The Prophet Muhammad

Abstract

On 21 January1821, Heinrich Heine, in a letter to his friend Moses Moser, proclaimed that no poet has ever surpassed Muhammad: I must admit that you, great prophet of Mecca, are the greatest poet and that your Quran … will not easily escape my memory. 1 Heine was one of many romantic poets to admire Muhammad both as a prophet and a poet: indeed, for Heine as for Goethe, the prophet of Islam showed how thin the line was between prophet and poet. Heine admired the toleration that Muhammad showed towards those of other religions, in particular to Jews. For a number of nineteenth century Jewish writers, Muhammad, and medieval Islam more generally, became something of a foil for Christian Europe: various Jewish scholars, particularly those associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, took a particular interest in Muhammad and the early history of Islam, often portraying the prophet as a reformer close to the true spirit of Judaism. Jews were not the only Europeans who expressed their admiration for the prophet of Islam: on the contrary, one finds Muhammad portrayed as a religious reformer, lawgiver, mystic and poet in many European writings, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 2 This facet of European orientalism is less known than the more negative portrayals, the indeed-common denigration of Islam and its prophet. For some scholars in religious studies, such as Tomoko Masuzawa, The European idea of Islam was curiously monolithic and, for the most part, consistently negative. 3 Yet in fact, European images of Islam and its prophet Muhammad are anything but monolithic, and are far from being invariably hostile. Part of the problem, as far as recent scholarship (particularly in English), has been the influence of the pathbreaking book by Edward Said, Orientalism, published in 1978. Said chronicles the representations of the Orient in nineteenth-and twentieth-century