To Praise or not to Praise the Messenger

It is one of the pillars of faith in Islam to believe in all of the messengers and prophets sent by Allah. Being the last of the line of messengers, Muhammad pbuh also brought the final revelation to guide humanity until the end of time. All of these select people were enabled by God to work extraordinary things as a confirmation of their divine authority. However, throughout the life of Muhammad and especially during the period in which Quran was revealed, two major principles were meticulously observed: human essence of the messenger and the authority of the mind. I would like to use these principles to reflect on the situation of religious leaders in our times. But first, let's set up the background.

The first of these principles is the emphasis on the human essence of the prophet. It is the nature of people to exalt things beyond what they truly are. Having seen the miracles in the hands of the prophet, and witnessing the divine words coming through him, people around Muhammad and also all the people to follow in later times are prone to exalting him beyond human. So, either through events in his life or through some corrective verses in the Quran, this point was firmly made clear by God in the minds of the people surrounding Muhammad pbuh. In fact, although humanity always managed to revert to idolatry or to deify the saint people before or after Islam, Muhammad himself was never deified by his followers, and I think this is an unnoticed miracle of his.

The second principle observed in the beginning of Islam was to convince people about the greatest miracle and the greatest tool to reach truth. The greatest miracle of Muhammad is not the extraordinary events he showed but the book he brought from God. A book is not exciting enough for people, but in reality, what makes a human human is their intellect and reason guiding their will power. A conviction about truth can be achieved by a book telling the truth and a mind contemplating it. So, we humans are ultimately left to our minds as a sign of God.

Both of these principles are built into the verse below from the chapter Al-Imran:

"It is not for a human [prophet] that Allah should give him the Scripture and authority and prophethood and then he would say to the people, "Be servants to me rather than Allah," but [instead, he would say], "Be pious scholars of the Lord because of what you have taught of the Scripture and because of what you have studied." Nor could he order you to take the angels and prophets as lords. Would he order you to disbelief after you had been Muslims?" (Quran 3/79-80)

In order to employ these principles on the situation of the religious leaders of our times, I am going to first build a fictitious story. Let's imagine that during the life of the prophet, some people thought that it is through this holy man that people find guidance, and so, if they respect him and recognize him as a great man, they can find the path of God. With this thinking, they embark on a zealous effort to advertise the qualities of the holy man and to explain him everywhere. As a result, many people in the vicinity or in distant places get to know the messenger, and start praising him. Since this step is treated as a precursor to the real guidance, the initial people who started the action are happy with this situation. Seeing them happy, the people who just got to know the messenger think that recognizing and praising the messenger is the ultimate point.

If you carefully and sensitively ponder on the above story, you will see the seeds of idolatry, for one of the claims of idolatry is that the idols intercede with God and they help people get close to God. Therefore, unaware of what they have done, the friends of the messenger would have started a path of misguidance with their very hands. Let's continue our fictitious story for more lessons.

Following their admiration, the newly converts flock to see the man of God, and upon their arrival to the city but before they see the messenger, everybody sees other groups who have overcome long distances just to taste a few minutes of presence with the holy man. So, words get exchanged about the holiness of the messenger, and stories of his miracles are circulated from tongue to tongue, and an aurora of admiration settles on the entire city with all the visitors in it. The local merchants, poets, etc. join the effort, further exalting the messenger. At this point, if the messenger, too, were to think that this much focus on him is good, because people acknowledging him as an extraordinary, heavenly being is a step of guidance, he would ruin not only himself but also all those people around him. Remember the above verse, and also add the following verse in to your perspective:

"Say, [O Muhammad], "I do not tell you that I have the depositories [containing the provision] of Allah or that I know the unseen, nor do I tell you that I am an angel. I only follow what is revealed to me." Say, "Is the blind equivalent to the seeing? Then will you not give thought?" " (Quran 6/50)

Now we can come to our day. Today, around the world, there are many scholars or religious leaders who are striving to spread the message of God. In fact this is a duty on all believers, but these people turn out to be more skilled and more successful at that. If you consider that contemplating about the truth and explaining it is very difficult whereas praising a human is so much more easy, it shouldn't be that difficult for you to guess that the people around those scholars and leaders are prone to the mistake told in our fictitious story. Furthermore, if those scholars and leaders cannot properly interpret this situation and take counteraction, they are running a risk of paving a path contrary to their aim. Plus, the presence of a crowd praising one person is inflammable for human ego.

In short, to conserve the purity of our faiths and intentions, to protect the people who are showing the path of God from going astray, and to preserve the authenticity of the divine message we want to spread, the believers must educate themselves with the proper manners of appreciation and with ways to avoid the infiltration of idolatry into their deeds. Furthermore, we believers must inculcate critical thinking into the minds of our generations as an integral part of proper faith.