Muhammad: A Parody of Jesus Christ?

“... there can be no doubt that the aim of the Qur’an is to substitute Muhammad for Christ as the Head of the human race”

A teaching resource used to introduce people to Islam situates its video in a former church which is now a mosque and instructs the audience that Muhammad was called "The Faithful One" because of wise business dealings for his first wife.

What might be missed in such an appealing introduction, however, is the fact that a church being converted into a mosque is a sign of Islamic domination, and that the title "Faithful" is very much in the eye in the beholder. Faithful to who or what? Does it mean one who walks in confidence in the fully completed work of Jesus Christ and is thus "full of faith" or does it have the connotation of someone who carries out a job with honesty. The first constitutes saving faith. The second constitutes an act due to common grace, which of course is still found in the larger world of sin.

It is a popular tendency to airbrush the life of Muhammad as writers such as Karen Armstrong do, and even to a small extent the author of the training above. He tells how infanticide was stopped and women were given rights after the coming of Islam. Yet the larger historical track record would tell us that due to the example and teaching of Muhammad many children were killed in jihads, many more were made father and motherless and even more were enslaved. The daily news of ISIS bears this out.

Eclipsing the Son of Righteousness:

Yet a larger issue looms. It is the attempt of the prophet of Mecca and the moon of Islam — to use the words of Samuel Zwemer — to eclipse the Son of Righteousness. Here is Zwemer's original quote:

Mohammed's mission, whatever else it may have been or done, was a blindfolding of JESUS, an eclipse of the Sun of Righteousness by the moon of Mecca

Source: Samuel Zwemer The Glory of the Cross (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1928): 41

Was Zwemer the man almost native to Arabia having a bad day? I do not think so. He had carefully read two other careful works by previous scholars. The first was by Carl Gottlieb Pfander in his The Mizanu’l Haqq (Balance of Truth). In this book which provided a series of tests to find out whether a revelation was true or not, Pfander asserted (1910 ed. p. 288)

 “... there can be no doubt that the aim of the Qur’an is to substitute Muhammad for Christ as the Head of the human race”

A second source that is even more comprehensive was S. W. Koelle's Mohammed and Mohammedanism Critically Examined. In this work published in 1869, Koelle devotes a chapter to the area of the attempt by Muhammad to upset Jesus Christ. What he does in this chapter is to quote Muslim authorities verbatim and leaves the reader to make his/her judgment. He calls this chapter:

The Biographies of Mohammed by Moslem authors, attributing to their prophet an equality with, or even a superiority to, the prophet of Nazareth, appear in the light of a thinly disguised plagiarism of the evangelical records, and Mohammad himself as an obvious parody of Jesus Christ.

One example that he uses is the account of Muhammad's journey to the temple mount in Jerusalem where he leads Adam, Abraham, David, and Jesus in Islamic prayers and chats with Jesus who asserts that he is only a creature. After this the Islamic account continues and Muhammad greets Jesus in the 2nd to lowest heaven and says "In the second heaven I saw the two youths John and Jesus, who were cousins, and they saluted me thus. Welcome, thou righteous prophet and righteous brother." (p. 308) Thereafter he keeps going up the ladder to the 7th heaven, talks directly to Allah in an "I-Thou" fashion and comes back down.

By now if the Christian reader is not furious, he/she must have a problem. Listen to how Koelle concludes his chapter (p. 374):

The attentive reader will probably have found the apparent parallels between the lives of Christ and Mohammed, which this chapter has brought before his eyes, far too close and numerous to be considered accidental. It seems really difficult to avoid arriving at the conviction that, where there appears a sameness or rivalry between both these extraordinary characters of history, and seeing that the antecedent cannot imitate the subsequent: the later biography can only be a designed, though more or less disguised, copy of the earlier. Such a conclusion must appear all the more justified, by the traces we have discovered of Mohammed expressly referring to Christian precedents, as the cause and model for his own institutions, see e.g. p. 332. Now if this fact is duly pondered, that Mohammed is represented as having dared, directly or indirectly, to usurp to himself the known position of Jesus Christ, the God-man Saviour, the avowed Mediator between God and man: then he appears in the full light of an Antichrist. It can also no longer surprise us, but must appear quite natural, if we find that Islam, the system he initiated, ruthlessly destroyed every vestige of Christianity in Arabia, and that, in the course of its foreign conquests, it speedily invaded Palestine, the land of its birth ; Asia Minor, the field of St. Paul's labours; Egypt, the early seat of Christian anchorites and learned divines; North Africa, where St. Augustin had long been a burning and a shining light; and even Constantinople, the capital of the first Christian monarch, and the locality of the earliest Councils of the Church. As Mohammed tried to usurp the place of Christ, in a religious sense, so the Mohammedan world has laboured, during successive centuries, to displace Christendom, as a dominant Factor of History.

Question: Are you seeing this in current events?

For further reading:

1. Koelle's book can be found here.

2. Zwemer's The Glory of the Cross can be found here.

3. For an analysis of how one of the first biographers of Muhammad, Ibn Sa'd (who died in 845) strategically created miracle stories to eclipse those of Jesus Christ and a the following list with Bible verses that are upseated see: Sahas, Daniel J., "The formation of later Islamic doctrines as a response to Byzantine polemics: the miracles of Muhammad," The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 27 no 2-3 (Sum-Fall 1982): 307-324

From Sahas, p. 314-315

1. Muhammad's command causes trees to be uprooted and then returned to their place. [Cf.Lk. 17:6]   

2. Muhammad ascends into heaven sitting on a branch of a tree with Gabriel sitting on another. [Cf.  Lk. 24:50-51 and Mt. 4:6]       

3. Muhammad is protected from his enemies. [Cf. Lk. 20:19; Jn. 7:20-46, esp. 7:30]                                           

4. Muhammad turns water into milk and fresh goat cheese. [Cf. Jn. 2:1-11]

5. A wolf addresses a shepherd and bids him to go where the Prophet is preaching. [Cf.Jn. 1:43-49]   

6. Muhammad raises his gaze to the sky and then to the ground while exhorting his listeners against sensuality. [Cf.Jn. 8:1-11]                   

7. Muhammad reveals to his Jewish challengers four hidden matters. [Cf.Jn. 4:4-19]

8. Muhammad reveals the names of those 'hypocrites' who had been speaking against him. [Cf.  Lk.  13:10-17 and Mt. 9:3-4]

9. Muhammad causes water or food to multiply, wherefrom many people either perform ablutions or feed themselves. [Cf.Mt. 14:13-21; Mk. 6: 32-44;Lk.9:10-17;Jn.6: 1-13]

10. Muhammad heals a man with a bad eye. [Cf. Mk. 8:22-26 and else- where]        

11. Muhammad causes a tree branch to become a steel sword. [Cf.Lk. 22:35-38?]       

12. Muhammad foretells the destruction of prejudicial documents of the Quraish against the Banu Hashim.         

13. In two other miracles Muhammad causes either a dry ewe or an immature she-kid to produce milk.