that was before Gibbon, a famous orientalist and historian, when he opined on it. Bosworth Smith writes about it in Mohammed and Mohammedanism (Lecture II, R. Bosworth Smith; Smith, Elder & Co., 15 Waterloo Place, London, (1874)) as follows:To begin with, I recited before you the Kalima Shahada. Then I read the opening chapter of the Holy Qur’an and a verse from a chapter called Al-Kahf. Kalima Shahada, which I recited, was the more elaborate version of the one generally known. It is in two parts; first, Allah is one, there is no God but Allah; and the other, Muhammad is His servant, a man and a Prophet. The emphasis is on man before you move on to consider him as a prophet.
It was the shorter version of the Kalima, that was before Gibbon, a famous orientalist and historian, when he opined on it. Bosworth Smith writes about it in Mohammed and Mohammedanism (Lecture II, R. Bosworth Smith; Smith, Elder & Co., 15 Waterloo Place, London, (1874)) as follows:
“It is almost equally strange that Gibbon, who has done such full justice to Mohammed in the general result, should say at starting, ‘Mohammed’s religion consists of an eternal truth, and a necessary fiction—There is one God, and Mohammed is his prophet’.”
(Page 82)
Smith goes on to develop this by saying:
“It was, as I have endeavoured to show, no fiction to Mohammed himself or to his followers; had it been so, Mohammedanism could never have risen as it did, nor be what it is now.”
(Pages 82-83)
We are grateful to Bosworth Smith for fairly presenting one excellent western attitude towards Islam, and particularly towards the Holy Founder of Islam, Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. He discussed the two phases of Islam’s rise and fall in his lecture Mohammed and Mohammedanism and I quote from him:
“During the first few centuries of Mohammedanism, Christendom could not afford to criticise or explain; it could only tremble and obey. But when the Saracens had received their first check in the heart of France, the nations which had been flying before them, faced round, as a herd of cows will sometimes do when the single dog that has put them to fight is called off; and though they did not yet venture to fight, they could at least calumniate their retreating foe.”
(Page 56)
Now follow the examples of calumniation as recorded by Smith; he says:
“In the romance of ‘Turpin’, quoted by Renan, Mohammed, the fanatical destroyer of all idolatry, is turned himself into an idol of gold, and, under the name of Mawmet, is reported to be the object of worship at Cadiz.”
(Page 57)
Then he says:
“He is Antichrist, the Man of Sin, the Little Horn, and I know not what besides; nor do I think that a single writer, with the one strange exception of the Jew Maimonides, till towards the middle of the eighteenth century, treats of him as otherwise than a rank impostor and false prophet.”
(Page 61)
To build this subject further, he goes on quoting from Renan (page 224):
“The romances of Baphomet, so common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, attribute any and every crime to him, just as the Athanasians did to Arius, ‘He is a debauchee, a camel stealer, a Cardinal, who having failed to obtain the object of every Cardinal’s ambition, invents a new religion to revenge himself on his brethren!’ ”
(Page 59)
“ … he occupies a conspicuous place in the ‘Inferno’. Dante places him in his ninth circle among the sowers of religious discord.”
(Page 59)
“With the leaders of the Reformation, Mohammed, the greatest of all Reformers, meets with little sympathy, .and their hatred of him, as perhaps was natural, seems to vary inversely as their knowledge. Luther doubts whether he is not worse than Leo; Melancthon believes him to be either Gog or Magog, and probably both.”
(See ‘Quarterly Review’, Art. Islam by Deutsch, No. 254, P. 296, Mohammed and Mohemmadanism Lecture II Pages 59-60)