Through Force or Faith? — Page 17
Refutation of the Allegations Made Against Islam 17 I shall now present some examples of what the fair-minded Christian Orientalists say about the Holy Prophet s as. Thomas Carlyle says: Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his reli- gion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well mean- ing zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to our- selves only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet’s ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof ! 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. These hun- dred-and-eighty millions were made by God as well as we. A greater number of God’s creatures believe in Mahomet’s word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual leg- erdemain, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have lived by and died by? I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition. I will believe most things sooner than that. One would be entirely at a loss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and were sanc- tioned here. ( On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, by Thomas Carlyle, pp. 42–43, published in 1906 by Longmans, Green and Co. , London and Bombay)