i am well and truly puzzled at you, father stephano, i said. how could you have reached this conclusion and believed in it and you are a christian clergyman?
it is true i am a christian clergyman but i respect and revere all prophets. prophets have brought us only goodness and love. jesus himself didn't order us to disparage any of them or deny his religious mission. if we do so we'd be rather contravening the teachings of jesus himself. besides, who told you muhammad and jesus are enemies?
some westerners seem to think so, i said.
whoever says that is ignorant of both muhammad and jesus. if he'd study the life of muhammad and know the truth about it, he could only say what george bernard shaw said.
and what did shaw say, i asked?
"i have studied muhammad and come to admire him. in my view," shaw said, "rather than the anti-christ, he must be called 'the saviour of humanity.'"([1])
now let me go back to what i was saying, father stephano added, to reassure you that those who followed the prophets did not do so because they were great men or geniuses. they followed them because they were godsend human prophets.
so the attributes of greatness the prophet muhammad (pbuh) had were due to his prophethood and to the mission god had entrusted and sent him with to all human beings, weren't they?
yes, father stephano said. any study of muhammad's character would not be of much use if it separated between this character and its prophethood. nor would it be of any use if it separated the quran, the true hadeeths and the reliable accounts of the prophet's life. for all these are constituent elements of one and the same subject.
as i bona fide accept this conclusion, he added, i have to study the aspects of mercy* for human beings in the character of muhammad as a prophet and as a godsend messenger. i am therefore adamant that i accept no aspect of this mercy unless it is underpinned by a text from the three primary sources we've agreed to defer to. and this is precisely the benefit i expect from you so as to have my study well documented and supported by reliable evidence.
with the blessings of god, i said. where do you want us to start?
before we start, i'd like to bring up something and discuss it with you further.
what?
as i was putting my ideas in order before i began writing, it occurred to me to introduce my study with a preface about the aspects of mercy for human beings in muhammad's character before his divine call.
that's good.
but i encountered a logical problem, he said.
what is it, i asked?
([1]) quoted in a. deedat, what the west says about muhammad, cit., p. 10. see also g. b. shaw, the genuine islam.
* mercy here, as elsewhere in this book, is the collective term synonymous to kindness, compassion, leniency, pity and other closely affiliate significations. its collective antonyms are cruelty, harshness, roughness, ruthlessness, etc.