Poking fun about Muhammed?

Submitted by Concerned European (Lithuania), Sep 14, 2007 at 03:32

In my mind, Muhammed is hardly a ridiculous figure. In fact, he was not much better or worse than many of the world rulers. Many rulers used the divine will as pretext of justifying their most bizarre wishes, many claimed to be divine or semidivine figures, as for exemple emperors of China who clamed to be "Son of Heaven", or Japanese emperors - pretended grandgrand...grandsons of the Goddess Amaterasu, or some Hindu rulers who claimed they are Shiva incarnate; many had swarms of wives and concubines vastly exceeding the harem of Muhammed.

In fact, Muhammed was a clever politician, who realized that the there is high time and unique opportunity to create a strong Arab state, at the moment when two main superpowers - Rome and Persia were locked together in the mortal combat. And Muhammed started to implement his goal. First with peaceful, and when these backfired - with violent means. He perfectly understood that in order to unite the people consisting from many tribes he had to have some ideology - and since he could not adopt none of the ideologies of the enemies - Christianity or Zoroastrianism - he had to improvise one of own making. And he accomplished that very skillfully. So what ridiculous do you see in it? As a politician of VII century he performed remarkably.

What is, however, the most strange is the fact that if a French person would start to say with all seriousness that the modern France shall be ruled with the methods of Chlodwig or Charlemagne, or a British person would nowadays prefer those from the times of King Alfred or William the Conqueror, they would soon land in mental asylum, while in Muslim countries and communities millions of persons - including many graduates of universities - sincerely believe that the best methods for the rule of the modern world can be found in the Arabia of VII century and such belief is considered to be rather the norm, not an oddity.

This is really ridiculous and should be ridiculed to death. But not the historical figure himself.

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