Mohamed - A settlement

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Hamed Abdel-Samad in 2013

Mohamed - Eine Abrechnung is an Islam-critical nonfiction book by the German-Egyptian political scientist Hamed Abdel-Samad published by Droemer- Verlag in 2015 . The main theme of the book is a representation of the life of Muhammad and the emergence of Islam . He attributes the actions of Osama bin Laden and the crimes of Islamist terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State to the willingness of Muhammad to spread Islam through violent submission and, in some cases, the physical liquidation of people of different faiths. Comparisons to the Mafia are also drawn.

content

After the introduction, Radicalization of a Visionary , which gives a rough overview of the life of Muhammad, Abdel-Samad divides his work into eight chapters.

The first chapter, Mohammed's rebirth , is devoted to the question of whether Mohammed ever existed and how clearly his life can be read. Abdel-Samad assumes the existence of Muhammad, but doubts that the hadiths, as works that were written long after Muhammad's death, reflect reality at every point. In this chapter, Abdel-Samad is careful to emphasize the role of the Mohammed biographer Ibn Ishāq , who made a great contribution to the founding myth of Islam.

The second chapter, Mohamed and Ishmael , traces Mohammed's origins. Abdel-Samad considers him to be a child who emerged from a “cohabiting marriage” and was spurned by his tribe. In the middle of his life, Mohammed fell into a deep identity crisis and gave up his profession as a businessman. This was accompanied by acoustic and visual hallucinations and suicidal thoughts and was the origin of Islam. In this chapter, Abdel-Samad draws parallels between the actions of Muhammad in the early Middle Ages and that of the Islamic State in the 21st century.

In the third chapter, Mohammed's merits , Abdel-Samad investigates these and mentions above all the unification of the Arab tribes and the creation of an Arabic culture and language, which Mohammed enforced with a " total war ". Abdel-Samad also emphasizes that Muhammad wanted to proclaim Islam through the word alone, but was ridiculed or driven out in all attempts to do so. He then turned to violence and, with the help of the Khasradsch and Aos, attacked his own tribe. Abdel-Samad compares this approach with the approach of Osama bin Laden and the Islamic State. Abdel-Samad also draws comparisons between the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the political structure of Islam. According to the author, Sicilian culture was lastingly shaped during the Islamic occupation of the island, which can be seen in the Sicilian honor killing .

The fourth chapter, Beyond the Veil , is devoted to Muhammad's relationship with the female sex. “The older he got, the more adolescent his dealings [...] with women became,” writes the author. In particular, Muhammad's polygamy and his restrictive testamentary provisions towards his wives are denounced. Abdel-Samad assumes that this behavior can be explained by Mohammed's early childhood. At that time, Muhammad's mother rejected her son three weeks after he was born. His - significantly older - first wife, Khadijah , played the role of a surrogate mother for Mohammed . Then Abdel-Samad turns to Mohammed's eldest daughter, Zainab , and his youngest wife, Aischa .

The fifth chapter, The Word of God or “confused bundle of dreams” , begins Abdel-Samad with a personal introduction to how he, as the son of an imam, had to learn the Koran by heart as a child. He later found the Koran in the Augsburg University Library with the author's name unknown . Following on from this, the author criticizes the Islamic teaching that Mohammed received the Koran as a divine revelation , and sees many parts of the Koran as written hallucinations of Muhammad.

In the sixth chapter, Mohamed and the Jews , Abdel-Samad characterizes Mohammed as a mass murderer and an anti-Semite . The author makes use of Islamic sources that document the massacre of Jews (see Banū Quraiza ). In addition, Abdel-Samad devotes himself in detail to the language of the Koran, which changed in parallel with the development of Muhammad's attitude towards the Jews.

In the seventh chapter, Genius and Delusion , Abdel-Samad describes Mohammed as an aggrieved outsider, pathological tyrant , narcissist and paranoid with hypergraphy due to temporal lobe epilepsy .

The eighth chapter, The Naked Prophet , is the shortest chapter of the work. Abdel-Samad goes into the contemporary event of the attack on Charlie Hebdo and wishes the Muslim community a more liberal approach to criticism and satire.

Important data on the emergence of Islam and a bibliography can be found in the appendix.

dedication

Abdel-Samad dedicated the book to the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo , in which Islamists murdered employees of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo , which had repeatedly made Mohammed the subject of its caricatures. Specifically listed are Stéphane Charbonnier , Jean Cabut , Georges Wolinski , Bernard Verlhac , Philippe Honoré , Mustapha Ourrad, Elsa Cayat , Bernard Maris , Michel Renaud, Frédéric Boisseau, Franck Brinsolaro and Ahmed Merabet.

criticism

The book was widely received in the mass media and was a bestseller shortly after its publication . In the second week after its publication, it reached number 1 on the list of the best-selling non-fiction books published by Buchreport magazine .

Positive review

Armin Geus , emeritus medical historian from the University of Marburg and critic of Islam , summed up on Citizen Times : “The author has written a courageous, honest book. The balance of his 'accounting' is impressive. He has embarked on the overdue dismantling of deadly traditions and disenchanted the 'darling of Allah' as ​​the insane founder of religion. "

Norbert Kron said in ttt title, theses, temperaments in the first : “What a contentious book. With his frontal attack on Mohammed, Abdel-Samad wants to change the attitude of Muslims towards religion: They should make their faith a private matter. He knows that his provocation will meet with opposition from many. "

The journalist Kersten Knipp concluded in his review for Deutsche Welle : “One does not have to follow Abdel-Samad's conclusions on the biography of the Prophet. It is possible that they will soon be refuted in whole or in part. But the book does one thing: it will encourage discussion among Muslims about the foundations of their beliefs. "

Jerome Lombard reviewed for the Jüdische Rundschau : “Abdel-Samad's work stands out. It is by no means just another biography, let alone a treatise focused on the religious. Rather, it is a biographical sketch in the form of a psychogram. Written in a historical-critical reading. [...] the book is a call for an inner-Islamic enlightenment movement. "

Negative review

TAZ editor Daniel Bax , a critic of Islamophobia disguised as criticism of Islam , saw the book on Spiegel Online as extremely critical. With reference to an earlier statement by Abdel-Samad in a lecture at the AfD youth organization , he wrote in the conclusion of his draft : “Nobody would accuse him of being a racist just because of his skin color, the publicist chuckled. There is something to it. And it's wrong. "

Stefan Weidner , editor-in-chief of Fikrun wa Fann , said in his review on Deutschlandradio Kultur and in the Wiener Zeitung about Abdel-Samad: “His image of Islam and Mohammed is due precisely to the fundamentalist Salafist Islam that it wants to fight. The difference between Abdel-Samad's depiction of Mohammed and that of a Salafist is not in the content, but in the evaluation: Abdel-Samad finds what the Salafists find worthy of imitation reprehensible. Both believe that there is the real Mohammed and they know what he is. "

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , the Middle East editor and Islamic scholar Rainer Hermann summed up: “The IS ideologues, however, read Muhammad's biography as one-sidedly as Abdel-Samad does. [...] Islam needs a renewal. It does not come from Abdel-Samad. ”He also criticized Abdel-Samad's handling of the sources.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Prophet under criticism. on: buchreport.de. October 9, 2015, accessed January 9, 2016.
  2. ↑ Armin Geus: The overdue dismantling of deadly traditions ( Memento from October 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: Citizen Times. October 21, 2015.
  3. ↑ Norbert Kron: The Prophet Mohammed - a settlement by Hamed Abdel-Samad ( Memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: The first. 22nd September 2015.
  4. ↑ Kersten Knipp: The Prophet on the Couch . In: Deutsche Welle. September 30, 2015.
  5. ↑ Jerome Lombard: The Icebreaker . In: Jüdische Rundschau. 4th November 2015.
  6. ^ Literature by and about Daniel Bax in the catalog of the German National Library
  7. ^ Daniel Bax: Criticism of religion according to Pegida style . In: Spiegel online. September 28, 2015.
  8. ↑ Stefan Weidner: Psychogram of the Prophet . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur. October 1, 2015.
  9. ↑ Stefan Weidner: Criticism of Islam on the wrong track . In: Wiener Zeitung. 3rd November 2015.
  10. ^ Rainer Hermann: Fantasizing about Muhammad . In: FAZ. 4th October 2015.