Answer
Asalamu Alaikum,
Thank you for contacting About Islam with your question.
Dr. Shabir Ally addresses this question in the video below:
Transcript:
Aisha Khaja: So, Dr. Shabir, the question that we have is: how can we reconcile our love and respect for the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) with information in the early biographies regarding political assassinations of poets at Muhammad’s command or the massacre of the Jews of bani Quarayza?
Dr. Shabir Ally: Well, we can reconcile this, well first of all, what was the problem with reconciliation, let me get to that.
The problem here is that obviously our modern sensibilities we cannot accept that a great leader of the past would have ordered the assassination of people for what seems to be like petty issues.
Like what’s big issue somebody’s reciting poetry against use you? So, assassinate that person?
And then what about the reports that the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) had hundreds of men of a particular Jewish tribe killed on one occasion, following from a battle.
OK, so you’ve besieged them: you’ve captured them. Regardless of what the crime is, now what do you do with them? You just assassinate them?
So, the reports that say that the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) did something like this. This could be difficult for Muslims to deal with given our modern sensibility. So, then how do we reconcile that?
Now we get to that, well for one thing we should recognize that the time and circumstances of the Prophet (peace be upon him) were very different from our own. So, that gives us some allowance for some things which might be unpalatable to us to think about in the modern context.
But we have to see how this applied in an ancient context. The second most important part of this answer is to recognize that some reports about what the Prophet (peace be upon him) said and did may not be authentically what the Prophet (peace be upon him) said.
Even if these reports are found in some of the most cherished records that Muslims have celebrated throughout the centuries and called them like books of authentic narratives of the Prophet.
Because each one of these narratives, each hadith has a text, a thing that is being reported, but also a chain of narrators who reported this thing from one person to another for many generations until they were, until the text was eventually put into writing.
So, you know how information can change from one mouth to another as people relate things. Even the memories of people change. If you take the testimony of somebody one day and you take the testimony the next day, that testimony the next day could actually be different from the testimony from the previous day.
So, given this volatility of oral reports we should not give credence to reports which paint the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in a light contrary to that which is depicted of him in the Quran.
The Quran in the twenty-first chapter the 107th verse says that God has sent the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as a mercy to the world’s. So, given that general description and everything else we know from the Quran, we should not attribute to the Prophet heinous deeds.
And hence we can recognize our love for him with these kinds of reports.
I hope this helps answer your question. Please keep in touch.
Walaikum Asalam.
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