Notes On the Enlightenment and the Prophet ﷺ

Ibn Maghreb

The creed of Mahomet is free from suspicion or ambiguity, and the Koran is a glorious testimony to the unity of God. The prophet of Mecca rejected the worship of idols and men, of stars and planets, on the rational principle that whatever rises must set, that whatever is born must die, that whatever is corruptible must decay and perish. In the author of the universe, his rational enthusiasm confessed and adored an infinite and eternal being, without form or place, without issue or similitude, present to our most secret thoughts, existing by the necessity of his own nature, and deriving from himself all moral and intellectual perfection … A philosophic theist might subscribe the popular creed of the Mahometans: a creed too sublime, perhaps, for our present faculties.

Muhammad: an anticlerical hero of the European Enlightenment | Aeon Ideas

Beyond the laudatory platitudes of Gibbon - (a writer notorious for writing exclusively in platitude without substance or real intent) lies a grave misunderstanding of the Prophet's ﷺ mission. In general, as Tolan surmises in his excellent essay - "During the European Enlightenment, a number of authors presented Muhammad in a similar vein, as an anticlerical hero; some saw Islam as a pure form of monotheism close to philosophic Deism and the Quran as a rational paean to the Creator".

Tolan is not alone, several historians of the Enlightenment have noted this curious and perplexing love affair of some authors with Islam - approximating it as a deism, to put it in stark contrast with the supposed obtuse and arcane superstitions of Christendom. As Jonathan Israel notes:

The Radical Enlightenment, as has been noted, entertained a curiously schizoid view of Islam and Mohammed. On the one hand, from the late seventeenth century and culminating in Boulainvilliers 'Vie de Mahmoed'... a work widely diffused through Europe - and republished in English...and Italian..Islam is view positively, even enthusiastically as a purified form of revealed religion, stripped of the many imperfections of Judaism and Christianity and hence reassuringly akin to deism.

From: “Despotism, Islam and the Politicization of 'Superstition'” (2003) in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the making of modernity 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

However, nothing could be further from the truth. Islam is not an arid theology of pure reason - a type of desert deism shorn of any mystery or wonder. Islam is not a philosophical creed resembling some vague amorphous worship of Reason. The primary impulse of Islam is Revelation - not reason. It is the ''revealedness'' of Islam that is its unique point of reference and connected to this notion of ''revealedness'' is the idea of Prophecy and Revelation.

For the Prophet ﷺ was not a postman of sorts as Omid Safi writes in his retelling of the Seerah narrative in contemporary times:

In other words, divine guidance is not simply sent to humanity as if through a UPS delivery. Guidance is more than simply a book—it is a book internalized by illuminated teachers whose ethics, behavior, and manners become the embodiments of the teaching. It is for this reason that I refer to this revolution not simply as an Islamic revolution, or even as a Qur’anic revolution, but as the Muhammadi Revolution. Ever since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, to be a follower of Muhammad, to be a child of Muhammad, has entailed in some sense being, or aspiring to become, Muhammad-like, or Muhammadi.

From: Safi, O. (2010) “The Muhammadi Revolution,” in Memories of Muhammad: Why the prophet matters. New York: HarperOne.

The notion of a moral exemplar is one completely and utterly shunned by all strands of Enlightenment thought - deemed as an inferior way of being in the world. Not just inferior in an intellectual sense but in a very human one i.e. those who disagreed with the dictates of Reason were met with the guillotine - as they were seen as subhuman and thus no longer worthy of holding so-called ''rights''. Nothing could be further from the gradualism and reformative creed of the Prophet ﷺ that sought not to condemn the past, to wage war against it but to simply reaffirm the good that came before, to refine it and channel it to the Divine through the bedrock of cultural practice that had already existed in communities.

Anyone who seeks to claim that the Enlightenment in some way was indebted to Islamic thought or to the mission of the Prophet ﷺ does not know either phenomenon. It is a fanciful slogan of counter-history. For Muslims, enthralled by Islamophilic presentations there is a real danger that we misunderstand our own tradition through the lens and work of supposed allies and sympathisers. We run the real risk of misappropriating the Islamic creed as a pseudo-deistic Enlightenment creed stripped of the complexity of ritual, mysticism and the embeddedness of Prophecy. There is a real threat of treating the Qur'an as a book of mere precepts as Ameer Ali did when he wrote his Victorian era apology ''The Spirit of Islam''. By adopting such assumptions we can commit hermeneutical errors that end up violating both the integrity of the Text and the Prophetic mission.

Instead, no longer should the Muslims be enamoured and in awe of Islamophilic presentations. There should be a pause, a moment to step back and consider the full gravity and import of what is being said and offered. Then there should be a careful unpacking to see if it matches up with mainstream Sunni notions of Prophecy and Revelation. One cannot square the monstrosities of Spinoza with Revelation and to be frank, one should not even attempt to do so.

And God Knows best