Muhammad the Greatest

by Ahmad Deedat

page 18

Chapter 2

FROM THE HISTORICAL PAST  

      It is not difficult to reproduce a further dozen or more
eulogies by the admirers and critics of Muhammad (pbuh).
Despite all their objectivity, jaundiced minds can always
conjure up some aspersions.  Let me take my readers deep
down in past history.

       It was Friday the 8th of May, 1840, that is about a
hundred and fifty years ago, at a time when it was a
sacrilege to say anything good about Muhammad (pbuh),
and the Christian West was trained to hate the man
Muhammad (pbuh) and his religion, the same way as dogs
were at one stage trained in my country to hate all black
people.¹ At that time in history, Thomas Carlyle, one of the
greatest thinkers of the past century delivered a series of
lectures under the theme - "Heroes and Hero-worship."

DEVELOPED SICKNESS
       Carlyle exposed this blind prejudice of his people at the
beginning of his talk.  He made reference to one of the
literary giants a Dutch scholar and statesman, by the name
of Hugo Grotius,²  who had written a bitter and abusive
invective against the prophet of Islam.  He had falsely
charged that the Holy Prophet had trained pigeons to pick
out peas from his ears, so that he could by this trick bluff
his people that the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove was
revealing God's Revelation to him, which he then had them

1. By the way "dogs are colour blind!" Yet it can be done.
2. From page 57 of the book - "On Heroes Hero-worship and the Heroic in History" by
Thomas Carlyle, London 1959.

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