53 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good information but poorly written, June 17, 2008
This review is from: Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah's prophet (Paperback)
Ali Sina is a brave man, and he make some interesting observations about the various mental illnesses and pathologies Muhammed exhibited. Unfortunately he isn't a very good writer and the book is a bit repetitive. Having said that, I do think this is a very important book and should be read by anyone who wants to understand the danger we face from this cult masquerading as a "Religion of Peace".
If people weren't so afraid of Islamic bullies in academia, we would see more analysis of Islam's fairly sordid origins.
It's pretty clear from the Mohammedans who wrote reviews here, they didn't read the book, nor will they, because they aren't allowed to.
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76 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Prophetic Analysis, June 21, 2008
This review is from: Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah's prophet (Paperback)
Prophetic Analysis from staringattheview.blogspot.com
Imagine that three individuals were each commissioned to prepare the psychological profile of a self-appointed religious prophet who founded a tightly-knit community in Arizona in the mid-1800's.
The prophet, soon after the death of his wife of 25 years, began having dreams about the six-year-old daughter of his best friend and persuaded the friend that God had told him to marry her. He later used the same God-told-me-so line to convince his adopted son to divorce his attractive wife so he could marry her as well. The community was polygamous, but the prophet was the only man who could have as many women as he wanted.
The community had few financial resources, so the prophet developed the idea of robbing stagecoaches and trains that passed through the area. Slavery was legal within the community, and the people who were not killed on these raids were used and sold as slaves. Male members of the community had full sexual access to the female slaves.
The prophet's ambitions were much larger than the few hundred converts he garnered his first few years. He fully expected all the people of the area to accept his prophethood and join the community. When some refused, he turned viciously against them. Eight hundred men were killed in one day, and the rest were driven to outlying regions. When he realized that his people did not have the agricultural and industrial resources to provide for the needs of the community, he came up with a new strategy. He again attacked the people he had recently driven away, this time allowing them to live in exchange for giving him fifty percent of their produce. Shortly before his death, he stated a new ruling that they were to be driven completely from Arizona and never allowed to return.
As often happens with religious and political leaders who see themselves as chosen vessels, the prophet became more intolerant to criticism as he grew older and more powerful. Stories of the murder and assassination of his critics became increasingly common. One of his disciples bragged that he had come across a one-eyed sheep rancher who said he would never join the prophet's group. The disciple waited until the rancher fell asleep, and then thrust a sharpened stick into the rancher's good eye so hard it came out the back of his neck. The disciple next captured an associate of the rancher, tied his thumbs together, and led him to the prophet. The prophet laughed so hard at the sight, according to the disciple, that, "You could see his back teeth". The prophet blessed the disciple when he heard how he had killed the one-eyed rancher.
About the same time a 100-year old poet wrote lines critical of the prophet and his followers. In reference to the many regulations the prophet had established for the community, the poet noted, "You follow someone who divides everything into `This is allowed' and `That is forbidden'." As soon as the prophet heard this, he sent someone to assassinate the old poet.
A second poet, the mother of five children, was courageous enough to criticize the murder of the old man. She wrote, "I despise you people....you who obey a stranger and expect good things from him after he killed all your leaders." The prophet, realizing he was the "stranger" she was writing about, sent one of his followers to kill her. She was murdered in her bed that night with her nursing child lying by her side. Her murderer, perhaps touched with remorse by the heinousness of his crime, asked the prophet if anything bad would happen to him. The prophet replied that her death was of no more significance than two goats butting their heads together in the back yard.
Some time after the prophet's death, it was discovered that the Arizona desert underneath his followers' feet contained the world's largest diamond resources. Community members became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and began to use their new-found riches to extend the prophet's vision that the entire world come under the influence of his teachings and principles.
Now back to the first sentence, where "three individuals" are each commissioned to write a profile of the prophet. The first is a university professor who is an expert in the teachings of the prophet even though he has not joined the prophet's community. He was recently given 25 million dollars by that community to establish a university department where the teachings of the prophet are examined. He is careful to only teach a version of community history appoved by his sponsors. His students rarely learn incidents such as the deaths of the poets and the role of the community in the slave trade as noted above. They know nothing about the world-wide political aspirations of the group.
The second individual is a fully-committed member of the community. She has been taught since her birth that the life of the prophet is the perfect model for all humankind to follow. She doesn't even know many of the details of that life, such as his treatment of the exiles who did not accept his message. She only knows what she was taught, one side of the story, and is not interested in learning more.
The third person is an ex-member of the community. He was born and raised within it, similar to individual number two, but at a certain stage began to question the things he had always been ordered to simply believe. His questioning led to doubt, and the doubt resulted in his leaving the community. He now sees himself as free, but his former associates, including individual number two above, view him as a traitor. Even the university professor, individual number one, despises him because he is not sufficiently "academically trained", according to the professor, to critically examine the community of which he was once a part.
Which of these three individuals might give the most objective profile of the prophet's life? If your answer is individual number three, I recommend this book by Ali Sina.
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120 of 151 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The truth shall set you free, May 22, 2008
This review is from: Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah's prophet (Paperback)
While Ali Sina's book is a critique of Islam and its founder, and his personal foibles, a similar book can be written about pretty much all Biblical prophets (including Moses and Abraham). It does not take an Einstein to figure out that religion is a major cause of strife and violence in the world and while Islam has been singled out for much criticism of late, a lot of similarly legitimate criticism can also be directed towards the other two Semitic faiths Judaism and Christianity.
Ali Sina builds much of his case on the Hadiths. Wikipedia says of the Hadiths :
"By the 9th century the number of hadiths had grown exponentially. Islamic scholars of the Abbasid period were faced with a huge corpus of miscellaneous traditions, some of them flatly contradicting each other. Many of these traditions supported differing views on a variety of controversial matters."
It is difficult to ascertain the veracity of material on the Prophet written more than 2 centuries after his death, and in my opinion, the Hadith are as reliable a narrative of the founder of Islam, as the gospels are of the founder of Christianity. Needless to say, the Hadith are important inasmuch as they shape public opinion among the Muslim masses regardless of their historic authenticity.
Coming back to the contents of this book, much of the material is, as promised a psychoanalysis of Mohammed. This psychoanalysis is falsified if it turns out that the material upon which it is based is not reliable. Apart from that, Freudian psychoanalysis itself as a discipline has progressed a lot since the days of Freud. What was accepted wisdom once (a person turning out evil because his mother didn't love him) is the butt of jokes now. Psychology very much like economics is not just an inexact science, but is also very subjective in nature. Consequently it is extremely difficult to psychoanalyze an individual even after several face to face meetings. Psychoanalyzing a long dead individual is an impossible task. Anyone who attempts to do so, risks creating an abstraction and a archetype of a complex flesh and blood individual.
This book will probably preach only to the converted. Devout Muslims will question the credentials of Ali Sina and attribute conspiracy theories to the publication of this book. Islam haters will use the material present in this book to further justify their hatred. And the rest of us will keep looking for a book which bridges the gap between science, religion, anthropology and sociology, a book which will treat religion as a necessary rung in the ladder of the evolution of human consciousness.
By denouncing religion as evil and wishing it away, we are no closer to resolving the problem of inter-religious strife. By looking down upon religious people as dimwits, we are only ceding the field to fundamentalists who move in and impose their vision of religion upon the masses. We have to accept that secular humanism is pretty bleak and joyless as an ideology. A sanitized world ruled by science and reason, which has no place for mystery and mysticism is not a world likely to appeal to most humans. And as the collapse of the consumerist utopia in much of the Western world shows, science is not the panacea to all the ills of the world. Science can provide material comfort, but humans still need to seek a meaning to life. That meaning cannot be provided by the Theory of Relativity, or double helix structure of the DNA, fascinating as these things are. Religion will continue to hold an important place in human society, but it need not do so at the expense of science. Science and religion operate in different realms and one is not a substitute for the other.
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