I’ve spent a lot of time trying to combat Islamophobia. Since 9/11, I’ve read the Quran several times, many of the Hadith, several biographies of Muhammad, and many histories of Islam. I created a blog where I debunked many of the most common myths about Muhammad. http://muslimbuddhist.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately, once you have debunked these myths, there are still a lot of things Muhammad did which would be immoral, even criminal, if they were done today in our society. To see them as the acts of a truly saintly and heroic man, you have to see the context in which he did them. Articles like yours express an attitude very common today which it makes it impossible to do that.

If you listen to Islamophobes like Sam Harris and Geert Wilders, all you will hear is things like “Islamic law gives women a smaller share of inheritance than men”. This ignores the fact that Muhammad created laws which made it possible for wives to inherit property at all. Before his time, wives could be inherited as property. Muhammad also created laws that limited corporal punishment of wives, which saved many a wife from bruises and broken bones. Today he gets condemned because he didn’t forbid corporal punishment entirely. There is, in fact, not a single case I know of where Muhammad made any new rules about women which didn’t improve their condition and give them more rights and protections. However, that’s impossible to see if you only judge his rules by comparing them to the kind of freedom that women have today.

Muhammad also put restrictions on slavery which made it far more humane than the 19th century American version. For example, Muhammad forbid selling a slave away from their family, and even made it possible for a slave to sue their master in court if they were mistreated. But he still permitted slavery, and owned slaves himself, some of whom were his sexual slaves. More on this here:

https://teedrockwell.medium.com/save-our-imperfect-moral-heroes-e490dced158c

I have a very low opinion of Donald Trump, but I am reasonably sure he never enslaved anyone. I am not going to conclude from this that Donald Trump has a higher moral character than Muhammad. Why? Because of context, because “things were different then.” Because Muhammad made the world a better place by reducing certain injustices, even though he didn’t eliminate them entirely. That doesn’t make it OK that Muhammad (or Jefferson) enslaved people. But it does make what they did more forgivable, and invalidates the impulse to totally dismiss someone as a monster or savage because they followed the behavioral codes of their time. They may have ignored the few rebels of their time who were more aligned with modern sensibilities, and they would have been better people if they had listened to those rebels. But that doesn’t level the playing field. Those rebels were extraordinary saints who deserve praise. Anybody who believes the same thing today gets no praise at all. Donald Trump and William Lloyd Garrison both acknowledge that slavery is wrong. That doesn’t make them moral equals. Conversely, those people who were complicit in the institution of slavery were the worse for it morally, but that doesn’t put them on the same level as someone who would kidnap and enslave someone today.

If you want to see the dangers of this kind of moral leveling, take a look at some of the texts written by 19th century historians. They justified colonialism by focusing on the numerous ways in which Asian, African and Native American peoples had moralities that were different from ours. This made it impossible to appreciate the wisdom and artistry of these cultures, which justified the conclusion that these people were unredeemable savages who couldn’t govern themselves. This is the same kind of reasoning that is used to dismiss the numerous accomplishments of Washington and Jefferson because they owned slaves, and it creates the same kind of loss. I don’t have any problems with criticizing people or cultures in the past for not living up to our standards. History should tell the truth. But the truth should include their heroism and wisdom along with their failings. We must remember that we are their superiors only because we are standing on their shoulders.