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Muhammad
Muhammad
God instructs us in his Word to test the prophets and we find
in scripture not only clear criteria for this testing but also
reports of many true and many false prophets so that we have
examples that help us in this evaluation.
To test whether a prophet is from God or a false prophet we have
to look at both, his message and his life. Muslim theology itself
acknowledges the importance of the lives of the prophets as an
essential part of the criteria to evaluate the legitimacy of a
prophetic claim so much so that it has created the doctrine of
the sinlessness of the prophets which goes much further than
the Biblical criteria.
There have been many people claiming prophethood both before and
after Muhammad. Muslims easily reject the prophetic claims of
Joseph Smith (founder of the Mormons, no relation to Islam),
Baha'ullah (Bahais, acknowledging Muhammad as true, but moving
on to further revelation) and the Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (Ahmadiyya,
understanding himself to be a reformer of Islam, not with new
revelation) based on the "easy" criterion that Muhammad said
there will be no prophet after him.
Even though Muslims will certainly not be pleased by the material
linked from this page, nor might they agree with us on the criteria
for this test, we hopefully can agree that claims to prophethoood
need to be tested whether the claimant's message truly comes
from God or not, and this includes theclaims of Muhammad about
himself and his message. We will provide references to Muslim
sites and their view about Muhammad and why he is a true prophet.
But in those presentations a number of issues are regularly left
out. A true evaluation has to deal with all the facts and cannot
be satisfied with a selective presentation.
These articles are not written to aggravate Muslims, even though
this is probably the section on the "Answering Islam" site which
will produce the strongest (emotional) reactions. Our sincere
hope is that the material will help both Muslims and Christians
come to a more realistic evaluation and view about Muhammad based
on a fuller presentation of evidences from the sources. In that
respect, I hope that even Muslims will find the material helpful
for themselves to not be ignorant regarding parts of their history.
The first and most important of each evaluation of a claim to prophethood
is the testing of the message. The testing of the prophet based on his
life is secondary. Therefore we urge our readers to first study the section
on the Evaluation of the Qur'an
before proceeding with the below material.
A lot of biographical and background information on life and person of
Muhammad can be found via the Index to Islam.
For Christians the most important issue is whether Muhammad is a
legitimate / true prophet in the tradition of the Biblical revelation.
In particular, the issue whether he is announced in the scriptures:
Further Miscellanea:
Comparison studies
Answering Islam Home Page