Medieval Christian views on Muhammad
"During the Early Middle Ages, the Christian world largely viewed Islam as a Christological heresy and Muhammad as a false prophet. By the Late Middle Ages, Islam was more typically grouped with heathenism, and Muhammad was viewed as inspired by the devil. A more relaxed or benign view of Islam only developed in the modern period, after the Islamic empires ceased to be an acute military threat to Europe, see Orientalism.
The earliest documented Christian knowledge of Muhammad stems from Byzantine sources, written shortly after Muhammad's death in 632. With the Crusades of the High Middle Ages, and the wars against the Ottoman Empire during the Late Middle Ages, the Christian reception of Muhammad became more polemical, moving from the classification as a heretic to depiction of Muhammad as a servant of Satan or as the Antichrist, who will be suffering tortures in Hell.
Contents
1 Overview
1.1 Early Middle Ages
1.2 High Middle Ages
2 See also
3 Notes
4 References
4.1 Encyclopedias
Overview
Main articles: Criticism of Muhammad § Christian criticism, and Muhammad in the Bible § Muhammad as Antichrist
In contrast to the Islamic views of Muhammad, the Christian image stayed highly negative for over a millennium.[1][2][3]
Early Middle Ages
The earliest (documented) Christian knowledge of Muhammad stems from Byzantine sources, written shortly after Muhammad's death in 632. In the Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati, a dialogue between a recent Christian convert and several Jews, one participant writes that his brother "wrote to [him] saying that a deceiving prophet has appeared amidst the Saracens". Another participant in the Doctrina replies about Muhammad: "He is deceiving. For do prophets come with sword and chariot?, …[Y]ou will discover nothing true from the said prophet except human bloodshed".[4] Though Muhammad is never called by his name,[5][6] there seems to have been knowledge of his existence. It also appears that both Jews and Christians viewed him in a negative light.[7] Other contemporary sources, such as the writings of the Patriarch Sophronius, show there was no knowledge of the Saracens having their own prophet or faith, and only remark that the (Muslim) Saracen attacks must be a punishment for Christian sins.[8]
Knowledge of Muhammad was available in Christendom from after the early expansion of his religion[9][10] and, later, the translation of a polemical work by John of Damascus, who used the phrase "false prophet in "Heresies in Epitome: How They Began and Whence They Drew Their Origin.".[11][12] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Christian knowledge of Muhammad's life "was nearly always used abusively".[1] Another influential source was the Epistolae Saraceni or the “Letters of a Saracen†written by an Oriental Christian and translated into Latin from Arabic.[1] From the 9th century onwards, highly negative biographies of Muhammad were written in Latin,[1] such as the one by Alvarus of Cordoba proclaiming him the Anti-Christ.[13] Christendom also gained some knowledge of Muhammad through the Mozarabs of Spain, such as the 9th-century Eulogius of Cordova,[1] who was one of the Martyrs of Córdoba.
High Middle Ages
Further information: Vita Mahumeti
"Mohammed and the Murdered Monk", 1508 engraving by Lucas van Leyden – an incident unattested in Islamic accounts of the Prophet's life
In the 11th century Petrus Alphonsi, a Jew who converted to Christianity, was another Mozarab source of information on Muhammad.[1] Later during the 12th century Peter the Venerable, who saw Muhammad as the precursor to the Anti-Christ and the successor of Arius,[13] ordered the translation of the Qur'an into Latin (Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete) and the collection of information on Muhammad so that Islamic teachings could be refuted by Christian scholars.[1]
During the 13th century European biographers completed their work on the life of Muhammad in a series of works by scholars such as Pedro Pascual, Ricoldo de Monte Croce, and Ramon Llull[1] in which Muhammad was depicted as an Antichrist while Islam was shown to be a Christian heresy.[1] The fact that Muhammad was unlettered, that he married a wealthy widow, that in his later life he had several wives, that he was involved in several wars, and that he died like an ordinary person in contrast to the Christian belief in the supernatural end of Christ's earthly life were all arguments used to discredit Muhammad.[1]
Medieval scholars and churchmen held that Islam was the work of Muhammad who in turn was inspired by Satan. Muhammad was frequently calumniated and made a subject of legends taught by preachers as fact.[14] For example, in order to show that Muhammad was the anti-Christ, it was asserted that Muhammad died not in the year 632 but in the year 666 – the number of the beast – in another variation on the theme the number "666" was also used to represent the period of time Muslims would hold sway of the land.[13] A verbal expression of Christian contempt for Islam was expressed in turning his name from Muhammad to Mahound, the "devil incarnate".[15] Others usually confirmed to pious Christians that Muhammad had come to a bad end.[14] According to one version after falling into a drunken stupor he had been eaten by a herd of swine, and this was ascribed as the reason why Muslims proscribed consumption of alcohol and pork.[14] In another account of the alcohol ban, Muhammad learns about the Bible from a Jew and a heretical Arian monk. Muhammad and the monk get drunk and fall asleep. The Jew kills the monk with Muhammad's sword. He then blames Muhammad, who, believing he has committed the crime in a drunken rage, bans alcohol.[16]
Leggenda di Maometto is another example of such a story. In this version, as a child Muhammad was taught the black arts by a heretical Christian villain who escaped imprisonment by the Church by fleeing to Arabia; as an adult he set up a false religion by selectively choosing and perverting texts from the Bible to create Islam. It also ascribed the Muslim holiday of Friday "dies Veneris" (day of Venus), as against the Jewish (Saturday) and the Christian (Sunday), to his followers' depravity as reflected in their multiplicity of wives.[14] A highly negative depiction of Muhammad as a heretic, false prophet, renegade cardinal or founder of a violent religion also found its way into many other works of European literature, such as the chansons de geste, William Langland's Piers Plowman, and John Lydgate's The Fall of the Princes.[1]
Muhammad pulling his chest open in William Blake's illustration of Dante's Inferno
The thirteenth century Golden Legend, a best-seller in its day containing a collection of hagiographies, describes "Magumeth (Mahomet, Muhammad)" as "a false prophet and sorcerer", detailing his early life and travels as a merchant through his marriage to the widow, Khadija and goes on to suggest his "visions" came as a result of epileptic seizures and the interventions of a renegade Nestorian monk named Sergius.[17]
In Dante's Divine Comedy, Muhammad is in the ninth ditch of the eighth circle of hell, the realm for those who have caused schism; specifically, he was placed among the Sowers of Religious Discord. Muhammad is portrayed as split in half, with his entrails hanging out, representing his status as a heresiarch (Canto 28):
No barrel, not even one where the hoops and staves go every which way, was ever split open like one frayed Sinner I saw, ripped from chin to where we fart below.
His guts hung between his legs and displayed His vital organs, including that wretched sack Which converts to shit whatever gets conveyed down the gullet.
As I stared at him he looked back And with his hands pulled his chest open, Saying, "See how I split open the crack in myself! See how twisted and broken Mohammed is! Before me walks Ali, his face Cleft from chin to crown, grief–stricken."[18]
Mohammed tortured in Hell from fresco in San Petronio Basilica
This scene is frequently shown in illustrations of the Divina Commedia. Muhammad is represented in a 15th-century fresco Last Judgement by Giovanni da Modena and drawing on Dante, in the Church of San Petronio, Bologna, Italy,[19] as well as in artwork by Salvador DalÃ, Auguste Rodin, William Blake, and Gustave Doré.[20]
One common allegation laid against Muhammad was that he was an impostor who, in order to satisfy his ambition and his lust, propagated religious teachings that he knew to be false.[21] Cultural critic and author Edward Said wrote in Orientalism regarding Dante's depiction of Muhammad:
Empirical data about the Orient […] count for very little [i.e., in Dante's work]; what matters and is decisive is […] by no means confined to the professional scholar, but rather the common possession of all who have thought about the Orient in the West […]. What […] Dante tried to do in the Inferno, is […] to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are […] only for Europe. Hence the vacillation between the familiar and the alien; Mohammed is always the imposter (familiar, because he pretends to be like the Jesus we know) and always the Oriental (alien, because although he is in some ways "like" Jesus, he is after all not like him).[22]"
