From our perspective it is extraordinary that an esteemed figure such as
Professor Watt should have been so approving of Mohammed finding a
“solution” no different from that of Hitler. It’s not as though people did
not know about the Holocaust in the 1950s, as Gerald Reitlinger’s The
Final Solution: the Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe was
published in 1953 (see Walter Laqueur (ed) The Holocaust
Encyclopaedia, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001 , p.142).
Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman ends with an assessment of the
founder of Islam. Watt uses a relativist argument, measuring the
treachery, robbery and genocide by Mohammed against the behaviour of
his contemporaries. But even Watt realizes that this argument has terrible
implications for the future, since Muslims regard Mohammed’s behaviour
as the perfect exemplar of morality:
Muslims, however, claim that he is a model of conduct and
character for all mankind. In so doing they present him for judgement
according to the standards of enlightened world opinion. Though the
world is increasingly becoming one world, it has so far paid scant
attention to Muhammad as a moral exemplar. Yet because Muslims
are numerous, it will sooner or later have to consider seriously
whether from the life and teaching of Muhammad any principles
are to be learnt which will contribute to the moral development of
mankind. (p.235, emphasis added).
Watt’s books must have had a considerable influence on the
understanding of Islam in Britain from the 1950s onwards. It is quite
clear that Watt saw that Islam was successful as a religion of war rather
than a religion of peace, and that the success of Islam was more about
politics than religion. Yet instead of the West having any kind of
discussion about a seventh century desert warlord serving as a moral
guide to humanity in the twentieth and twenty-first century (as Watt
expected), the public discourse about Islam and Mohammed turned into
one of lies and deception. If one’s understanding of Mohammed came
from state-controlled education or from the complicit mass-media, one
would assume that Mohammed was more like Buddha than he was like
Hitler (as we pointed out earlier, some Muslim writers have claimed that
dana p.
(Dana P.)
#1