Myths about the Holy Prophet - Part 1: "Epileptic plagiarist!"

Following on from my last post about the misconceptions of women in Islam, I wanted to discuss yet another controversial subject that is used to criticise Islam and Muslims across the world. Our Holy Prophet Muhammed (S.A.W.), has become an unnecessarily controversial figure of attack from non-Muslims and those with an Islamaphobic agenda. The allegations, misconceptions and myths surrounding our Holy Prophet are the most painful, hurtful, outrageous and offensive.

From the famous 14th century poem, Dante's Inferno by an Italian poet, which placed the Holy Prophet in hell to Salman Rushdie's infamous "Satanic Verses" which portrayed the Holy Prophet as a dishonest and immoral man. The Danish cartoons in 2006 which depicted him as a lustful suicide bomber, Western literature and culture and of course, a media infected by Islamaphobia has been intent on trying to demonise and dismiss our Holy Prophet.

Non-Muslims fail to understand our attachment and relationship with the Holy Prophet, and fail to understand why we get so offended when he is insulted. Love for the Holy Prophet is a measure of ones faith and as the Quran say, our faith is completed only when our love for the Holy Prophet exceeds our love for everything else in this world, including our own lives: "The Prophet is closer to the believers than their selves..." (Surah 33, Verse 6)

And it's not just non-Muslims, certain Muslim groups also try to talk the Prophet down and try to deprive him of his true status not just in Islam, but in the entire history of mankind. Sunni Wahhabis and Salafis treat the Holy Prophet as a glorified postman, he delivered the Quran, he died, he's gone, forget him - he was no different to any other man they claim. In this next series of posts, I would like to discuss these allegations and attacks (non-Muslim and Muslim) that are directed towards the Holy Prophet and try to dispel and expose them for the lies and myths that they truly are.

For centuries, many Westerners have tried to argue that the Holy Prophet was somehow a false Prophet, fraudulent, mad, dishonest who borrowed from Judaism and Christianity to create his own false religion, Islam. It's perhaps best expressed in recent years by the well-known atheist author Christopher Hitchens who referred to the Holy Prophet in his book "God Is Not Great," as an "epileptic plagiarist."


Over the years, some critics have tried to argue that the periods of Quranic revelations from the Angel Gabriel where in fact epileptic fits that the Prophet suffered. Others have claimed that the Holy Prophet was a con artist who copied chunks of the Bible, copied the stories of Jesus, Moses and Abraham. Hitchens however, does us a favour, by combining the two. How can one be an epileptic plagiarist? How can you be both? Either you're an epileptic who is having seizures which are then being misinterpreted as revelation from God, or you are a clever, calculating con-man who is consciously and deliberately stealing stories from other religions and trying to pass them off as new. You cannot be both surely.

Where is the evidence that the Holy Prophet suffered with epilepsy? Modern medicine characterises epilepsy and epileptic seizures as a loss of consciousness, loss of memory and physical collapse. The Holy Prophet suffered with none of these symptoms whilst receiving revelation. On the contrary, he was coming out of those periods with new information, new instructions, new verses, new guidance, new facts. Are we really expected to believe that the greatest piece of Arabic literature ever produced in human history was a result of a series of epileptic fits? You’d have to have blind faith to believe that!

As for the plagiarism accusation, it’s so lazy. Have these people read the Quran and the Bible? Seen the differences in the stories? For example, the birth of Jesus and how it is narrated in the Gospels and how it is narrated in the Surah Ale Imran, chapter 3, of the Quran? Totally different. Read the stories of Prophets Hud and Saleh, whose names do not even appear in the Bible. Also, where were all these Christian and Jewish scholars that Muhammad copied from? There weren’t any in Makkah when he declared his prophethood – even Professor Patricia Crone, writing in the New York Times, in 2002, acknowledged there were not “substantial number of Jews and Christians” in Makkah at that time and therefore it is a fallacy to claim that Muhammad copied the Quran from the Jewish Torah or the Christian Bible. It is a myth!

Next time, I'll be discussing the allegation that leads to some outrageous and offensive claims about our Holy Prophet that centre around the claim the he married a 6 year old girl.