|
However, at that time, there were already thinkers who did more justice to Muhammad. Even if they refused to call him a prophet, they saw in him one of the greatest men who had ever lived. He is described as a wise and enlightened law-giver who created a sensible religion to replace the doubtful dogmas of the Jewish and Christian Faiths. Savary saw in Muhammad's religion a universal teaching which only contains what is reasonable: the belief in on God, in the rewarding of virtue and the punishment of crime. That Muhammad made his appearance as "Messenger of God" seemed to him to be a pious fraud dictated by reasons of prudence. The nineteenth-century Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, too, opposed the interpretation according to which Muhammad was an impostor and in the last century the historian Heinrich Leo expressed the following opinion: "But those who call a man like Muhammad a deceiver have a very paltry inner experience and poor understanding. They know nothing of that power of the spirit which motivates communities, and raises the leader of true communities to heights which have been inaccessible at all times to the common mind."
(137:1)
|