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Strapping heavy weights to someone to make them sink is usually a sign that you don’t like them very much at

As with Easter and Passover, the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad is dated by the lunar calendar. This year it falls on Feb. 15, and the time seems particularly fraught with meaning. Every time there is a crisis in the Muslim world, grudges and resentments going back almost to the beginning of the faith, in the seventh century, seem to

For the past decade Islam has been suffering from fear almost everywhere you look. Arab countries are afraid of being invaded by the U.S. in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. Sunni Muslims are nervous about the rise of Iran to a nuclear state dominated by Shiites. But on a far more personal level, everyone is afraid to say anything about Muhammad that would inflame the faithful. I’ve experienced this recently myself. On tour for a book about Muhammad — one that I wrote primarily to tell Westerners that the Prophet led an exciting, inspiring life — the first word that comes up in every interview is fatwa. The first question is “Aren’t you afraid to write this book?”
Every religion takes sole possession of its founder. That’s what makes it strong. That and claiming that your version of God is the only correct one. But nobody who writes books about Jesus or Buddha does so in fear. The irony is that the stronger the faith, the more open it is to intolerance. Fundamentalist Christians believe that everyone else is an outsider to the true faith, including other Christians. But Islam has become locked down to an extraordinary degree. Those of us who want to write as sympathetically as possible about Muhammad, without giving in to official hagiography, are warned off. We are made to walk on eggshells. Saddest of all, those Muslims who are pleased to see a novel about Muhammad’s life scan it nervously to make sure that nothing is out of place.
Isn’t it time to make Muhammad a safe topic? The Danish cartoonist who lampooned the Prophet stepped into taboo territory since Islam forbids any physical depiction of him. But Islamic art over the centuries has come to terms with the strictures against painting portraits and taking photos of people’s faces. Adaptation means survival, and those forces in Islam that don’t want to adapt, far from preserving their faith for eternity, are endangering it.
The irony of the situation is double, actually. Muhammad recognized Jews and Christians as people of the Book, along with Muslims. They are not outsiders but fellow worshipers. Islam was meant to be an umbrella that includes them and tolerates their faith. So the fundamentalist streak in Islam isn’t true to the spirit of the Prophet. The very notion that the Koran should never be translated from the Arabic and never commented upon was born (so far as I can ascertain) among his followers after the Prophet’s death. As a result, the other people of the Book have passed through reform movements and adaptations that have been denied to the Muslim faithful.
Surrounding the Prophet with veneration is one thing. We can all understand and respect that. But surrounding him with threats, a kind of theological barbed wire, is another thing. It isn’t acceptable to the outside world, and moderate Arabs would be well served to speak out against it. I don’t mean to dictate to anyone how they should follow their religion. But we’ve come to an impasse if no one is allowed to speak the truth about Muhammad or comment upon his life. As long as freedom of thought is considered the enemy, the Islamic world will be embroiled in fear forever.
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Does the truth need to pass a litmus test? When you tell the truth about anyone’s religion, the answer isn’t so clear. Before I engaged in writing a novel on the life of Muhammad, the risks were only too apparent. Islam was a hot-button issue. Tempers were running high. Looming large were the fatwa and Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, and the worldwide uprising among Muslims over a cartoon in a Danish newspaper that was thought to blaspheme against the Prophet. Therefore, simply to set down the events of Muhammad’s life — events that are by turns gripping, exciting, disturbing, and inspiring — leads directly into an inflamed debate.
To me, the danger of writing about Muhammad are, frankly, a red herring. You can’t know what is safe to say these days and what isn’t. Before he backed down at the urging of President Obama and others , an obscure Florida pastor with less than a hundred in his congregation, proposed, against all sense, decency, and caution, that everyone join in Burn-a-Koran Day to commemorate 9/11. Terry Jones feels perfectly safe to incite potential violence, because he has prayed over it, and apparently his God can’t stand Allah (I thought they were the same God) and favors ignorant intolerance. By lineage, Jews, Christians, and Muslims share The Book, meaning the same antecedents in the Old Testament, which each faith interprets so that it comes out number one. Being “people of The Book,” a term frequently used when discussing the relationship between Islam and Judaism, hasn’t stopped historical feuding and bloodbaths.
To keep their claims of absolute divine truth, each religion has learned to moderate its criticism of other faiths. It’s not so much live and let live as people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Your founder walked on water? Yours heard a voice in a burning bush? Yours was visited in a cave by the angel Gabriel? From inside the faith, these are articles of belief that cannot be questioned. If you stand outside the faith, they seem unreasonable, to use the mildest term possible. As a non-Muslim, I was writing from outside the faith. Therefore, I didn’t challenge the accepted life of Muhammad as taught for over a thousand years to all devout Muslims. Yet at the same time I couldn’t give them only the aspects of their Beloved that are the most attractive. Muhammad, viewed as a historical figure, was involved in military campaigns; he asked God to strategize the battles. At one point he ordered the execution of Jews who had collaborated with the enemy. He was told by God to marry a girl of six who was betrothed to another man.
I didn’t judge any of this from a modern perspective. Child marriage was part of a society that existed across enormous gulfs of time and mores, just as the ancient Greeks do. Once you apply litmus tests to someone else’s faith, the result is guaranteed to be explosive. Fundamentalists in all religions don’t care. The benighted Terry Jones has counterparts in the Islamic world who are just as disturbing, and both say “God wants me to do this.” It’s not up to me or any chronicler of Islam to judge either side of religious conflict. To me, putting on my writer’s cap, the only muse that must be honored is the truth, told with respect and without distortion. The great enemy here is denial. None of us has the right to deny another person the dignity of faith, and by the same token, no person of faith has the right to claim sole ownership of the facts. Outsiders are allowed to peer in the window of churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues. Those inside then have a choice: slam t window shut or open it and let in some light.
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Right Think and Wrong Think About Muslims
Earlier this year the Gallup polling organization provided two intriguing statistics about Americans and their view of Islam: 53 percent of Americans view Islam unfavorably compared with 42 percent who view the religion favorably. Majorities view other major religions favorably: 91 percent for Christianity, 71 percent for Judaism and 58 percent for Buddhism. The negativity comes even as 63 percent of Americans said they know little about Islam.
It’s no surprise that ignorance leads the way for prejudice. When I set out to write a fictional account of the life of Muhammad, I considered myself free from prejudice. I was raised in India playing with Muslim kids and maintain close ties with Muslim friends. Yet when I began to research the origins of Islam, I found that compared to what I had absorbed about the life of Jesus or Buddha, my knowledge of the Prophet’s life was almost a blank. But in the present climate of antagonism toward Muslims, a blank is good, since so many people started out their knowledge of Islam with two facts: Arabs control the world’s oil supply, and Muslim extremists attacked the U.S. on 9/11. This accounts for another finding by Gallup, that Americans see extremists as woven into the basic fabric of Islam, a view they don’t hold about Jewish or Christian fundamentalists. Would you say that Christians who kill anti-abortion doctors and burn down abortion clinics are basic to Christianity? Yet the protest of moderate Muslims that jihadis are an extremist minority tends to fall upon deaf ears.
There are some moderating facts as well. Only 9% of respondents told Gallup that they had a great deal of prejudice against Islam, and until the recent upsurge of rhetoric against the proposed Muslim center near Ground Zero, the tradition of religious tolerance in this country held strong, with half of respondents saying that they felt no prejudice against Muslims. Right think prevails over wrong think. And yet Muslim-Americans are still a hidden minority in this country. Did you know that they are the most diverse religion ethnically in America? Most people automatically equate Muslim with Arab. Given the image of Muslim women as being strongly oppressed, would it surprise you to learn that in this country, they are : one of the most highly educated female religious groups in the United States, second only to Jewish American women.”
By the time I finished writing my book, I had a wealth of knowledge about Muhammad compared to when I started. The most surprising fact about him is that among all the founders of great world religions, he considered himself “a man among men,” in other words, the closest to how you and I see ourselves. Even though Muhammad received the Koran as a divine transmission (in keeping with most of the world’s scriptures) and is a sacred figure in Islam, his self-conception was not like that. I found him fascinating, even as I found that the contradictions present in Islam today, such as the clash between religious tolerance and jihadist fervor, have roots going back to the very beginning.
In the end, the issue isn’t right think or wrong think. It’s about emotions. Could I write about seventh century Islam without the negative feelings surrounding al-Qaeda, 9/11, the Iraq War, oil oligarchies, and the looming Iranian bomb? Not completely. This is consistent with psychological findings, which show that emotions cannot be entirely separated from reason. So our duty isn’t to join right think — however abhorrent wrong think is — but to be self-aware and honest. Being able to hold mixed feelings at the same time is known as the capacity for ambivalence. Mature people have this ability; immature people don’t. Self-aware people speak openly about their ambivalence; people who prefer to be unconscious hide their prejudices until it is safe enough to haul them out. Which camp you belong to is your choice.
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In this interview, Deepak Chopra discusses his reasons for writing “Muhammad: A Story Of The Last Prophet,” which captures the life story of the Prophet of Islam.

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