Medieval Christian views on Muhammad

Various Western and Byzantine Christian thinkers considered Muhammad to be a perverted, deplorable man, a false prophet, and even the Antichrist, as he was frequently seen in Christendom as a heretic or possessed by demons. Some of them, like Thomas Aquinas, criticized Muhammad's promises of carnal pleasure in the afterlife. With the Crusades of the High Middle Ages, and the wars against the Ottoman Empire during the Late Middle Ages, the Christian reception of Muhammad became more polemical, moving from the classification as a heretic to depiction of Muhammad as a servant of Satan or as the Antichrist, who will be eternally suffering tortures in Hell amongst the damned. By the Late Middle Ages, Islam was more typically grouped with Paganism, and Muhammad was viewed as an idolater inspired by the Devil. A more relaxed or benign view of Islam only developed in the modern period, after the Islamic empires ceased to be an acute military threat to Europe (see Orientalism). == Early Middle Ages ==

The earliest written Christian knowledge of Muhammad stems from Byzantine sources, written shortly after Muhammad's death in 632 CE. In the anti-Jewish polemic the Teaching of Jacob, a dialogue between a recent Christian convert and several Jews, one participant writes that his brother "wrote to [him] saying that a deceiving prophet has appeared amidst the Saracens". Another participant in the Doctrina replies about Muhammad: "He is deceiving. For do prophets come with sword and chariot?, …[Y]ou will discover nothing true from the said prophet except human bloodshed". Though Muhammad is never called by his name, the author seems to know of his existence and represents both Jews and Christians as viewing him in a negative light. Other contemporary sources, such as the writings of Sophronius of Jerusalem, do not characterize Saracens as having their own prophet or faith, only remarking that the Saracen attacks must be a punishment for Christian sins. Sebeos, a 7th-century Armenian bishop and historian, wrote shortly after the end of the first Arab civil war concerning Muhammad and his Farewell Sermon: Knowledge of Muhammad in Medieval Christendom became available after the early expansion of the Islamic religion in the Middle East and North Africa. In the 8th century John of Damascus, a Syrian monk, Christian theologian, and apologist that lived under the Umayyad Caliphate, reported in his heresiological treatise De Haeresibus ("Concerning Heresy") the Islamic denial of Jesus' crucifixion and his alleged substitution on the cross, attributing the origin of these doctrines to Muhammad himself: Later, the Latin translation of De Haeresibus, where he explicitly used the phrase "false prophet" in referring to Muhammad, became known in the Christian West. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Christian knowledge of Muhammad's life "was nearly always used abusively". Another Spaniard, Álvaro of Córdoba, proclaimed Muhammad to be the Antichrist in one of his works. Christendom also gained some knowledge of Muhammad through the Mozarabs of Spain, such as the 9th-century Eulogius of Córdoba. == High Middle Ages ==

's Inferno casts Muhammad in Hell, reflecting his negative image in the Christian world. Medieval lives of Muhammad During the 13th century, European biographers completed their work on the life of Muhammad in a series of works by scholars such as Peter Pascual, Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, and Ramon Llull For example, in order to show that Muhammad was the anti-Christ, it was asserted that Muhammad died not in the year 632 but in the year 666 – the number of the beast – in another variation on the theme the number "666" was also used to represent the period of time Muslims would hold sway of the land. Others usually confirmed to pious Christians that Muhammad had come to a bad end. Leggenda di Maometto is another example of such a story. In this version, as a child Muhammad was taught the black arts by a heretical Christian villain who escaped imprisonment by the Christian Church by fleeing to the Arabian Peninsula; as an adult he set up a false religion by selectively choosing and perverting texts from the Bible to create Islam. It also ascribed the Muslim holiday of Friday "dies Veneris" (day of Venus), as against the Jewish (Saturday) and the Christian (Sunday), to his followers' depravity as reflected in their multiplicity of wives. Medieval romances Medieval European literature often referred to Muslims as "infidels" or "pagans", in sobriquets such as the paynim foe. In the same vein, the definition of "Saracen" in Raymond of Penyafort's Summa de Poenitentia starts by describing the Muslims but ends by including every person who is neither a Christian nor a Jew. These depictions such as those in The Song of Roland represent Muslims worshiping Muhammad (spelt e.g. 'Mahom' and 'Mahumet') as a god, and depict them worshiping various deities in the form of "idols", ranging from Apollyon to Lucifer, but ascribing to them a chief deity known as "Termagant". Depictions of Muhammad in the form of picaresque novel began to appear from the 13th century onward, such as in Alexandre du Pont's Roman de Mahom, the translation of the Mi'raj, the Escala de Mahoma (“The Ladder of Muhammad”) by the court physician of Alfonso X of Castile and León and his son. The Divine Comedy 's illustrations of the Divine Comedy (1861) In Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Muhammad is placed in Malebolge, the eighth circle of hell, designed for those who have committed fraud; specifically, he is placed in the ninth bolgia (ditch) among the sowers of discord and schism. Muhammad is portrayed as split in half, with his entrails hanging out, representing his status as a heresiarch (Inferno 28): :No barrel, not even one where the hoops and staves go Every which way, was ever split open like a frayed Sinner I saw, ripped from chin to where we fart below. :His guts hung between his legs and displayed His vital organs, including that wretched sack Which converts to shit whatever gets conveyed down the gullet. :As I stared at him he looked back And with his hands pulled his chest open, Saying, "See how I split open the crack in myself! See how twisted and broken Mohammed is! Before me walks Ali, his face Cleft from chin to crown, grief–stricken." This graphic scene is frequently shown in illustrations of the Divine Comedy: Muhammad is represented in a 15th-century fresco Last Judgment by Giovanni da Modena and drawing on Dante, in the San Petronio Basilica in Bologna, as well as in artwork by Salvador Dalí, Auguste Rodin, William Blake, and Gustave Doré. In his depiction of Muhammad, Dante draws inspiration from medieval Christian views on Muhammad. As stated by historian Karla Mallette, "medieval Christians viewed the historical Muḥammad as a frankly theatrical character." One common allegation laid against Muhammad was that he was an impostor who, in order to satisfy his ambition and his lust, propagated religious teachings that he knew to be false. Cultural critic and author Edward Said wrote in Orientalism regarding Dante's depiction of Muhammad: Dante's representation of Muhammad in Inferno (canto 28) is generally interpreted as showing Dante’s disdain for Muslims. However, Dante's relation to Islam is more nuanced than what this canto would suggest. Dante lived during the eighth and ninth Crusades and would have been brought up around the idea that it is righteous to war against Muslims—namely, against the Hafsid dynasty, the Sunni Muslims who ruled the Medieval province Ifriqiya, an area on the northern coast of Africa. It is not surprising that he would have been surrounded by anti-Islam rhetoric and have seen Muslims as the general enemy. For example, he shows his admiration for the crusaders when he writes about his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida in the heavens of Mars in Paradiso. However, this narrative is complicated by Dante's intellectual admiration for some Muslims in Inferno 4, and specifically Averroes, Avicenna, and Saladin. When the Knights Templar were being tried for heresy reference was often made to their worship of a demon Baphomet, which was notable by implication for its similarity to the common rendition of Muhammad's name used by Christian writers of the time, Mahomet. All these and other variations on the theme were all set in the "temper of the times" of what was seen as a Muslim-Christian conflict as Medieval Europe was building a concept of "the great enemy" in the wake of the quickfire success of the early Muslim conquests shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, as well as the lack of real information in the West of the mysterious East. In the Heldenbuch-Prosa, a prose preface to the manuscript Heldenbuch of Diebolt von Hanowe from 1480, the demon Machmet appears to the mother of the Germanic hero Dietrich and builds "Bern" (Verona) in three days. == See also ==