They Said About Him
The famous poetess of India says about Islam: "It was the first religion that preached and practiced democracy; for in the mosque, when the call for prayer is sounded and worshippers are gathered together, the democracy of Islam is embodied five times a day when the peasant and king kneel side by side and proclaim: 'God Alone is Great'! I have been struck over and over again by this indivisible unity of Islam that makes man instinctively a brother." Ideals of Islam, video Speeches and Writings, Madras, 1918, p.169 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Muhammad was the soul of kindness, and his influence was felt and never forgotten by those around him." D.C. Sharma, The Prophets of The East, Calcutta, 1935, pp. 12 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as Divine Law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment." Noten und Abhandlungen zum Weststlichen Dvan, WA I, 7, 32 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "It is not the propagation but the permanency of his religion that deserves our wonder, the same pure and perfect impression which he engraved at Mecca and Medina is preserved, after the revolutions of twelve centuries by the Indian, the African and the Turkish proselytes of the Koran...The Mahometans have uniformly withstood the temptation of reducing the object of their faith and devotion to a level with the senses and imagination of man. 'I believe in One God and Mahomet the Apostle of God', is the simple and invariable profession of Islam. The intellectual image of the Deity has never been degraded by any visible idol; the honors of the prophet have never transgressed the measure of human virtue, and his living precepts have restrained the gratitude of his disciples within the bounds of reason and religion." History of the Saracen Empire, London, 1870, p. 54: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "It is impossible for anyone who studies the life and character of the great Prophet of Arabia, who knows how he taught and how he lived, to feel anything but reverence for that mighty Prophet, one of the great messengers of the Supreme. And although in what I put to you I shall say many things which may be familiar to many, yet I myself feel whenever I re-read them, a new way of admiration, a new sense of reverence for that mighty Arabian teacher." "But do you mean to tell me that the man who in the full flush of youthful vigour, a young man of four and twenty (24), married a woman much his senior, and remained faithful to her for six and twenty years (26), at fifty years of age when the passions are dying married for lust and ***ual passion? Not thus are men's lives to be judged. And you look at the women whom he married, you will find that by every one of them an alliance was made for his people, or something was gained for his followers, or the woman was in sore need of protection." The Life and Teachings of Muhammad, Madras 1932, p. 4