Islam and the Freedom of Conscience — Page 119
~ 119 ~ Discussing the Prophet sa ’s marriage and his domestic relations, Carlyle wrote: ''How he was placed with Khadija, a rich Widow, as her steward, and travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed all, as one can well understand, with fidelity and adroitness; how her gratitude, her regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is altogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us by the Arab authors. He was twenty five; she forty. He seems to have lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way, with this wedded benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of his years, was done. '' 62 ''Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to anyone. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only…It is really time to dismiss all that. The word this man spoke has been the life- guidance now of a hundred and eighty millions of men these twelve hundred years [He was writing this in the 62 Thomas Carlyle. On Heroes, Hero ‐ Worship and the Heroic in History. Wiley and Putnam. , NY. p. 48 (1846)