When — and Why — Christians First ‘Demonized’ Muhammad

In a recent article, we saw the degree to which academics, such as Georgetown professor John Esposito, lie to whitewash Islamic violence and scapegoat Christians. Esposito claims that “[f]ive centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed” between Muslims and Christians before the latter shattered that peace with the First Crusade in 1095 AD.

In reality, those “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” featured Islam violently conquering three-quarters of the Christian world, replete with massacres, mass enslavements, and the systematic destruction of churches — 30,000 of them under just one caliph (Hakim bi-amr Allah).

Now, let’s look at another similar lie emanating from another “authority” and “historian of religions”: former nun Karen Armstrong. Among other honors and accolades, she’s the bestselling author of many books, including A History of God; The Battle for God; Holy War; and Islam.

So surely she too must know her Islam, yes?

In a 2007 article she wrote (which I addressed way back then) she made the following assertion:

In other words, she’s saying that negative images of Muhammad began in Europe just before — and as a pretext to justify — the First Crusade of 1095.

In reality, of course, non-Muslims — chiefly Christians, since it was they who were conquered by and lived under Islam — have seen Muhammad as a “sinister figure,” and “sexual pervert” right from the start.

The oldest parchment that alludes to a warlike prophet was written in 634, a mere two years after Muhammad’s death. It has a man asking a learned Jewish scribe what he knows about “the prophet who has appeared among the Saracens” of Arabia. The elderly man, “with much groaning,” responded: “He is deceiving. For do prophets come with swords and chariot? Verily, these events of today are works of confusion. . . . You will discover nothing true from the said prophet except human bloodshed.”

Muhammad is first mentioned by name in a Syriac fragment, also written around 634. Only scattered phrases are intelligible: “many villages [in Homs] were ravaged by the killing [of the followers] of Muhammad and many people were slain and [taken] prisoner from Galilee to Beth,” and “some ten thousand” other Christians were slaughtered in “the vicinity of Damascus.”

Writing around 640, Thomas the Presbyter says that “there was a battle [probably Ajnadayn] between the Romans and the Arabs of Muhammad in Palestine twelve miles east of Gaza. The Romans fled. . . . Some 4,000 poor villagers of Palestine were killed there. . . . The Arabs ravaged the whole region.” They even “climbed the mountain of Mardin and killed many monks there in the monasteries of Qedar and Bnata.”

A Coptic homily, also written around the 640s, is apparently the earliest account to associate the invaders with (an albeit hypocritical) piety. It counsels Christians to fast, but not “like the Saracens who are oppressors, who give themselves up to prostitution, massacre and lead into captivity the sons of men, saying, ‘we both fast and pray.’”

Writing around 650, John of Nikiû said the Ishmaelite invaders and conquerors of Egypt were not just “enemies of God” but adherents of “the detestable doctrine of the beast, that is, Mohammed.”

But it is only toward the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth centuries — still roughly four centuries before the First Crusade — that learned Christians became acquainted with and scrutinized the theological claims of Islam. The image of Muhammad went from bad to worse.

The best representative of this is Saint John of Damascus (b. 676), whose thorough analysis of Muhammad and Islam is the earliest of its kind. Based on his reading of the Koran and familiarity with other Islamic sources, he concluded that the only “miracle” Muhammad performed was to invade, slaughter, and enslave those who refused to submit to him — a “miracle that even common robbers and highway bandits can perform.” The prophet put whatever words best served him into God’s mouth, thus “simulating revelation in order to justify his own sexual indulgence”; he made his religion appealing and justified his own behavior by easing the sexual and moral codes of the Arabs and fusing the notion of obedience to God with war to aggrandize oneself with booty and slaves.

In the eighth century, Nicetas Byzantinos, who studied the Koran, presented it as the “most pitiful and most inept little book of the Arab Muhammad … full of blasphemies against the Most High, with all its ugly and vulgar filth,” particularly its claim that heaven amounted to a “sexual brothel.”

In his entry for the years 629–630, Theophanes the Confessor (b. 758) wrote:

Allah was denounced as an impostor deity, namely Satan: “I anathematize the God of Muhammad,” read one Eastern Roman canonical rite.

Perhaps most importantly, Muhammad’s denial of and war on all things distinctly Christian — the Trinity, the resurrection, and “the cross, which they abominate” — proved that he was Satan’s minion. Thus, “the false prophet,” “the hypocrite,” “the liar,” “the adulterer,” “the forerunner of Antichrist,” and “the Beast” became mainstream epithets for Muhammad among Christians for centuries.

In short, it wasn’t only during the Crusades — when, as Armstrong would have it, popes desperately needed to demonize Mohammed and Islam in order to rally support for the Crusades — that Christians began to see him as a “sinister figure,” “cruel warlord,” a “lecher and sexual pervert” (Armstrong’s words, not mine). That’s how Christians saw him right from the start.

Incidentally, Armstrong’s claim that the scholar monks of Europe, “with ill-concealed envy, berated him as a lecher and sexual pervert at a time when the popes were attempting to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy” seems to be a bit of projection. As an ex-nun who betrayed her own vows, perhaps it is she who harbors “ill-conceived envy” against her former colleagues who stayed the course?

Be that as it may, let us close by considering the parallels between Esposito’s lie and Armstrong’s: Although Muslims engaged in violence and conquest against Christians for nearly five centuries, Esposito claims that “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” passed between Muslims and Christians before the Crusaders ruined it all. And although Christians have always seen Muhammad as a “sinister figure,” Armstrong claims that this view was fabricated as a pretext to justify the Crusades.

In both cases, Muslims are exonerated of their demonstrably bad behavior and everything is, once again, blamed on those evil Christian Crusaders.