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Wahi: The Supernatural Basis of Islam Part II - The Modern View of the Quranic Trance Dr. Koenraad ELST [Editor's Note: Kashmir Herald is honored to have Dr. Koenraad ELST write a series of articles exclusively for Kashmir Herald. His series of 4 exclusive articles on "The Supernatural Basis of Islam" will be published exclusively here on Kashmir Herald.] Some modern Western and even some Muslim-born scholars have diagnosed the process of Quranic revelation to Mohammed as a case of paranoid delusion. For now we shall discuss the analysis offered by the Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson. In his Penguin monograph Mohammed, p.76-79, he starts out by rejecting the allegation that Mohammed's claim to receiving visions in a state of trance (wahi) was fraudulent. This allegation has of course been made by Christian polemicists against Islam, but also by modern leftist sympathizers of Islam seeking to recast Mohammed in the mould of a social progressive: in order to further his purported programme of social reform, Mohammed is said to enact the role of conveyor of God's voice merely to carry more conviction. Against this line of thought, Rodinson argues: "Modern advances in psychology and psychiatry have made short work of such simplistic explanations of fraud, whether justifiable or otherwise. The reaction may even have gone too far in the other direction, for there have been, and still are, cases of real fraud. But their number is limited. At all events, it is now generally understood and admitted that certain individuals can sincerely believe that they are the recipients of visual, auditory and mental messages from the Beyond; and also that their sincerity is no proof that these messages really come from where they are claimed to come." So, where did the Quranic messages come from? "It is the concept of the unconscious that has enabled us to understand these things. (.) One has only to dip into psychology text-books to find a hundred perfectly bona fide cases of people in a state of hallucination hearing things and seeing visions which they claim quite genuinely never to have seen or heard before. And yet an objective study of their cases shows that these are simply fresh associations produced by the unconscious working on things which have been seen or heard but forgotten." Just like a dream, a hallucination recombines old sensory and mental impressions: "It is therefore conceivable that what Muhammad saw and heard may have been the beings described to him by the Jews and Christians with whom he talked. It is understandable that, in the words that came to him, elements of his actual experience, the stuff of his thoughts, dreams and meditations, and memories of the discussions that he had heard, should have re-emerged, chopped, changed and transposed, with an appearance of immediate reality that seemed to him proof of some external activity which, although inaccessible to other men's minds, was yet wholly objective in its nature." Throughout his career as a Prophet (except, as we shall see, at the very beginning), Mohammed genuinely believed that the visions and spoken messages which he "received" were of divine origin. His wahi or Quranic trance seemed to make a far deeper impression on his mind than any ordinary human experience could, and he therefore considered it supremely real. Today, both in mental hospitals and in the cult scene, you can find numerous people who likewise believe to be regular recipients of messages from Above. In some cases, these people manage to make others believe in their claims, too. They then set themselves up as cult leaders, revered by a group of followers as their direct telephone line to God or the spirit world. It is not uncommon for people who regularly hallucinate to function fairly normally in the world, sometimes highly successfully. Thus, Joan of Arc derived from her visions the strength to lead an army against the British invaders of France. Mohammed was probably the single most successful voice-hearer in world history. It is only in a very few cases later on in his career that both contemporaries and later scholars of Islam have found reason to cast doubt on the genuineness of instances of Quranic trance. These are the cases where the divine messages received during wahi were just a little too convenient not to look like Mohammed's self-serving fabrications. The best-known instance is when Mohammed received permission from Allah to marry Zaynab, the repudiated wife of his adopted son Zayd. Under Arab customary law, this union was prohibited, but in a timely revelation (Q.33:37, 33:50), Allah exempted Mohammed from this law. Christian polemicists against Islam have often cited the Zaynab episode as proof of Mohammed's insatiable lust, but in fact its indication of self-serving manipulation of the wahi by Mohammed is more damaging to the Islamic belief system. According to Rodinson: "It is true that, later on, some disturbing characteristics did appear. Muhammad had to take day-to-day decisions, decisions of a political, practical and legislative nature, which could not wait for some unspecified moment when the spirit might see fit to breathe on him. He was constantly under fire, bombarded with questions and requests for advice. The divinely inspired nature of his replies gave them a solid basis of authority. Did he yield to the temptation to nudge the truth a little? Some of the revelations correspond a little too closely to what might have been the Prophet's own human desires and calculations. Or was it, once again, his unconscious at work? We shall never know." These few somewhat suspect instances should at any rate not make us lose sight of the general case: "When his soul was thus plunged into the void (.) Muhammad then attained periodic states of ecstasy in which he felt that he had been stripped of his own personality, submitting passively to the invasion of a mysterious force, (.) he experienced the phenomena described above - seeing and hearing things, either inwardly or outwardly, in the mind or the imagination. We find these ecstasies and sensory phenomena in a very similar form among persons suffering from recognized mental conditions such as hysteria, schizophrenia and uncontrolled verbalization." If anything can dispel the lingering doubt about Mohammed's genuine belief in the reality of his trance visions, it is the description of his own reaction when these psychic phenomena started. Rodinson: "A study of Muhammad's earliest messages, coupled with a perusal of accounts of the crises of doubt or despair which preceded or accompanied them, can only produce a skeptical attitude towards the theories which see them as evidence of a coolly calculated plan carried out ruthlessly from motives of either ambition or philanthropy. And these accounts do seem to be authentic. Tradition, concerned to stress the supernatural affiliations of Muhammed's personality, would not have invented from scratch such very human traits." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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