Muhammad

Muhammad was a monotheist prophet. Monotheism is the belief that there is one God, and only one. It is a simple idea; and like many simple ideas, it is not entirely obvious. Over the last few thousand years it has probably been the general consensus of human societies that there are numerous gods (though men have certainly held very different views as to who these gods are and what they do). The oldest societies to have left us written records, and hence direct evidence of their religious beliefs, were polytheistic some five thousand years ago; by the first millennium BC there is enough evidence to indicate that polytheism was the religious norm right across the Old World.

It did not, however, remain unchallenged. In the same millennium ideas of a rather different stamp were appearing among the intellectual elites of the more advanced cultures. In Greece, Babylonia, India and China there emerged a variety of styles of thought which were noticeably more akin to our own abstract and impersonal manner of looking at the world. The tendency was to see the universe in terms of grand unified theories, rather than as the reflection of the illcoordinated activities of a plurality of personal gods. Such ways of thinking rarely led to denial of the actual existence of the gods, but they tended to tidy them up in the interests of coherence and system, or to reduce them to a certain triviality.

The traditional biography of Muhammad presents his career as a remarkable combination of religion and politics, and this combination can fairly be seen as the key to his success. As we saw, he made little headway as a prophet until he became a successful politician; but at the same time, his political opportunity turned on his credentials as a prophet. His religion and his politics were not two separate activities that came to be entangled; they were fused together, and this fusion was expressed doctrinally in the distinctive vocabulary of monotheist politics that pervades the Koran. The theme of this vocabulary is quite literally revolution, the triumph of the believers against the pervasive oppression of unbelief.

From the numerous Koranic references to the oppression to which believers are exposed, we may pick out one particularly evocative term: mustad'af . Literally it means 'deemed weak'; an apt translation might be 'underdog', but here I shall settle for the less colourful rendering 'oppressed'. The term is quite loaded, and like most of them, it is not confined to the context of Muhammad 's own career. Striking examples of its use are to be found in the Koranic versions of the story of Moses and Pharaoh. Here Pharaoh's iniquities include oppressing a section of the population (i.e. the Israelites). God, however, wishes an end to this injustice: 'We desire to be gracious to those who have been oppressed in the land,. . . to make them the inheritors, and to establish them in the land' (K 28.4-5);