10 Facts Everyone Should Know about Muhammad

There are a lot of  videos and articles out there which give  you certain facts about Muhammad and  tell you who Muhammad was. Unfortunately those videos and articles,  those lists  are usually very one-sided. Therefore I  have decided to sit down and to make a  video  in which I want to show you the other  side. Today I want to  list and share at least 10 things that  everybody should know about  Muhammad.

Number  10. Muhammad is not the God of Islam but he  is definitely a sex god. Not really a sex god, more like a  sex enthusiast  or a sex addict. According  to the most authentic reports, Muhammad  had 9 or 11  wives at once (Sahih Bukhari 268). The Quran itself says that  you may marry the women that you like  two, three or four (Surah 4:3) but Muhammad had much  more than four  because the Quran gives special  privileges to Muhammad  such as that women could simply give  themselves to him  and he could marry them. (Surah 33:50) Even his wife  Aisha commented that she does not  understand how women can just  give themselves to him and that Allah  seems to care a lot about Muhammad’s  convenience and desires. (Sahih Bukhari 4788) His first  marriage was to a woman who was  15 years older than him because she was  his employer and supporter  but after her death he could just not  get enough of women.

Number nine. The child marriage. One very  controversial fact about Muhammad is  that he  reportedly married a little girl when  she was only  six and consummated the marriage with  her  when she was only nine meaning he had  sexual intercourse with her when she was  only nine years old. (Sahih Bukhari 3894, 3985, 3896, 5133, 5134, 5158, etc.) Some modern Muslims want to doubt the  authenticity but those  reports are not doubted unless you want  to doubt the authenticity of Islamic  scripture altogether.  Muhammad is taught to be the most  perfect human being to ever walk the  face of the earth, to be globally  followed,  obeyed and imitated. The fact that he  married  and had sex with a little child makes  this very problematic.

Number eight. He was a slave master. Although Muslims in modern times  romanticized Muhammad as somebody who  gave slaves better rights and  emancipated slaves, that is a very new  perspective and actually a distortion of  who Muhammad was. Slavery and the slave market were always  a big part,  a core part of Muslim society and  Muhammad never ended or  intended to end slavery. In fact, if we  search  through Islamic traditions about  Muhammad and slavery,  what we see is predominantly that  Muhammad  kept, bought and sold slaves, picked out  slaves took or distributed female slaves  for sexual pleasure,  and even advised gifting a slave to  someone else instead of  freeing a slave. (Sahih Bukhari 2592, 4234, 6161, 6202, 5191, 371, 3145, 6603, 4121, 2403, 2415) What is true is that a  certain early Muslim Bilal was a slave and that he was bought  and freed by the Muslims  because he converted to Islam and he was  asking for  help. What is also true is that Muhammad  and the Quran make it a good  deed or an atonement for sins to free a  slave  but just because freeing a slave is a  good deed or an atonement in exchange  for sin  that doesn’t mean that slavery is  considered bad and that people  are obligated to free slaves. Muhammad is  the best example  of Islam according to Islam and he  certainly did not have  a problem with the idea of the ownership  of humans  over other humans. (Sahih Bukhari 1464)

Number 7. Muhammad’s strange  state of revelations. The Islamic belief is that Muhammad was  a messenger, a prophet of Allah  and that he would receive inspirations  from Allah through the angel Gabriel.  Muhammad would then recite those  revelations that he supposedly received  to the people around him, who would  orally memorize  them or write them down. The authenticity  of all that  aside for now, how Muhammad got these  revelations is a matter of  interest. According to the most authentic  reports, Muhammad himself described that  the inspirations from Allah  would sometimes come in what resembles  the ringing of a bell  and that this would be very hard for  Muhammad. Sometimes the angel would come in the form  of a man and  speak to him and then he would grasp  what was being said to him. (Sahih Bukhari 2) According to other reports by his wife  and those around him,  he would sweat heavily when receiving a  revelation,  he would be unresponsive and in a  trance-like state  when receiving revelation. According  to one report he was laying down  making loud noises like the snorting of  a camel and his loyal follower Umar would cover  him during that inspiration. (Bukhari 2, 4929, 4795, 1180)   I don’t want to make any diagnosis here  but Muhammad’s  divine revelations were seemingly a very  great struggle to him  and resemble the symptoms of certain  psychological disorders,  which are very distressing and which  come with hallucinations  and delusions.

Number 6. Muhammad was born in Mecca  into a polytheistic tribe that oversaw  the pagan temple of the Kaaba, which then  was dedicated to a polytheistic  god Hubal. Muhammad did not like his own  culture possibly because he was an  orphan and he didn’t fit in. Reportedly,  he used to go on trade routes to Syria  as an early teenager  where he learned about Christians and  Jews and their beliefs. He probably  looked up to them because they were far more  advanced,  knowledgeable and civilized than his own  people back home.  Muhammad declared his own religion based  on monotheistic  Abrahamic beliefs but even after  declaring his own religion, which was  meant to be an Abrahamic religion,  he still kept many polytheistic pagan  aspects, which he adopted  from the pre-Islamic Arab polytheists. These are the Kaaba, which turned into  the center of Islamic attention, the black stone which the  stone-worshiping polytheists revere, the  belief in beings called  jinns and more.

Number 5. Muhammad was a suspected  liar.  Muslims and Islamic sources often assert  that Muhammad was known as a reliable  man  and that he had the nickname “the  trustworthy”. They assert that he earned  this title  as a trader and in the internal affairs  of  Mecca before he announced his  prophethood. But of course just because  someone is  a reliable trader that does not mean  that this person can be trusted in  everything that they say and do,  especially if they claim to be coming in  the name of an almighty God who demands  everyone’s  submission. In fact, the Quran itself,  which is supposedly Allah’s direct word  revealed through Muhammad’s own mouth,  responds to people and  defends Muhammad repeatedly because  people ridicule him for his stories and  claims. They call him a liar repeatedly, they  call him a madman,  they accuse him of forgery and of  retelling ancient stories  as if they were original. (Surah 35:4, 16:101, 25:4-5, 15:6, 9:61)They would also  accuse him of  believing what everyone says and they  even accused him of  taking his Quran revelations and stories  from a specific  man that Muhammad used to spend time  with. The Quran attempts to refute  this in a rather funny way by saying  that  that man that Muhammad talks to speaks a  different language while the Quran is in  Arabic. (Surah 16:103) From here, we can see that the  entire idea that Muhammad was  undoubtedly a reliable  man is a little bit far-fetched and  probably does not represent  the whole truth.

Number four. Head of  military and state.  Muhammad was not only a prophet and the  founder of the Islamic religion,  he was also the head of a new state and  its army.  Muhammad formed the Islamic state with  his followers in the city of Medina. This state was the first Islamic state  whose mission it was to  uphold Islam, to protect the Muslims and  to spread Islam. Under different pretenses, the Muslim  army under Muhammad  conquered tribe after tribe and Muhammad  states had taken most of Arabia by the  time he died. After his death, his followers  established the caliphate  and designated khalifs who, like Muhammad,  led  the state and the army to uphold and  spread Islam like Muhammad did. This caliphate continued fighting until  it was abolished by  Ataturk in the early 20th century.

Number three.  Muhammad’s life is  unclear. Trusting Muhammad is not the  only issue that we have. Even before we get to trusting Muhammad,  it is hard for us to establish  who Muhammad really was. The Quran deals  in much of its contents with the  political matters that are happening  during the time of its revelation. Aside from that it repetitively retells  fragments of  biblical stories and makes claims about  life, afterlife and Allah. It doesn’t really tell us much about  Muhammad himself what we know about  Muhammad comes from biographies, the first complete one of which came  into existence 120 years after  Muhammad’s death  and mostly relied on oral traditions. The  other primary source is the hadith, which  are transmitted narrations about  the actions and words of Muhammad and  his contemporaries. The first complete hadith  compilation was completed a century  after Muhammad’s death while the most  authentic compilations  only came into existence over two  centuries after his death. There are also many problems with the  hadith such as that many unreliable  hadiths exist  and that hadiths can only be rated as  authentic  if the narrators are Muslims of a good  character,  which under historical standards would  establish a bias  and put the authenticity of those  reports under doubt. So accounts of who Muhammad actually was  and what he really did  rely on late accounts that may be very  biased  and that makes it hard to trust the  Islamic tradition altogether.

Number two. Muhammad was illiterate or  ignorant. Among most Muslims, it is a  known fact that Muhammad was illiterate  although there is some dispute about  this. Generally, Muslims argue that it is  miraculous that Muhammad was illiterate  but yet he brought forth  the Quran, which was so much full of  knowledge,  which of course proves that the Quran  came from Allah. There are certain  problems about that such as that the  Quran only came into existence as a book  after Muhammad’s death. And that if we analyze and criticize  certain things within the Quran,  Muslims generally tend to reinterpret  the Quran and to deny that the Quran is  mistaken about  many issues. It is rather  unclear whether Muhammad was really  illiterate. The Quran refers to Muhammad as “ummiy” (Surah 7:157),  which is translated as “illiterate”  but the term could also stand for  unlettered, as in  ignorant such as ignorant of religion  and scripture  or ignorant of Abrahamic religion. In  fact,  the Quran does use the word in that way  in other parts (Surah 2:78, 7:157) and many hadith report him writing a  letter (Sahih Bukhari 2938, 65, 5875, 7162) or asking for a paper and a pen because  he wants to write a note (Sahih Bukhari 7366, 4432, 114). So although Muhammad’s illiteracy is  treated as a known fact,  it is in reality not really clear, it’s a  little bit ambiguous.

Number one. Finally we have the confusing idea  of the final messenger. The core Islamic idea surrounding  Muhammad’s prophethood  is not only that he was a messenger, a  prophet of Allah but that he was also  the final messenger. Islam teaches that  Allah sent  prophets before to all nations to warn  them  but Muhammad is the final messenger who  has come to  warn the people before the destruction  so they come onto the true path. If we look closer at the Quran and the  hadith, we see that the idea here was not  that Muhammad will be the last messenger,  and that the world will then go on  forever, the idea was rather that  judgment day, the last day, the end of the  world  is imminent. (Surah 33:63, 20:15, 54:1) It is very near about to  happen  and that Muhammad is the final messenger  who has come  to warn everybody before it happens. According to the early Islamic reports (Sahih Muslim 41:7044-7049),  Muhammad said  on multiple occasions that the last day  is about to happen (Sahih Muslim 2880-2881),  that it is extremely near, closer than  ever. He hinted and said that the events  of the last day are about to happen,  he feared that the end was about to  happen, he was in fact very specific in  prophesying the imminent end of the  world (Sahih Muslim 41:7050-7053, Sahih Bukhari 601, 564, Sahih Muslim 2538 etc.). There are many of these traditions which,  put together, make that very clear. So Muhammad’s title as the final  messenger was not just some  weird title. It served as the title of  the final messenger who comes before the  end. Insofar, Islam was very much a doomsday  cult which  failed.