exposed themselves to
every danger to reach it; they became heroes. Muhammad was a prince; he
rallied his compatriots around him. In a few years, his Muslims
conquered half the world. They plucked more souls from the false gods,
knocked down more idols, razed more pagan temples in fifteen years, than
the followers of Moses and Jesus Christ did in fifteen centuries.
Muhammad was a great man.” [8]
“Muhammad was a great man.” Boulainvilliers, Rousseau and Pastoret
would definitely agree, though none of them are known to have ever
practiced Islam. ‘Umar, Khālid, and ‘Amr would definitely agree as well,
whether you asked them before they embraced Islam or afterwards. But
what do all of them have in common? The answer, I would argue, was their
enlightened, which provided them with certain values which shaped their
understanding of the life of Prophet Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam).
They lived during periods of uncertainty and major social and
intellectual shake-ups of society. The Frenchmen all lived during the
Enlightenment, and so they challenged the traditional way of thinking
about Prophet Muhammad using their shifting values (a shift towards
objectivity when studying history, for example). The Arabs, for their
part, were all relatively young at the time of the dawn of Islam, and
therefore were not as caught up in the traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia
as their elders were, so they challenged the traditional way of thinking
about Prophet Muhammad as well, using their own shifting values (a
shift from tribal identity to faith-based identity, for example).
The reminder in this for Muslims today is that not all those who
oppose Islam do so for the same reason or in the same way. There are
always certain trends, yes, but Muslims should remain keenly aware of
non-Muslim individuals who are attaining enlightenment through social,
cultural and intellectual shifts, because these shake-ups in history
often present excellent opportunities for fulfilling the obligation of da’wah to Islam. ‘Umar, Khālid, and ‘Amr all received this da’wah;
Boulainvilliers, Voltaire, Rousseau, Pastoret and Napoleon almost
certainly did not. And we will never know, given their general
admiration for the Prophet, how close these enlightened French
disbelievers may have been to embracing Islam if only they had been
properly invited to it.
Sources:
- Yasir Qadhi, “Seerah of Prophet Muhammed 3 – Why study the Seerah? & Pre-Islamic Arabia”, YouTube video, June 22, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F5qzMI2IKs.
- Henri de Boulainvilliers, La vie de Mahomed (Amsterdam: P. Humbert, 1730); Boulainvilliers, The Life of Mahomet (London: W. Hinchliffe, 1731), 179-222.
- John Tolan, “European Accounts of Muhammad’s Life”, in Jonathan Brockopp (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 241.
- Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, chap. 6.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1762), 303–304.
- Emmanuel Pastoret, Zoroastre, Confucius et Mahomet, comparés
comme sectaires, législateurs, et moralistes; avec le tableau de leurs
dogmes, de leurs lois et de leur morale (Paris: Buisson, 1787), 385, l. 1 and 234-236.
- Qtd. in Henri Laurens, L’Exp´edition d’Egypte, 1798–1801 (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 108.
- Napoléon Bonaparte, Campagnes d’Egypte et de Syrie (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1998), 140-141.
Image: Napoleon in Egypt (1863) by Jean-Léon Gérôme (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/f4/f3/41/f4f3415ec2e9bb7913c4d67931082bb7.jpg)
