The Philosophy of Muhammad

By John Heinmiller

So much is said about Muhammad, the founder of Islam, but so much of it is not true. Many false statements are made about him all the time. But what is the truth about him?

Author John Heinmiller has taken almost a year analyzing the only source we have of what Muhammad actually said, the Quor'an. What emerges is a picture of a man completely different from the common perception, even in the Islamic world. It is the picture of a man determined to do what is right, who prefers peace, who tried to elevate women from the status of nothing, who saw that all people needed to do right and worship right. To support this, Muhammad created a law. Not Sharia, but Quranic. Through this law his thinking, his philosophy, can be known.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Heinmiller
• Release date: Feb 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005568993

John Heinmiller

John D. Heinmiller is a student of truth, in all of its various ways. He has long been interested in such questions as why and how we know what we know. Of course, he started looking into itThen, true to form, he started to write about it. Of course, he did not limit himself to just that field of interest.A lifelong Californian who was born in Los Angeles, Mr. Heinmiller currently lives by himself in San Francisco where he tries to continue his research and his writing.

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The Philosophy of Muhammad

By John D. Heinmiller

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Copyright 2021 by John D. Heinmiller. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

Forward

Notes on the Book

1 The Man

2 The World of Muhammad

3 Basic Principles

4 God and Submission

5 The Code of Muhammad

6 The Basic Morality of Muhammad

7 Women and Sexual Relations

8 War and Peace

9 Crimes to Avoid

10 Final Thoughts on Muhammad’s Philosophy

Bibliography

Forward

MUHAMMAD!

This is a name that, especially today, means different things to different people. He is the prophet par excellence to some, the greatest deceiver of all to others. He is the speaker of the perfect word or the greatest of once living deceivers. In terms of distinction and notoriety he is in a very rarified class for people either follow him or hate him. They consider him to be the earthly author of God’s final word, the verses of Satan or of a great lie. But nobody who looks at him can ever claim that he was mediocre.

True believers assert that he is the last of the prophets of God, the cap of God’s word, the seal of prophecy. People who respect him claim he is a wise man, a doer of great deeds, a thinker who tried to advance moral thinking in a wide swath of the world. Detractors have many terms for him, claiming that he was a deceiver and a swindler or a devout follower of the forces of evil. Such is his influence.

With the forces in the world arrayed today, with people trying to use his words to force them upon everyone else, what is it that allowed him to become so famous, to remain so influential, loved and feared, fourteen hundred years after he died?

Muhammad preached a message of peace and respect, of this there can be no doubt. All who have read the whole of his spoken words that were written down, the Qur’an, can point this out. It is true there have been others who have preached a similar message – Jesus is famous for his message of peace and love, though few who claim to follow him actually follow this message. Centuries before the Buddha in Northern India also had a message of peace and tranquility. There have been others. But what makes Muhammad’s message so different was that while others kept on their message and kept it somewhat vague, preferring to express it in broad principles with a few examples, Muhammad is unique insofar that this message of his became part of a very codified structure of law.

The thing about this codified structure of law is that it allows for his followers, Muslims as they call themselves, to ignore his teachings of love and to focus on the teachings of violence that also pervades the Qur’an. People have heard about the suicide bombers and the Jihadists, people who willingly and violently fight and die to spread their word, their thinking. And it is true that, unlike the teachings of Jesus, Confucius and Buddha all of whom explicitly forbade such conduct, Muhammad did allow for it. But it was allowed only under very specific conditions, specific conditions that so many of his followers constantly and conveniently … ignore.

And really, when one thinks about jihad, it is no different than the crusade of yore – a holy war that was authorized by the leaders of Christendom. For jihad is simply another word for crusade, a holy war waged against those the leader of the war wants the war waged against. Since so many Muslims are as ready to launch a jihad as Christians are to launch a crusade, there is really no difference between the two.

But Muhammad allowed it, it is said. Yes, but as I had earlier pointed out, it was only under very specific circumstances. Jihad for the sake of jihad Muhammad strongly condemned. He also condemned starting a jihad when there was no war and with going in with the intent to die!

The teachings of Muhammad are found in the book that is a collection of all the sayings he supposedly received from God through the Archangel Gabriel. This book, the Qur’an, is revered by Muslims worldwide as the holiest of books. It is one of the greatest law books in history and the code it specified, along with other works attributed to Muhammad, has been called Sharia Law. But when taken as a whole, the Qur’an, without the Hadith or the other so-called Islamic books is also a philosophy, a way of life. For that is what Muhammad preached, a way of life. This makes Muhammad a moral philosopher, on par with Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and others.

To understand Muhammad, to understand his teaching, his thinking, his philosophy, this is the task of this book.

Notes on the Book

Because of the interest this work would have for Muslims, it is not possible to treat it like an ordinary scholarly work. The passions that will be invoked by merely reading this will be great because of the importance that so many people put to the specially spoken words of Muhammad. Various Islamic denominations have very strong opinions as to what it means to be a Muslim. Atheists opposed to anything with religious connotations have a strong desire to debunk anything that even remotely sounds like it came from Muhammad. Scientific thought has long been opposed to one of the key principles of the thought of Muhammad, that of the existence of God, because it threatens the foundation of the principle that has been so very useful in developing the various sciences, the Principle of Determinism.¹ Of course, mystics who strive for spiritual union with the one, or om, often take the stand that Jesus and Muhammad is a hindrance to their goal.

Consequently it is impossible for this work to avoid all religious implications. His name and words are too closely tied to Islamic thought. That said, I have refused to abandon scholarly principles in order to make a purely religious book. True, I have a difficult time because Islam is not native to me and I have not studied the Qur’an as I have other religious works. Still, it was easy to understand and explain what he actually meant because of the nature of his work. Nevertheless, I have still tried to present what he said and taught in as objective and scholarly a manner as possible. My goal in all this is to give a feel for what Muhammad said, what he thought, what he preached. In other words, what his philosophy was.

I have made a deliberately conscious choice to accept the claim that there is something out there, not determined by material causes. Being a deist, I do accept the claim that there is a deity, though I reject the claims by all religions that they understand what that deity is. Because of this, I do recoil from certain claims that even the religious admit are matters of faith, not provable. I do not come out and declare this to be the one true faith as many people would want me to. At the same time, I also do not declare that it is an outright fabrication, as others would want me to. I do not have the knowledge of God, so I cannot know if certain matters of faith are true or not. I embrace the Daoist principle that God is ultimately unknowable, beyond what we can understand. So be it!

Still, I try to look at the philosophy from a purely objective viewpoint. What was his belief, his approach towards life? What was it he truly said? What was it he intended to be said? What he actually said I have found too often be at variance to what most mullahs and ayatollahs claim is said. Consequently this book will be disturbing. This cannot to be avoided. For Muhammad knew that his teaching would be disturbing. Reportedly when he got the first visitation from Gabriel he was so disturbed he ran to his wife, certain he was going mad. Furthermore, he was opposed by family and enemies during most of his life. Oh yes, he knew it would be disturbing.

The Qur’an is divided into 114 chapters called Suras. Each Sura is further divided into various verses called ayahs. In this work, I will talk about which Sura and verse I am referring to. I will use the term Sura out of respect for the work of Muhammad, besides I am certain that most readers will understand exactly what I am saying. That said, I will use verse for the subdivision because, while ayah is the more technically correct term, using it would be confusing to the reader who is used to the Tanakhish or Biblical term.

In this work, I have italicized, without quotation marks, the actual words as written down in the Qur’an, with Sura and verse identification heading each quote. Similarly, if a footnote includes a Qur’anic quote, I will use the same approach to the Qur’anic quote in the footnote as I do in the body of the book. Other quotes are done according to the standard conventional method.

One more thing. This may seem strange to Muslims but I have refused to utilize a book that is standard among Muslims – the Hadith, which is considered to be equal in importance to the Qur’an. Why do I not use this? Because the scholarly reputation of the Hadith renders it completely suspect in my opinion. I wanted to utilize a source that I trusted actually came from Muhammad or is as close to having come from Muhammad as is possible to ascertain. While I cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that the words written down in the Qur’an did come from Muhammad, I can state, with reasonable certainty, which it is exceedingly likely that anything written in the Qur’an either came directly from Muhammad or, as the true believers assert, through Muhammad. Combine this with the more warlike and violent approach that the Hadith takes, often at odds with the writings in the Qur’an, and I have strong reason to suspect the validity of the Hadith.

I hate to make a point that is not strictly scholarly but here I must. If Islam is, as some claim, based on the Satanic Verses, it is not the verses of the Qur’an that make it Satanic. As the letters of Paul detract and twist the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and as the Talmud twist and turn the teachings of the Torah and Tanakh, so the Hadith seems to me to also twist and turns the teachings of the Qur’an.

If you want to know what Muhammad actually said, use the Qur’an. Do not use the Hadith. It is too suspect.

Endnote

1. The Principle of Determinism states that everything is determined by events before it. Simply put, it is the principle of cause and effect. No choice is allowed. Everything, even our supposed choices, is determined by prior events and material causes.

1

The Man

Who was Muhammad?

This is not a simple question. Many people around the world have strong opinions as to whom and what Muhammad is. To all Muslims, he is the Last Prophet, the cap of prophecy, the final message bearer and the one who bears the most perfect message from God. Non-Muslims, of course, have different viewpoints. Christians have long viewed him as the messenger of Satan. Jews consider him to be a phony. Hindus respect him as a wise man and look down on his followers. Buddhists simply ignore him. Atheists consider him to be a liar, a hypocrite and a swindler. Naturally all of these claims are simply taken as a matter of faith. While faith is blessed and beautiful, giving us a certainty that we find comfortable, however warranted or unwarranted, it does not answer the question: Who was Muhammad?

There is a lot about the life of Muhammad that we know, much of it coming from the man himself, the rest from people who knew him. Of course, many of the works that have come down to us have been tampered by the hand of devotion. So many of the sources that came down to us, even as recent as a few centuries after the death