Muhammad: His Character and Conduct. Adil Salahi
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The pursuit of right requires fairness in any situation where people are at odds. The Prophet was always keen to establish justice, no matter who the quarrelling parties were. This was his aim before he was chosen for his great role as the Prophet, and it continued to be his aim whenever two parties put their dispute to him for judgement. For example, in Chapter 1 we noted the situation when he was asked to arbitrate in the case of the dispute between the Quraysh clans over the honourable act of putting the black stone back in place. There were several options open to him. He could have argued a case for his own clan (the Hāshim clan) to do that honourable job, as the Hāshimites were the most honourable clan. He could have ruled in favour of the clan, or clans, that had little to do with the Kaʿbah and the pilgrimage. Such a ruling would have given them something to enhance their position. He could have chosen a neutral person, or argued for his own neutrality. He did nothing of that. Rather, he recognized that the situation required a measure of total fairness and opted for a verdict in which all clans shared on equal footing. That was a verdict of complete justice: achieving what is right.
After prophethood, Muhammad was the judge in all disputes within the Muslim community, or between Muslims and non-Muslims. He declared to all concerned that he could only judge on the basis of the evidence presented to him:
“Any of you,” he warned, “may come up with apparently stronger evidence, and I would rule in his favour. Let him consider: if I give him something that by right belongs to his brother, I am only giving him a brand of hellfire. He may choose to take it or leave it.”5
To a believer, this is a very strong warning, as it gives responsibility to the people concerned. They should know whether they have a rightful claim or not; or if they are in doubt, they should seek clarification. With this, the Prophet set a high standard of responsibility and made all people share in it, so that right and justice can be established.
In pre-Islamic days, Muhammad was very keen to be fair to all. When he was called upon to arbitrate, he ruled in fairness to all, because right requires fairness. When he became a Messenger of God, he elevated that to an even higher standard. An example pertains to the Jewish communities in Madinah. As stated in the previous chapter, the Jews were very unhappy about Islam and tried every method to undermine the Muslim community. They violated their treaty with the Prophet and sided with his enemies. However, when it came to judging cases involving the Jews, the Prophet set a clear example of ensuring justice. In one case, someone stole a shield of armour from another. Both belonged to the Anṣār, but apparently the thief was suspected of hypocrisy. When the evidence pointed to the real thief, he secretly hid the stolen shield in the home of a Jewish neighbour. He then asked his relatives to tell the Prophet that they had spotted the stolen shield in the Jew’s home. They did, and the Prophet rebuked the accuser. However, the Prophet received Qur’ānic revelations telling him the facts. These were recorded in verses 105-113 of Sūrah 4 (“Women”). What would any ruler do in such a situation, where the accused enemy is innocent and the unsuspected friend is guilty? Let us look at the argument for keeping matters as they appeared with the material evidence pointing to the Jew as the thief, since the stolen shield was found in his home. Sayyid Qutb writes:
Had human or worldly standards or considerations been the deciding factor in the Islamic code and its method of implementation, there would have been several reasons to overlook the whole event. A cover-up would have been concocted and the reality of the matter would not have been exposed in such a way as to approach a scandal. The first and clearest reason was that the accused himself was a Jew belonging to a Jewish community which was engaged in a tooth and nail fight against Islam, using every piece of armament at its disposal. The Muslims of that period were suffering much from the Jews’ wicked designs. [God has willed that the Muslims should suffer much from the Jews at all times!] Those Jews in Madinah were not restrained by considerations of right or justice. They applied no moral standard in their dealings with the Muslim community.
Another reason stems from the fact that the issue directly concerned a group of the Anṣār, the Muslims of Madinah who provided the Prophet and his Makkan Companions with refuge, support and protection. Such an incident could have easily caused much disunity and hatred among their different groups. To direct accusations at a Jew would have averted any likelihood of division among them.
A third reason for approving a cover-up was that it would have avoided giving the Jews in Madinah more armament with which to attack the Anṣār. Exposure would allow the Jews to denounce the Anṣār as stealing from one another and then falsely and knowingly accusing the Jews of committing their own crimes. The Jews were certain not to allow such an opportunity to pass them by.6
Without hesitation, the Prophet declared the Jew innocent. He was unconcerned with any of the considerations that would have swayed people in favour of a cover up. He was concerned with the establishment of rightness and fairness. He impressed on all his Companions that unfairness would lead to ruin, of both individual and community, because justice establishes right and strengthens the community. We see clearly how the pursuit of right led Muhammad to be fair in his verdict long before the advent Islam, and we can see how, under Islam, the pursuit of rightness made him set justice at a superior standard.
The pursuit of rightness appears to be something implanted in the nature of Muhammad from a very early age. This is clear in the report of his encounter with a Christian monk in Syria when he was still a child of twelve. The report is widely circulated in the sources of Islamic history, but its reliability cannot be absolutely ascertained. Several Orientalists consider it to be an important piece of evidence, and one that supports their claims that Muhammad met Christian clerics and learned from them. We do not need to discuss these claims here: except to say that if this is their evidence, then their case remains weak.
The report in question mentions that at the age of twelve Muhammad clung to his uncle Abū Ṭālib as the latter was about to set on a business trip to Syria with a trade caravan. A soft hearted uncle, Abū Ṭālib took his beloved nephew with him. The caravan route passed close to the hermitage of Baḥīrā, a Christian monk, who invited the people of the caravan to have a meal with him. As he served them, he kept looking at Muhammad. He then took him aside and questioned him about himself. He then asked him under an oath by al-Lāt and al-ʿUzzā, two of the main Arab idols. Muhammad interrupted him, saying: “Do not ask me by al-Lāt and al-ʿUzzā, for I hate nothing as I hate them.” Baḥīrā rephrased his question, putting it with an oath by God, and Muhammad answered him normally. After this conversation, Baḥīrā asked Abū Ṭālib what relation Muhammad was to him. When he confirmed that Muhammad’s father died before his birth, Baḥīrā told Abū Ṭālib to take extra care of his nephew as the Jews, in particular, could harm him.
The point here is the hatred expressed by a twelve-year-old to the idols worshipped by his people: this is not an attitude based on any religious principle. At that time Muhammad had no exposure to any religious teachings, other than what was known in Makkah, which was a very low form of idolatry. There were some people in Makkah who rejected idolatry, but none of them showed any inclination to start advocating a new religion. Even those whose rejection of idolatry was well known and reported were either still looking for a better faith, such as Waraqah ibn Nawfal, or were very young, such as Zayd ibn ʿAmr. This was an instinctive dislike based, perhaps, on personal observation that those deities were no more than man-made statutes.
The rejection of idolatry remained with Muhammad throughout his life. He was an adult when the incident of the idol Buwābah (reported in Chapter 1) occurred. As someone who was loved by all his family, he yielded to his aunts’ pressure and went to the festival of that idol, because it meant much to his family. Whenever he came near