Bosworth smith was a Christian and famous British historian. His book “Mohammed and Mohammedanism” took the form of four lectures, which were first delivered in 1872 at Harrow before a small number of friends and in 1874 before the Royal Institute of Great Britain. As soon as the course was over and these lectures were published in book form.
In his book ‘Mohammed and Mohammedanism’ Reverend showed his unbiased and impartial views about Islam and Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). He appreciates Prophet Muhammad in these words:
“He raised superior to the titles and ceremonies, the solemn trifling, and the proud humility of court etiquette.
Mohammed was content with the reality; he cared not for the dressings of power.
The simplicity of his private life was in keeping with his public life. ‘God’ says Al-Bukhari, ‘offered him the keys of the treasures of the earth, but he would not accept them”.
Another place Bosworth Smith said:
“Those who knew him best, his wife, his eccentric slave, his cousin, his earliest friend- he who, as Mohammed said, alone of his converts, turned not back, neither was perplexed’-were the first to recognize his mission [that is, his Prophethood].
The ordinary lot of a Prophet was in his case reversed; he was not without honor save among those who did not know him well”.
Unmatched Accomplishments of Prophet Muhammad
Reverend Bosworth Smith also said:
“The practices that Muhammad forbade and not forbade only, but abolished, human sacrifices [That is sacrificing humans] and the murder of female infants, and blood feuds, and unlimited polygamy, and wanton cruelty to slaves, drunkenness, gambling would have gone unchecked in Arabia and the adjoining countries”.
“Nor could anyone have done what Mohammed did without the most profound faith in the reality and goodness of his cause [he had firm faith and conviction in his mission, claim and that he was sent from God; it is thus that a revolution was brought about] there is everything to prove the real enthusiastic arriving slowly and painfully at what he believed to be the truth”.
“To say that Arabia needed renovation was to say in other words that the time for a new Prophet had come, and why might not that Prophet be Mohammed himself?
Sprenger, the most recent and exhaustive writer on the subject, has shown that for some hundred years before Mohammed the advent of another Prophet had been expected and even predicted”.
Prophet Muhammad’s Exceptional Personality
Commenting on Prophet Muhammad’s amazing capabilities and consistency in personality, Smith says:
“On the whole, the wonder is to me not how much, but how little, under different circumstances, Mohammed differed from himself.
In the shepherd of the desert [when he tended sheep];
in the Syrian trader;
in the solitary of mount Hira;
in the reformer the minority of one;
in the exile of Medina;
in the acknowledged conqueror;
in the equal of the Persian Chosroes and the Greek Heraclius;
We can still trace a substantial unity.
I doubt whether any other man, whose external conditions changed so much, ever him changed less to meet them: the accidents are changed; the essence seems to me to be the same in all”.
Prophet Muhammad vs Jesus Christ
Reverend Bosworth Smith has tried successfully to prove Prophet Muhammad’s superiority over all others Prophets in this respect. He writes:
“Historically we have a remote image of Christ’s life. On the other hand, as far as Prophet Mohammed’s life is concerned, we have a history.
We know indeed some fragments of Christ’s life but who can lift the evil of the thirty years that prepared the way for the three?
But in Mohammed’s life everything is different here. Instead of the shadowy and the mysterious, we have history. We know as much of Mohammed as we do even of Luther and Milton.
The mythical, the legendary, the supernatural is almost wanting in the original Arab authorities, or at all events can easily be distinguished from what is historical. Nobody here is the dupe of himself or others; there is the full light of day upon all that light can ever reach at all.
‘The abysmal depths of personality’ indeed are, and must always remain beyond the reach of any line and plummet of ours.
But we know everything of the external history of Mohammed, his youth, his appearance, his relations, his habits; the first idea and the gradual growth intermittent through it was of his great revelation;
while for his internal history, after his mission had been proclaimed, we have a Book (Quran) absolutely unique in its origin, in its preservation and in the chaos of its contents, but on the substantial authority of which no one has ever been able to cast a serious doubt.
There, if in any book, we have a mirror of one of the master-spirits of the world; often inartistic, but impregnated with a few grand ideas which stand out from the whole; a mind seething with the inspiration pent within it, intoxicated with God.
He preserved to the end of his career that modesty and simplicity of life which is the crowning beauty of his character”.