Interview between Ahmad Gunny and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd about Prophet Muhammad in French and English literature.

Prophet Muhammad:

“Sent as a mercy to all people” the Glorious Qur’an 21:107.

Prophet Muhammad said: "I have been sent to perfect the noble traits of character".

Some of Western thinkers wrote, seeing Muhammad as both a prophet and a politician, W. Montgomery Watt. Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman. Muhammad at Medina, Muhammad at Mecca, Armstrong in a Prophet for Our Time, Thomas Carlyle, who was among the first people to speak against the Christian lies against Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, Hart recognized that ranking Muhammad first might be controversial, but felt that, from a secular historian's perspective, this was the correct choice because Muhammad is the only man to have been both a founder of a major world religion and a major military/political leader.

Steven B. Western wrote Muhammad Prophet of God.

Professor John Adair wrote ‘The Leadership of Muhammad’.

I found myself wishing I had known the Prophet; Professor Peterson presents a very human picture of Muhammad, his locale and times. His early history includes the known material, without additional speculation.

That Muhammad's teachings and more importantly his actions were magnanimous is repeatedly illustrated.

Muhammad In Europe: A Thousand Years In Western Myth-making.

Generations of Western writers from the Crusades to the present day have written portraits claiming to depict the life and personality of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

Over the course of thirteen centuries, stubbornly biased and consistently negative representations have persisted, presenting images which bear no resemblance to the noble man familiar to Muslims. Muhammad in Europe traces this consistent tradition of distortion and provides an account of the reasons behind it.

Professor Ahmad Gunny is a pioneer in the study of French and European literary and theological representations of Islam in the modern period, he has been studying and wrote a great book The Prophet Muhammad in French and English literature 1650 to the present 2010.

It is necessary to talk in this interview to show Prophet Muhammad in French and English literature.

Professor Ahmad Gunny:

Professor Ahmad Gunny is fellow and senior associate at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

He has been a pioneer in the study of French and European literary and theological representations of Islam in the modern period,  Second Secretary, Mauritius High Commission, London 1965-68, Appointed First Secretary, Mauritius Embassy, Pakistan 1970.

Lecturer in French, Liverpool University.

Senior Lecturer in French, Liverpool University 1982-97 then Visiting Fellow, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Reader in French, Liverpool University, Honorary Senior Fellow, Liverpool University.

In 1999- Fellow and Senior Associate, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

1999-2009.Seminars on various aspects of Islam in European writings from the seventeenth century to the present at St Antony’s College, All Souls College, Hertford College, Maison Française and Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

In 1989 he gave a paper at an international conference in Tunis on ‘La Révolution Française et le monde Arabo-musulman’. In December 2004 he returned to Tunis to give a paper on ‘Les philosophes des Lumières, Kant et l’Islam’ at the Institut Supérieur des Sciences Humaines de Tunis.

At the invitation of Leicester University’s Centre for the History of Religions and Political Pluralism he delivered the sixth Geza Vermes Lecture on ‘Islam and the Enlightenment :some changing perspectives’ in March 2002.

At the invitation of the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, he gave 5 lectures in its series‘ Chaire de l’IMA’ on ‘ L’Islam dans la littérature européenne du XVIIe au XIX siècle’ between January and February 2004.

His books:

• Voltaire and English literature 1979.

• Images of Islam in eighteenth-century writings 1996.

• Perceptions of Islam in European writings 2004.

• The study focuses on the period 1787-1892.

• The Prophet Muhammad in French and English literature 1650 to the present 2010.

In 2008 the French Government appointed him a ‘Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques’ for his contribution to the diffusion of French language and culture.

He was invited by the University of Qatar to be a Visiting Professor there during March-April 2009. He gave 5 lectures on Islam and the West in various Faculties.

He should have gone to Islamabad in March 2011 in order to read a paper on French-speaking writers' contribution to Sirah, but for some reasons he wasn’t able to travel, thanks to his acclaimed critical studies, as well as to his definitive editions of Voltaire, students and scholars alike have found in his work new and important directions for research.

Q: It is great to study Prophet Muhammad in French and English literature: From the twentieth century to the present, this magisterial survey of the Prophet Muhammad over three hundred and fifty years in French, we read what Voltaire wrote about Prophet Muhammad, Mahomet, a Play in Five Acts in 1741 and complete and unabridged translation in New York in 1901, are there many or some who fellow Voltaire's?

Professor Gunny: The Prophet of Islam has always attracted attention in the West. It should be remembered that France has had the longest association with Islam and her writers have produced some of the most outstanding works on Islamic culture and Muhammad. That is why my emphasis is on French writers, although I recognize the achievement of other nations. While Muhammad is the subject of study by many Western writers, they rarely portray him in drama. Goethe (1749-1832) did intend his poem Mahomets Gesang (1773) to be part of a tragedy on the Prophet’s life, but he did not develop it. However, it depicts a very positive image of Muhammad who leads his followers to God: no temptations turn him from his path. Western writers often relied solely on their wild imagination, the most notorious example being Dante who, in the Divine Comedy (c.1307-1321), makes Muhammad suffer the torments of Hell. As late as the eighteenth century, Voltaire (1694-1778) completely ignored the historical figure of Muhammad in his play Mahomet (1742) which he dedicated to Pope Benedict XIV, hoping to win his support for election to the Académie Française. He created an imaginary character called Mahomet whom he painted in the darkest possible colors. However, he later became more positive towards the Prophet. In the Essai sur les moeurs (1756), for example, he listed the historical achievements of Muhammad. There and elsewhere in his writings, he stressed the fundamental teachings of Muhammad, including that on the unity of God.

Q: You studied English Literary Influences on Voltaire, Could you elaborate on that statement?

For centuries Prophet Muhammad hasn’t been viewed as a Prophet by French and English writers, the notable exception being Carlyle in the nineteenth century, what would you add?

Professor Gunny: I wrote on English literary influences on Voltaire in the earlier part of my career at Liverpool University when I was interested in comparative literature (English and French). In Voltaire and English literature (Oxford, 1979), I showed how Voltaire did his best to popularize English civilization and literature- epic, drama, satirical poetry and prose fiction- among French-speaking readers. His broad outlook on the world enabled him to study the culture and civilization of a neighboring country he had visited in the 1720s (England), then to advocate recognition of civilizations beyond the Greco-Roman world.

To put it bluntly, Muhammad was viewed in Western writings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century as an impostor (Carlyle being an exception). It is true that in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth century, he was only one of three impostors in clandestine published and manuscript writings, the others being Moses and Jesus.

Gradually, however, Western writers forgot about the last two and made Muhammad the sole impostor. In clandestine literature, there was no genuine attempt at comparative religion. The work of Claude Emmanuel Pastoret therefore stands out, since in Zoroastre, Confucius et Mahomet (1787) he stresses Muhammad’s skills, genius and deep thought, even if he still considers him an impostor. Muhammad not only checks all types of excesses but he also favors the practice of all virtues. Although endowed with a ‘superior intelligence’, Muhammad is, however, portrayed as inferior to Zoroaster as legislator.

Q: Only in the first decades of the twentieth century is he finally recognized as a Prophet, why did it take a long time?

Professor Gunny: Attitudes to him began to change gradually and he was increasingly regarded as a ‘legislator’ by writers such as Gibbon. However, the passage from impostor to legislator to Prophet was to be a long and arduous process throughout French and English writings. M. Watt attempted to give a plausible explanation for this situation.

In the chapter on Muhammad in The Cambridge History of Islam (1977), he argues that the occidental reader faces grave difficulties in attaining a balanced understanding of his historical role, the most serious being the dominant conception that religion is a private matter. He believes that Muhammad’s influence was important in the religious, intellectual, economic, social and political spheres.

What is surprising is that he finds it impossible for any occidental to distinguish within Muhammad’s achievement between what is religious and what is non-religious. It is clear to me that the mind of any such reader may not be a blank: many Western readers have a set of religious beliefs (or no beliefs at all) or a cultural background that is not predisposed to give recognition to what is perceived as remote from their cultural experience. Prejudices which turn Muhammad into the incarnation of evil are deep-rooted in some Western readers. Separating the facts from the myths associated with his early life may also account for Muhammad’s slow progress towards recognition as Prophet.

Monsignor Virgil Gheorghiu (1916-1992), a Romanian-born writer, is perhaps unique among clerics in acknowledging that some Christian sects believe God, creator of the universe, speaks to all nations in their own language through Prophets, such that He has not given the monopoly of His revelations and truth exclusively to Jews and Christians.

Q: French-speaking and English-speaking Orientalists began the onslaught on Muslim sources for the life of Muhammad by trying to refute Renan’s thesis that Prophet had appeared in the full light of history, Could you elaborate on that statement?

Professor Gunny: The French- and English-speaking writers who advocate the rejection of Muslim sources for the study of the life of Muhammad include H.Lammens, R.Blachère, P.Crone and M.Cook.

In the article ‘Mahomet et les origines de l’islam’(1851), Ernest Renan (1823-1892) is not to be confused with the same writer who was to attack the Arabs for their supposed hostility to science in his Sorbonne lecture of 1883.

In the article, he hints that the books and speeches attributed to the founders of other religions are lacking in authenticity. Not so with Muhammad. Renan argues that Muhammad’s biography is an ordinary one without miracles and exaggeration, although he accepts that the Prophet’s life, (he could have been more specific by mentioning the miracles allegedly involving him in the early period), like that of other founders of great religions, is surrounded by fables, but these, as he unfairly suggests, have won the seal of approval only among the Persians.

The conclusion he wishes the reader to draw is that the legendary elements found in Islam have always remained sporadic traditions lacking in authority. He believes that in the life of Muhammad every thing is not clear cut, every thing is approximate in a very human but historical manner. Thus Muhammad is defeated and makes mistakes. On the other hand, the legends surrounding Christian saints- St Francis of Assisi, for example-became much more mythical than those surrounding Muhammad. In order to stress the sobriety of the miraculous element in Islamic narrative, Renan offers a sample of India’s mythology dealing with the birth of her heroes.

Q: Your study attempts to put forward a scholarly, Muslim, point of view, on a subject which has acquired increasing importance in our time What do you see in the contribution of writers such as H. Lammens, E. Dermenghem, R. Blachere, V. Gheorghiu, M. Watt, P. Crone and M.Cook, G.R. Hawting, J. Berkey and G. Newby?

Professor Gunny: The answer to this question lies in my evaluation of the works of these authors in the last chapter of my book on the Prophet.

Q: Do you agree with me there is no need to discard Muslim sources if one wishes to renew Islamic studies?

Professor Gunny: Yes, I agree with you that there is no need to discard Muslim sources if one wishes to renew Islamic Studies. François Déroche, for example, proves this point admirably. Showing no bias against Islam, he renews Islamic studies by studying the oldest copies of the Quran and, unlike some of the Orientalists, he establishes that the Quranic text existed in written form as early as the years 650-75 in his book La trans mission écrite du Coran dans les débuts de l’islam (2009).

Q: Prophet Muhammad in French and English Literature: 1650 to the Present, a Western prejudice against Islam, what new did you discover?

Professor Gunny: My recent book shows that a history of Western reactions to Islam and its Prophet from 1650 to the present is a history of prejudices against them on the whole. It is not entirely negative, however, as in the nineteenth century rather balanced studies come from A. Caussin de Perceval, author of an Essai sur l’histoire des Arabes (1847-1848) and A. de Lamartine, author of a Vie de Mahomet (1854), extracted from the first volume of his Histoire de la Turquie. Lamartine made many attempts to show Muhammad’s humanity in battle and to bring Islam even closer to Christianity .than it actually is.

Q: You explored many different views of Prophet Muhammad that existed during the period of Enlightenment.

Professor Gunny: I explore different views of the Prophet that existed during the Enlightenment period. Despite his lack of Arabic, Henri de Boulainviller (1658-1722) had ensured that his documentation on Islam was of a high standard.

Incomplete as his Vie de Mahomed (1730)was, he had a fairly sound understanding of the essence of Muhammad’s teachings against the Trinity and he transmitted this understanding to Voltaire. Voltaire himself (after he had put Mahomet behind him) could demonstrate awareness and appreciation of Muhammad’s teaching on the unity of God, his moral code and outstanding achievements over a short period. Although he contradicted and repeated himself frequently, he opened new perspectives on Muhammad- theological, sociological and historical. The evolution in his attitude enabled him to make partial amends for his earlier treatment of Muhammad, in the dictionary article ‘De l’Alcoran et de Mahomet’ of 1748. Regrettably, in the 1760s, he used Islam and its Prophet in his polemics against Judaism and Christianity.

It would be unrealistic to expect any evolution in attitudes in the case of Diderot and Rousseau on account of their short-lived interest in Islam and Muhammad. The spirit of contradiction that dominates Rousseau’s thinking might explain why he denounced Muhammad’s alleged fanaticism in his Lettre to Christophe de Beaumont (1763) and eulogized him in the Contrat social (1762).

Although he and Diderot devote little time to Muhammad, they raise some fundamental issues. Diderot draws attention to the part played by ninth-century Muslim theologians in the debate on free will which originated in the dialogue between Moses and the servant of God (al-Khidr) in Sura 18 of the Quran. Rousseau’s critique of Muhammad in his novel Emile (1762) as preaching in a language not understood by many members of his audience need not be viewed in an entirely negative light. However painful the lack of Arabic may be to many non-Arab Muslims, Rousseau deserves recognition for boldly drawing their attention to the problem. For without Arabic, the majority of the Muslim umma run the risk of leaving the interpretation of Islam solely to writers who lack a fair-minded approach to the Prophet, even if they are proficient in Arabic.

Q: How ought to Prophet Muhammad be shown to west?

Professor Gunny: Muhammad should be shown to the West as a Prophet with outstanding qualities who does not allow difficulties to stand in the way of his program as a spiritual, moral and social reformer but who remains a mere mortal, as he himself insisted.

Q: How should the way be paved to a constructive dialogue between equals, Islam and the West?

Professor Gunny: To have a constructive dialogue between equals, between Islam and the West, both sides should begin by recognizing not only the achievement of the other in various fields such as education, science, the promotion of equality and human rights, but also their failure.

Abdur-Rahman: Thank you very much indeed, professor.