The Life of the Prophet Muhammad - Part II

Two explanations merit consideration. The first is from the pen of a distinguished Swedish scholar, who writes:

The cause....... may perhaps be best expressed by the proverb: Relatives understand each other least of all. A Christian sees much in Islam which reminds him of his own religion, but he sees it in an extremely distorted form. He finds ideas and statements of belief clearly related to those of his own religion, but which, nevertheless, turn off into strangely different paths. Islam is so familiar to us that we pass it by with the careless indifference with which we ignore that which we know and know only too well. And yet it is not familiar enough to us to enable us really to understand its uniqueness, and the spirit by which it has won its own place in the sphere of religion, a place which it still rightly occupies by virtue of its very existence. We find it much easier to understand religions that are completely new and strange to us-----as, for example, the religions of India and China. A greater degree of insight and of spiritual freedom is required of him who would understand the Arabian Prophet and his book.

A second explanation is presented by another scholar:

History has been such that the West's relations with the Islamic world have from the first been radically different from those with any other civilisation.......Europe has known Islam thirteen centuries, mostly as an enemy and a threat. It is no wonder that Muhammad more than any other of the world's religious leaders has had a "poor press" in the West, and that Islam is the least appreciated there of any of the world's other faiths. Until Karl Marx and the rise of communism, the Prophet had organized and launched the only serious challenge to Western civilisation that it has faced in the whole course of its history.......The attack was direct, both military and ideological. And it was very powerful.

( to be contd).
Courtesy: The Eternal Message of Muhammad.