What Helped Muhammad In Establishing Islam

By Mohammad Asghar


In one of my recent articles I had mentioned that Muhammad’s movement in Mecca
centered on its merchant community, which he believed had failed to fulfill its
obligations towards them. As a result of this understanding of the situation, he
launched his movement to seize from the merchants what they had, and owned. In
his struggle against the strong the Meccan Merchant community, he faced a lot of
obstacles, primarily, for the reason that almost all Meccans were depended on
the jobs that the merchants created, and, secondly, for Muhammad’s failure to
create a following of his own among them for want of an attainable basis that
was necessary to motivate a people into doing or believing in something..

At the time Muhammad was struggling against the Meccan merchants, Abu Bakr was
having trouble with his own business. Othman, though he belonged to the powerful
Umayyad tribe, had no real outlet to use his time fruitfully. Both these men
joined Muhammad in his efforts against the Meccan merchant community with the
hope that Muhammad’s success was going to bring them immense benefit. Waraqa ibn
Nofal and Muhammad’s wife, Khudeija’s desire to found a new religion eventually
became a strong tool for Abu Bakr and Othman; both of them used it effectively
to propel Muhammad to the status of a religious leader.

Most of Muhammad’s biographers noted that he suffered from epilepsy. Aisha and
others’ description of the pain and agony he suffered while being under the
so-called “revelatory” influence prove that he, indeed, was an epileptic
patient.

As happens with all the victims of epileptic attacks, Muhammad, too, used to
blabber while being under its attack, or while recovering from its effect. Since
most of his blabbering had religious connotations, Abu Bakr and Othman
publicized them to be the revelations from God. Since the people of the time had
no idea of epilepsy, they believed in what Abu Bakr and Othman had told them,
thus helping Muhammad and his gang to sow the seed of Islam in the minds of the
Arabian pagans.

To find out to what extent Muhammad’s affliction with epilepsy had helped him
and his cahoots in establishing Islam, reading of the following report, which
appeared in the Telegraph of October 30, 1997 is absolutely necessary. The
report reads:

Brain wired to the voice of heaven
From Robert Lee Hotz

New Orleans, Oct. 29: No one knows why humanity felt its first religious
stirrings, but researchers at University of California reported that the human
brain may be hard-wired to hear the voice of heaven, in what researchers said
was the first effort to directly address the neural basis of religious
expression.

In a provocative experiment with patients suffering from an unusual form of
epilepsy, researchers at the UC San Diego brain and perception laboratory found
that the parts of the brain’s temporal lobe, dubbed the “God module,” may affect
how intensely a person responds to religious beliefs.

People suffering this type of seizure have long reported intense mystical and
religious experiences as part of their attacks but also are unusually
preoccupied with mystical thoughts between seizures. That led this team to use
these patients to investigate the link between the physical structure of the
brain and spiritual experiences. In a carefully designed experiment, the
researchers determined that one effect of the patients’ seizures was to
strengthen their brain’s involuntary response to religious words, leading the
scientists to suggest a portion of the brain was naturally attuned to ideas
about a supreme being.

“It is not clear why such dedicated neural machinery … for religion may have
evolves,” the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans
{underscored}. One possibility, the scientists suggested, was to encourage tribe
loyalty or reinforce kinship ties or the stability of a closely knit clan.

They emphasized that their findings in no way suggest that religion is simply a
matter of brain chemistry. “These studies do not in any way negate the validity
of religious experience of God,” the team cautioned. “They merely provided an
explanation in terms of brain regions that may be involved.”

Until recently, most neuroscientists confined their inquiries to research aimed
at alleviating the medical problems that affect the brain’s health, and to
attempts to fathom its fundamental neural mechanisms.

Emboldened by their growing understanding of how the brain works, however,
scientists now dare t investigate the relationship between the brain, human
consciousness and a range of intangible mental experiences.

Craig Kinsley, an expert in psychology and neuroscience at the University of
Richmond, Virginia, called the new study “intriguing” and said “the implications
are fascinating.”

“People have been tickling around the edges of consciousness and this sort of
research plunges in,” Kinsley said. “There is the quandary of whether the mind
created God or God created the mind. This is going to shake people up, but (any
conclusion) is very premature.”

Muhammad’s loyalty to his tribe remained strong until his death; it was, among
others, his loyalty that prevented him from killing the pagans after he had
captured Mecca. As a matter of fact, he is not known to have killed or plundered
any of his tribal kin. Almost all of his victims were the Jews and the pagans of
the deserts. He detested them from his heart on account of their treacherous
nature (cf. Quran; 9:97 et al).

The finding of the study fits well into Muhammad’s profile. It gave me the
confidence to make the claim I have made in this article as well as in my
previous one. Readers’ counter claim will be welcome.

March 24, 2004