Bernard Lewis once observed that “Muhammed was his Constantine.” That is, the prophet of Islam was also a warlord of the Arabs. It is only a few steps of logic and intuition to wonder if perhaps Islam’s modern muscularity might not be a projection of its founder’s character.
Let us ignore the nuances of intra-religious variance and semantic precision, and consider the following dyads of prophet/teacher/messiah/God and religion:
Jesus/Christianity
Muhammed/Islam
Buddha/Buddhism
Confucius/Confucianism
Many would assert, I think correctly, that there is a definite concordance between the founder of a religion and its subsequent character, at least superficially (recall that I dismissed the issues of substructure and semantic quibbling that tend to encumber me when wading into this territory).
But I think there is an unexamined assumption here.
How do we know that what the proponents of a given religion tell us about their putative founder is in any sense accurate? Unlike Joseph Smith, for example, the aforementioned individuals’ historicity is not established. Personally, I suspect that Jesus, Muhammed, Siddartha and Confucius did exist in some form, but, I am less sure that we know the true nature of the character of these individuals. Who can say that early proponents of any given creed transmitted an accurate picture of the religious founder? Books like The Quest for the Historical Muhammad offer an alternative, more skeptical, view of the narrative that orthodox Islam presents of its genesis. I don’t know if the revisionists are correct, but their tack suggests that we should be cautious about assuming an arrow of causality from founder – > religion. The fact that the life stories and character traits of a given religious founder tend to accord well with the idealized expression of religious practice and belief as understood by the consensus of the faithful seems to be no great surprise.
What we do know from religious founders who operated in the light of history, like Joseph Smith, is that their own character had idiosyncratic and unpredictable affects on the development trajectory of the religion they founded. Certainly, Smith the shyster does not reflect the character of modern pious Mormons, but what Latter Day Saints will tell you about the character of Joseph Smith would make the man out to be a saint! Thank god we have other sources to contradict this sunny concordant image between the wholesome man and the whole contemporary congregations.
Posted by razib at 11:41 PM