A Rejoinder to Pope's Allegations Against Islam — Page 57
Ruth Cranston wrote: "Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be on him) never instigated fighting and bloodshed. Every battle he fought was in rebuttal. He fought in order to survive. . . and he fought with the weapons and in fashion of his time. . . Certainly no 'Christian' nation of 140,000,000 people who today dispatch (this is a book written in 1949) 120,000 helpless civilians with a single bomb can look askance at a leader who at his worst killed a bare five or six hundred. The slayings of the Prophet of Arabia (peace and blessings of Allah be on him) in the benighted and bloodthirsty age of the seventh century look positively puerile compared with our own in this 'advanced' and enlightened twentieth. Not to mention the mass slaughter by the Christians during the Inquisition and the Crusades - when, Christian warriors proudly recorded, they "waded ankle-deep in the gore of the Muslim infidels. " (Ruth Cranston 'World Faith'. Page 155. Ayer Publishing. (1949) James A. Michener wrote "Muhammad, the inspired man who founded Islam, was born about AD 570 into an Arabian tribe that worshipped idols. Orphaned at birth, he was always particularly solicitous of the poor and needy, the widow and the orphan, the slave and the downtrodden. At twenty he was already a successful businessman, and soon became director of camel caravans for a wealthy widow. When he reached twenty-five his employer, recognizing his meet, proposed marriage. Even though she was fifteen years older, he married her, and as long as she lived, remained a devoted husband. Like almost every major prophet before him, Muhammad fought shy of serving 57