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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Prophetic Character

Form

The Islamic argument from the character of Muhammad, as presented by Hamza Tzortzis and in most dawah literature:

  1. Before his call, Muhammad was known in Mecca as al-Amin, the trustworthy; his enemies never accused him of lying.
  2. He had no motive for fraud: he was persecuted, boycotted, driven from his city, and lived simply to the end.
  3. The message was consistent across twenty-three years, and its results, the unification of Arabia and a civilisation that endures, are not the work of a liar or a madman.
  4. Therefore he was neither deceiver nor deceived, and his claim to prophethood is true.

It is Lewis's Trilemma for Islam, and it fails in the same places.

My Positions

  1. The missing options are the same: sincere but mistaken, and later idealisation. A man can be honest and wrong about who is speaking to him. The experience in the cave on Mount Hira, with its terror, its sense of a presence, and its compelled speech, matches the pattern of religious experiences reported in every tradition, and sincerity about such an experience is evidence of sincerity (Experiential Argument). And the biography on which premise 1 rests was written by Ibn Ishaq some hundred and twenty years after the death and survives only in Ibn Hisham's edited version from the ninth century: the portrait of the trustworthy merchant is the tradition's memory of its founder, composed by believers (Circular Reasoning).
  2. The "no motive" premise stops at Medina. The Meccan years were hard; the Medinan years made him ruler of Arabia, commander of armies, recipient of a fifth of all plunder, and husband of a dozen wives. Revelations arrived that exempted him from the limit of four (33:50), permitted his marriage to his adopted son's former wife (33:37), and settled a quarrel in his household in his favour, to which Aisha is recorded as replying, "I see your Lord hastens to fulfil your desires" (Bukhari 4788). One need not conclude fraud; one must concede that the man who died master of a peninsula did not lack reward, and that the argument's picture is cherry-picked from one half of the career.
  3. Character and truth are different questions. Sincere, kind, and able people hold false beliefs; that is most of the human race. The Qur'an's claims do not become true because its messenger was honest, any more than Joseph Smith's plates become real because his neighbours liked him, and the contents are assessed separately (Inimitability of the Quran, Preservation of the Quran, Scientific Miracles in the Quran).
  4. Success is not truth. Christianity, Buddhism, and Mormonism also spread and endured. Islam's spread was, in its first century, by conquest, which is evidence of military and political ability and of nothing else.
  5. Each religion refutes the other's version. The Christian runs this argument for Jesus and rejects it for Muhammad; the Muslim does the reverse; each is right about the other. An argument form that its own users reject whenever it is applied to someone else's founder is not an argument but an expression of loyalty.

Sources

  • Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah, in Ibn Hisham's recension (9th century), trans. Guillaume, A., The Life of Muhammad (1955)
  • Tzortzis, H., The Divine Reality (2016)
  • Qur'an 33:37, 33:50; Sahih al-Bukhari 4788
  • Donner, F., Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (2010)
  • Hoyland, R., Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997), for the non-Muslim seventh-century sources

Also see