All about The Great Personality Prophet Muhammad PBUH
He's someone of the valour that when biggest of calamites and tribulations came across/hit his way, he's not intimidated. His mercy embraces all of his lord's creation. Someone who was known and referred to as the "trustworthy and truthful" in his society. An embodiment of empathy and magnonimity evident from the incidents throughout his blessed life, one for instance being him running into a caravan which was starving and wasn't accessible even to the basic necessities to survive. As soon as the Muhammad PBUH got back to his home, his body temperature began to rise out of grief. He therefore wrapped himself in a blanket and the empathy to the plight of caravan got him shivering. Later on, he helped them out in the best of ways but that's a story for another day . All I want here is to draw your attention towards his immense sensitivity to peoples' suffering and inability to let them suffer.
Someone of magnonimity that while he himself is starving and at last gets to have some meagre meal to stay alive and when some beggar or seeker questions , he donates his food without a second thought. The one when he promised someone never failed to keep it even if he had to wait at the spot for 3 days. The words here refer to an incident where someone asked the prophet to stay at a place and he would be right back after his work. However the person got this slipped his mind and when he suddenly recalled after three days, he found the man of highest moral character standing there waiting graciously.
Someone of humility that when he sat with his companions aced it with so much of humility that an outsider couldn't find out or ascertain the group leader/ master. Who asked people not to stand up for him when he arrived. Who being the most exalted and superior of the whole of mankind never let anybody feel inferior or subaltern. The one when he came across a group of children, greeted them with salutation.
The one with magnonimity to forgive arch enemies and not allowing the human intentions of revenge to overpower the great will to forgive and let go. "Habshi" a black, who brutally killed his uncle "Hamza" was forgiven to the amazement of all as soon as he felt guilty and accepted Islam. He was Muhammad the one who embraced the commander and his armies who once gave his group a crushing defeat. He was the one who forgave even the betrayers.
Muhammad was born in the most noble lineage of Arab i.e, Quraish. The wisdom behind this also being that the mission of Muhammad doesn't create impression of him being a social climber in his enemies' minds. He already belonged to the highest strata of the society back then so there was no chance, by any means that he's trying to fit in a particular elite group of the society, as alleged by some of his benighted enemies, who consciously ignored the fact that he already belong to one.
Muhammad PBUH lived a simple minimalistic life.
Inspite of being offered immense wealth by his lord, he rejected every luxury, this world has to offer, fearing the inability of the less privileged of the Ummah ( his followers) to imitate him or follow his ways. He was the most sensitive of mankind yet suffered the most, got mocked, insulted and stoned in his lifetime but he reverted back not with revenge but forgiveness and mercy even to those who hurted him the most.
This was Muhammad,the most beloved of creations, the closest entity to the creator and the sustainer.
He cried for the salvation and reform of mankind day in day out and sacrificed his own life for others to get liberated from the clutches of oppression and darkness. The one responsible for the paradigm shift in an illiterate and an absolutely ignorant society, the likes of Arab and it is something which accentuates his sublimity, greatness and prophethood.
Arabs were arrogant, illiterate, chauvinist, irrational, conceited, hot headed and ignorant.
Imagine purifying such kind of people and tackling such wretched society!!!
Seems almost impossible, right?
But history is a witness that at the end of Muhammad's mission, the Arabs were the most humble, composed, sincere, rational, intellectual and powerful.
This is The Muhammad!
(فداك امي و ابي)
But unfortunately with the passage of a few centuries, Arab's decline kicked in ,due to their own misdeeds and leaving the way of Muhammad.
British took over, French took over. Arabs were disgraced.
But the followers of Muhammad, before the sunrise of dooms day , will once again take over, if GOD wills.
DG Hogarth writes : "Serious or trivial, his daily behaviour has instituted a canon which millions observe this day with conscious memory . No one regarded by any section of the human race as perfect man has ever been imitated so minutely.
The conduct of the founder of Christianity has not governed the ordinary life of his followers.
Moreover, no founder of a religion has leftover on so solitary an eminence as the Muslim apostle.
His daily behaviour has indeed instituted a canon which millions have been following for centuries now but that number has sharply deceased in current times, unfortunately. Those who claim to have subscribed to his ideology and his belief and boast of following him are not doing so in actuality. Some of them are unaware of his life in the first place and even those who are familiar with it, only a minority of them is acting upon his commands. This phenomenon at large is counter productively the reason behind the misrepresentation of Islam by muslims and the eventual alienation of the audience . This is also the reason behind the decline, as i mentioned above.
Pardon me for the big time digression. I get back to my subject.
'Muhammad is the only man in history supremely successful on both the secular and religious grounds" Michael H hart stated.
There's been several confusions in the intellectual circles regarding Muhammad, two of which I address here. Can Prophet Muhammad be considered a feminist?
He is somehow considered to be a feminist by some feminist groups which is something arguable and debatable (as the definition of feminism has not been the same forever). This should be made very clear that he was not a feminist as per today's standards at all and imputing this to him would be nothing short of an impudence. Although he was undoubtedly a women right activist who fought for women being buried alive, being oppressed , disparaged and demeaned. He established explicit rights for women. At the time of severe ignorance when women weren't given even a human status, let alone the concept of "second sex" and "otherness", Muhammad got the divinely sanctioned rights of inheritance and property, social and marriage rights ( including the right to reject the terms of a proposal and initiate divorce) enforced and implemented in his blessed lifetime.
Secondly, Can Muhammad SAW, by any chance, be called a philosopher?
Muhammad is not a philosopher in the sense that philosophy involves a quest of knowledge and he possessed all knowledge requisite to his mission. Therefore he needed not to seek any knowledge because he just had it instinctually.
This is not to say that their teachings do not suggest philosophical questions, e.g. about the attributes of God or the nature of free will. But one is not a philosopher simply because what one says prompts philosophical questions.
Muhammad is a philosopher in a way that before the onset of the revelation, Muhammad was very perplexed about the , he tried to seek it by all means, his meditations in the mountains are famous, his sublime thought is v much conspicuous in his life before prophethood , his wisdom is evident in his daily - social life affairs and decision making among the disputed groups. Muhammad's SAW meditations at Gaar e Hira covered all those phases of a philosopher's and a truth seeker's life, seeking to understand the universal fundamental truths about the world , about themselves and their relation, seeking the answers to all sorts of metaphysical, existential and ethical questions. His journey was facilitated by GOD thus making him reach the ultimate truth at the end in the form of divine revelation : as stated by the late Islamic scholar Dr Israr Ahmed.
"He was Caeser and Pope in one, but he was Pope without the Pope's pretensions and Caesar without the legions of Caeser.Without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue, if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by a right divine, it was Muhammad; for he had all the power without it's instruments and without it's supports." comments Reverend Bosworth Smith, a Christian bishop and historian.
And as Alphonse De Lamartaine states " If greatness of purpose , smallness of means and astonishing results are the three criteria of human genius , who would dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad ?
The most famous men created arms , laws and empires only . They founded , if anything at all, material powers , which often crumbled away before their eyes.
This man not only moved armies , legislation and empires , dynasties but millions of men in one third of then inhabited world, and more than that, he moved the altars" and i add in here that he moved the then falsely worshipped gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls.
Conclusively, i would state that Muhammad's personality is so vast, multifaceted and heterogeneous that it's impossible to get into it's entirety even on basic human level, let alone his spiritual status and being which is so beyond a human mind. Let alone ordinary human beings, even the highest of the saints ,Sufis and philosophers can't fathom the levels of Muhammad's spiritualiy. We can only seek inspiration from his qualities as a human being for eg. his conscientiousness, his generosity, his integrity and his magnonimity so on and so forth. but what should remain very conspicuous that this spiritual flight and sublimity of Muhammad SAW doesn't make him a GOD, by any means. He's not, but a special human being and a slave of almighty GOD.
Trying to get into too much of depths regarding Sayyidina Muhammad SAW is a risky road. We may not appreciate him the way he deserves to be and that's what in the parlance of theology and metaphysics, impudence is. We can't possibly fathom his due greatness and that may lead to the estimation of his stature according to our limited human minds , which might be far less superior than the actual one.
Here are two Persian poems or more accurately odes of praise which summarise my argument in the last paragraph -
يا صاحب الجمال و يا سيد البشر
من وجهك المنير لقد نور القمر
لا يمكن الثناء كما كان حقه
بعد از خدا بزرگ توی قصه مختصر
~ شیخ صادی رح
Translation in English
"O handsome being - O the master of mankind"
"From your radiant face-Sparkled the moon"
"Impossible is your due praise"
"Most exalted is your hierarchy after God- To be precise"
~Sheikh Saadi RA
بلغ الا لا بکماله
کشفت الدجا بجماله
حسنت جمیع خصاله
صلوا علیه و آله
Translation in English
"He reached the pinnacle through his perfection"
"And enlightened the universe with his luminescence"
"How beautiful are your attributes!"
"Peace be upon you and your people (companions)".
