The orientalists, The seerah and the qur’an-2

Jassim Ibn Da’yan


A.2 RELIGIOUS ILLUSION THEORY

INSINUATION


Apart from the epileptic theory, there is what they call the religious illusion theory – conscious or sub-conscious. According to this theory put forward by the orientalists, a man who is deeply religious may have vision which may lead him to think that what he imagines come from God while that is not the case.
Rev. J.M. Rodwell has been quoted as saying that, “He (Muhammad) was probably, more or less, throughout his whole career, the victim of a certain amount of self-deception. A cataleptic subject from his early youth, born - according to the traditions – of a highly nervous and excitable mother, he would be peculiarly liable to morbid and fantastic hallucination, and alternations of excitement and depression, which would win for him, in the eyes of his ignorant countrymen, the credit of being inspired..”


R.A. Nicholson is another scholar who seems to propound the religious illusion theory. He says, “Whether we regard it as ‘ pathological case’ or a grand example of mystical ecstasy, the thing outset of his mission a dominating motive can be discerned in his conviction that, the Last Judgment was near and that he must at all costs warn his countrymen of the doom impending.”


Nicholson magnanimously says, that although the Qur’an was uninspired, Muhammad (pbuh) was not conscious of his fabrication. “To say that.. ‘ the Qur’an is, on the whole, uninspired does not mean that its author was conscious of fraud when he gave out all sorts of regulations and instructions in Qur’an’s name.”
However, he betrays his hidden bias when he says that, ‘Muhammad (pbuh) was addicted to the practice of solitary prayer, especially during the night, and may well have cultivated it for the purpose of inducing the abnormal states, which caused his enemies to describe as possessed by the jinn.’