Muhammad is the best example

In Islam, Muhammad’s role reaches beyond delivering a book. His sunnah, his customary words and deeds as recorded in the hadith, guides Muslim law, worship, family life, and manners. The Qur’an presents him as a pattern “for anyone whose hope is in Allāh and the Last Day” (33:21), which is to say, for believers in every place and age.

That is a large claim, and Christians make nothing like it about any prophet. Islam offers Muhammad’s life as a guide for how people should live now, so a pattern for all ages invites the question whether it fits all ages.

That is a different question from whether Muhammad was a great leader, which historians of every background agree he was. It is also not mockery, which does no one any good. It asks whether the life that Islam itself holds up as the best example shows the goodness that Muslims and Christians alike believe belongs to God.

A common reply is that moral criticism of Muhammad comes from Western values, not from God. Sometimes that is true; modern Western assumptions are not the measure of everything. But the standards involved here are not Western inventions. Muslims praise Muhammad as merciful, just, truthful, and gentle. Those are moral words, and they mean something only if goodness is something we can recognize, not whatever happens to be commanded.

If “good” meant nothing more than “what God commands,” then saying that God is good, or that his messenger is good, would tell us nothing; it would only say that God does what God does. Christians believe instead that goodness is rooted in God’s own unchanging character, and that human conscience can recognize it because people are made by him. The case for that view is set out in objective morality and God.

Muslim theologians argued about this among themselves. The Mu’tazila held that reason can recognize good and evil; the Ash’aris held that good and evil are known only through God’s command. Either way, Muslims praise the Prophet’s character in moral terms, so the question is whether his example shows the goodness of the one who is perfectly good, not whether it offends modern culture. Many Muslims ask it themselves. Some Muslim scholars today argue for reading certain hadith or verses differently, which shows that they feel the weight of it.

One example is enough, and it is given here with care, because it concerns real people.

Sahih al-Bukhari, which Sunni Muslims regard as the most reliable book after the Qur’an, records Aisha’s own report that the Prophet “married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old” (Bukhari 5133). Sahih Muslim has a parallel report. Aisha went on to become one of the most important teachers of early Islam, and nothing here is meant to diminish her. The question concerns the pattern. Muslims have given several answers: that customs of the time differed, that she had matured early, or that the reports of her age are mistaken. Those answers deserve a hearing. They also show that the question is a real one.

Critics did not invent the report. It is part of the example Islam presents, and the question is whether that example is meant to be followed in every age. Other questions are often raised, about warfare and about marriage law, and they deserve the same care: Islam’s own sources, read with the explanations Muslim scholars give, and no mockery.

When Christians compare Muhammad with someone, they compare him with Jesus, and Islam’s own sources point in the same direction.

• The angel announces Jesus to Mary as “a pure boy” (19:19).
• The Prophet says, in Sahih al-Bukhari, “There is none born among the off-spring of Adam, but Satan touches it… except Mary and her child” (Bukhari 3431).
• The Qur’an tells Muhammad more than once to “ask forgiveness for your sin” (47:19; 40:55), and speaks of God forgiving him “what preceded of your sin and what will follow” (48:2). It never tells Jesus to seek forgiveness.

Muslim scholars teach that prophets are protected from serious sin, and they understand these verses to refer to minor lapses or to the sins of the community. That reading should be respected. Even on that reading, though, the Qur’an and hadith describe Jesus in terms of purity that they do not use for Muhammad.

Christians go further. They believe Jesus was without sin entirely: “tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). You need not accept that. It is the Christian claim, and Islam’s own sources come close to it.

Twenty-first-century Western culture has its own deep moral failures, and Christians have no wish to defend it as the standard. The comparison Christians make is with Jesus as they know him.

According to the Gospels, Jesus taught, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). He held no political office and led no army. When he was arrested he told his followers to put away the sword, and on the cross he prayed for those who crucified him: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). One of his followers wrote of him, “When they heaped abuse on Him, He did not retaliate” (1 Peter 2:23).

This page does not ask you to accept the Gospels as reliable. It sets out what Christians mean by a perfect example: one whose life shows the character of God himself, especially in the way he suffered. If that is the standard, the comparison is between two lives.