Comparing two books

I wrote about the book Jesus and Muhammad before and how that book made my boss to lose his faith to Islam. I read that book because I was curious and eager to know how that book had such an impact on my boss. The whole book was focusing on negative sides of Islam and the things that could be considered very positive was described and criticized by writer (Mark Gabriel) in a very negative perspective, after finishing that book I felt relieved that I did not lose my fait! I thought, now I should read a book that has some thing positive about Islam and as I mentioned before I decided to read Muhammad Prophet of our time by Karen Armstrong, this book was suggested by one of my blog readesr Ashkavand and when I did a little research about it I found out that the writer of the book is not a Muslim, she has been original a Christian/Catholic and has served as a nun for 6 years. She has done lots of research about different religions and consider herself a monotheists. My impression of the first book Jesus and Muhammad as a non-religious Muslim who is more spiritual was that the writer was very unfair about Prophet Muhammad and Islam!
The second book by Karen Armstrong was a lot more realistic, she even refers to lots of event that are mentioned in the first book but looks at them and analyze them very differently. You see in the book that positive and negative sides of Islam are all mentioned but even things that are considered negative like polygamy or wars are analyzed very deeply in this book. Most of the wars were defending wars because Arabs did not want Prophet Muhammad to promote his religion they putting him and his followers under lots if pressure and attacked them whenever they could. Prophet Muhammad had a very hard job to even convince his own followers that the war is not solution to problems (in today world is hard to convince the leaders of the world that war is not solution to any problem)so just imagine how hard was for him to convince bunch of barbarians that sword was a part of their daily life not to fight. After every war lots of women became widows and their children became orphans without any protection or support so men would just rape them and abuse them, he had no choice other than telling the men that you have to marry the widow woman and protect her and her children if you want to have sexual relationship with her and since number of women were more than men due to wars polygamy was the only solution. He gave Muslim women lots of rights like inheritance right. Before Islam majority of Arab women were property of their men or male families so they would not inherit any thing every thing would go to their male families or husband rather than them. He gave women the right to divorce, so under certain circumentstances women could separate from their husband and … (these are all in this book, is not my own understanding or interpretation). Even Muslim men were rebellious when they heard Prophet Muhammad has brought women these much of rights and he had to talk to them and convince them that these rights are given by Allah and they should accept that. Karen Armstrong says “Muslim Women in 1500 years a go had more rights than western women in early 19th century” She mentioned this even in her interview with Christian Amanpour in a program about Islam on CNN couple weeks ago.
Any way Prophet was always trying to find a peaceful solution with his enemies and when he finally could make peace with Quraish (the biggest tribe of Arabia) his followers were mad at him and he told them that was the time for peace and concentrating on a bigger Jihad which means fighting with our inner self, fighting with the temptations that we always have to make sins.
These days we hear word for Jihad from the critics of Islam, what they are pointing at is holly war but they don’t know the real meaning behind it!
Any way Prophet Muhammad made a big difference in Arab’s people in that time and even now has a good influence on lots of Muslims, although some Muslims like enemies of Islam misinterpret his message and use jihad to attack, kill and terror but truth is there for any body that wants to know about it.
I have a very high respect for a prophet that had such a hard job to make very barbaric people understand that peace is important, human beings are equal and the most important thing is to work on our inner self.
There were things in Islam that we cannot apply to our today’s life like polygamy or women have half right than men in some cases (this was the best for that time), the way bank should work, etc but we can apply his main message to our life and try to be peaceful, work on ourselves and believe in equality between races and sexes.

When I was reading the last chapter about how he passed a way I could not stop my tears and I felt so sad for a moment I truly felt what he was going through and what he really meant to deliver to human beings as a message of god! And I believe that all prophets were trying to make people understand that message too but most of us try to deny the truth and interpret things the way we like.

I hope nobody got the impression that I was advertising for Islam here as I said before I am not religious but believe in peace, decency, honesty, loyalty, integrity and equality between human beings.