In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the veneration of the prophet in later Islamic tradition, emphasizing his role as a messenger rather than an object of worship.
Salman Rushdie's quote highlights a significant aspect of early Islamic belief, which strictly maintained that the prophet should not be worshipped but rather seen as a messenger conveying God's message. Rushdie suggests that the subsequent development of a cult around the prophet contradicts the foundational tenets of Islam, thereby urging a return to the original principles of the faith where the prophet is honored but not deified.
In practice
During a lecture on religious beliefs, this quote can serve to illustrate the nuances in Islamic tradition.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast
I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.
For every force charged by God, may He be exalted, with some business is an angel put in charge.
It is unconceivable that the whole Universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate moon.
We ask only to be reassured About the noises in the cellar And the window that should not have been open
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