Was Mohammad a prophet according to prophecy in the Old Testament?
Islamic scholars are desperate to prove that their purported prophet Mohammed is mentioned in the scriptures of all the existing religions of the world.
The irony is these same scholars do not believe that other religions are true and so their scriptures are not true and they are corrupted, but in spite of that they are desperate to prove that Mohammed’s name is mentioned in all those scriptures.
The question is how can that prophecy be true when that same prophecy is mentioned in a false or corrupted book? Obviously the statement of a false or corrupted book must be either suspect or false, but Islamic scholars forget this simple logic when they try to discover Mohammed’s name in those scriptures.
For the purposes of discussion we can take a prophecy taken from Old Testament and analyse it to see if Mohammed is mentioned there or not.
Islamic scholars claim that Muhammad’s name is mentioned in the Old Testament and they typically use the following sentences from the Old Testament for their claim where God is saying to Moses:
Deuteronomy 18:18-19: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.”
Now we can analyse whether Mohammed is that person or not as per the above quotation of the Bible. This Bible quotation has some conditions to fulfil the criteria of a person being prophet which are following:
- The prophet will be raised from the brethren of Moses.
- God will put his words into that prophet’s mouth.
- God himself will condemn who will not listen to that prophet.
we should know who the brethren of Moses are. From the Old Testament we know Abraham had two sons- Isaac and Ishmael. It also states that Ishmael was sent into exile with his mother Hagar when he was just a breast feeding infant. One of Isaac’s sons was Jacob who was later named Israel. Jacob had twelve sons and each son is considered to be the father or founder of a tribe. These twelve tribes are called the Israelites. Moses was born to the Israelites when they were living in Egypt as the slaves of Pharaoh. God was saying the aforesaid sentences when Moses was rescuing those Israelites from Egypt crossing the Red Sea. So now we can see who these brethren of Moses are. Obviously these Israelites are his brethren, not anybody else who is outside the Israelites. Isaac had other sons beside Jacob, even their ancestors will not be considered as the Israelites too. Only Jacobs’ ancestors will be considered as Israelites, nobody else. The whole Old Testament always has stated this. Moses was born to the Israelites and so these Israelites will be his brethren only, nobody else.
It was only Mohammed who claimed himself as the ancestor of Ishmael; the Bible does not witness that. Nobody has said it before Mohammed. The Bible says Ishmael with his mother Hagar were sent into exile when he was just a breast feeding infant and they were sent to somewhere near Egypt not Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula. Even if we accept Mohammed’s claim, that cannot make him one of the “the brethren of Moses|” because Ishmael’s ancestors are not the Israelites. Even all the ancestors of Isaac are not considered to be the Israelites, only Jacob’s ancestors are considered. So this clearly shows that Mohammed was not from the Israelites and so he can not be the prophet mentioned in Deuteronomy 18:18-19.
Deuteronomy 18:18-19 is said by God to Moses when Moses was rescuing his brethren from Egypt and God chose them. That is why they are also called “the chosen people”. But God would know sometime later these chosen people will (repeatedly) forget Him and will disobey His commandments, so He is promising Moses that he will send another prophet like Moses who will preach God’s words before them and would guide them in right path. So this prophecy is only specified for these chosen people (Israelites) not for any other nation in this world. And neither Quran nor Ahadith say that Mohammed was born in this group of chosen people. Mohammed himself did not claim that too. So how Mohammed can be the prophesied prophet as per Deuteronomy 18:18-19 is beyond me.
This prophecy could be applied only if God would make this promise to Abraham (Ibrahim). In such a case Mohammed could claim himself as the descendent of Ibrahim as he claimed that his forefather was Ishmael who was the son of Ibrahim. But sorry to say, this promise was made by God to Moses not to Ibrahim.
Now let us analyse if Mohammed can be the the descendent of Ishmael or not. The Bible says Hagar and her breast feeding infant Ishmael were sent to exile near Egypt. We should remember that Ibrahim preached his religion in the territory of Egypt, Jordan, and present-day Israel. But Mohammed claimed the location of the exile was Mecca and that Ibrahim also went there. Geographically, we see the flight distance from Israel to Mecca is about 1200 Kilometers. The passage from Israel to Mecca is full of dreadful dry desert. So it is quite unbelievable to think that Ibrahim would send his infant son Ismail and his mother Hagar across such a dreadful passage. So is not this tale just a fantasy of an idle brain?
Thus Mohammed fails the first condition.
God says He will put His words into the mouth of the prophet “like Moses”. We see all the prophets before were directly connected to God and God would directly talk to them. God talked to Ibrahim, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon etc. directly. In that way God would put his words in those prophets, mouths and they would then preach those words among their people. And most of time God would talk to them before their people, that means there would be a lot of witnesses. For instance, Moses talked to God before all of his people. Everybody of his people watched God’s existence on the hill top of Sinai to be a fire, Moses climbed the hill, reached the top of it and talked to God directly and most of his people watched it. It was not a secret contact. All Muslims also believe this.
Mohammed never talked to God directly. Mohammed always would say that an angel named Gabriel would come to him and would say “Allah’s” words. Nobody ever saw Gabriel coming to Mohammed either, so the whole story always depended on Mohammed’s word alone. This makes the story doubtful. But for Moses, there were thousands of witnesses who saw Moses’ direct contact with God. So Moses did not need to motivate or force his followers to believe him. Rather it was impossible for a person around Moses not to believe him. In the prophecy of Deuteronomy 18:18-19 we see God is very clearly saying that the promised prophet would be “like Moses” that means he too could talk to God directly and thus God would put his words into the prophet’s mouth.
We find in Islamic sources that after disappearing for a night, the following morning Mohammed claimed that he went to his Allah to meet him and talk to him, unfortunately of course that was not witnessed by anybody. But in fact Mohammed had spent that night in his cousin Umm Hani’s house when her husband was not at home. (That night is called “Miraz” in Islam.) So it easily can be understood what Mohammed was doing in Umm Hani’s house in the absence of her husband especially when many Islamic sources say Mohammed wanted to marry Umm Hani but her father Abu Talib had not agreed .
As there was not a single witness for Mohammed that he actually would receive messages from “Allah” through Gabriel, everybody would need to believe him blindly, and unfortunately he failed to make many people believe in him while living in Mecca for ten long years. When he migrated to Medina he became the ruler there, formed an army, became powerful and thus he did not depend on anyone believing him any more; rather started to force people to believe him which was quite contrary to the criteria of Moses – and all other prophets in the Bible. In the Bible, we do not see any prophet forcing others to believe them at all.
So according to these criteria, Mohammed is not a prophet “like Moses”.
Mohammed fails this condition also.
The 3rd condition.
God says- “Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.” (Deut.18:19)
Here God clearly says He Himself will judge those who will not listen to, or do not believe the prophet “like Moses”. In any case, the prophet cannot judge the “unbelievers”. Thus the one and only mission of the prophet “like Moses” would be to preach the words of God amongst people, and it is up to the people to believe him or not. But what we see in the life of Mohammed?
In his early life he followed this condition, for instance- “there is no compulsion in religion” (Quran 2:156) or “my religion is mine and your religion is yours” (Quran 109:06). But when he migrated to Medina and became strong, his preaching was changed and started to force people around him to believe him. Not only that, he started to judge the unbelievers. For instance, after the massacre of Khaibar where Mohammed had killed all the Jewish males and enslaved all the Jewish women, Mohammed took Sufia the wife of the Jewish leader Kinan as war booty. Again the great and notorious massacre of Banu Kuraiza where more than 700 Jews were killed after being captured took place with Mohammed’s approval as they did not believe in Mohammed as the prophet.
So Mohammed violated the ruling of God where He clearly said – “I myself will hold them accountable”. Muslims say that Mohammed fought and killed non-believers (mainly Jews) for self-defence purposes, but there is no historical evidence even in any Islamic source that Jews of Khaibar or Banu Kuraiza attacked Mohammed first and so Mohammed was forced to ‘defend’ himself by killing them all in a genocide. Rather it was Mohammed and his army who suddenly attacked them and massacred them. He would act like the cruel dictators of our history: like Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Dong, Saddam Hussain etc.
Not only that, Mohammed’s gang would often attack the innocent trade caravans travelling past Medina, they ould kill the traders and steal all their goods which they would distribute among themselves as “war booty”. But it was not war at all, it was clearly highway robbery (ironically the punishment for this in Islam is crucifixion) and Mohammed and his gang would mainly live on the proceeds of this robbery whilst living in Medina.
The Meccan people who migrated with Mohammed to Medina did not know agriculture at all. Agriculture formed the Medinan people’s main livelihood and for that reason Mohammed and his gang would need to rob the innocent trade caravans and thus robbery became their main livelihood. The surprising thing is that all the ‘Islamic scholars’ try to prove that all those acts of highway robbery were “self-defence wars”!
Now as Mohammed himself would (1) judge the unbelievers and would execute them and (2) lived on robbery, we can definitively say that Mohammed fails the third condition.
Thus out of three conditions given in the Bible for a “prophet like Moses”, Mohammed fails all three – therefore it is impossible for Mohammed to be the “prophet like Moses”.
But the most controversial claim that the Islamic ‘scholars’ make is that they say the Bible is corrupted. The claim is that it is mainly the Jews who have corrupted their Torah (part of the Old Testament) and at the same time they quote from the Torah to ‘prove’ their case.
How is that possible? A quote from a corrupted book must be corrupted which means it will be false. So the prophecy of Deuteronomy 18:18-19 must be false in the Islamic view. Now if the Islamic scholars claim that Mohammed is the prophet mentioned in a false prophecy in the Bible, that means prophet-hood of Mohammed must be false. Is there any other logical consequence?
Now if we see the next verse of Deuteronomy (18:20) which is –
“But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak—that prophet shall die.”
We know no human being is immortal, so a human prophet must die. If it is such a common phenomena why does God say “that prophet shall die”? So clearly this means that this death must not be a normal death rather it must be abnormal, degrading and perhaps, very painful. If we consider the death of Mohammed what we find? We can see in the Hadith-
Narrated ‘Aisha: The Prophet in his ailment in which he died, used to say, “O ‘Aisha! I still feel the pain caused by the food I ate at Khaibar, and at this time, I feel as if my aorta is being cut from that poison.” Sahih Bukhari, Book-59, Hadith-713
Mohammed died at 63 and of course this is not too old age.
Another hadith says that a Jewish lady gave Mohammed poisoned meat to eat at Khaibar, which Mohammed ate that and was poisoned by. The hadith also shows Mohammed was suffering terribly from that poison and it was very painful. We can see another hadith that shows how painful was Mohammed’s condition:
Narrated ‘Aisha:”When the Prophet became seriously ill and his disease became aggravated he asked for permission from his wives to be nursed in my house and he was allowed. He came out with the help of two men and his legs were dragging on the ground. He was between Al-Abbas and another man.” Sahih Bukhari, Book-11, Hadith-634
His condition was so severe that he could not walk at all and his legs were dragging when two persons were carrying him on their shoulders. Eventually Mohammed died a very painful and shameful death. That a prophet should suffer such a death is not believable. Rather we see he had such a degrading and painful death due to the prophecy of Deuteronomy 18:20. This shows that this prophecy of Deut. 18:20 proved true for the self proclaimed prophet Mohammed and so Deut.18:18-19 also must be true. From the conditions set out in Deut.18:18-19, Mohammed was a false prophet.
Now if Mohammed was a false prophet, he must have preached words among people which were not from God according Deut.18:20. Surprisingly, we see from all Islamic sources that Mohammed indeed preached “satanic verses” which are the following:
“Have ye thought upon al-Lat and al-Uzza , And Manat, the third, the other? These are the exalted cranes (intermediaries) whose intercession is to be hoped for.” (Quran,53:19-22)
In these satanic verses, Mohammed was accepting Kuraish pagans’ 3 goddesses- Al-Lat, Uzza and Manat who were actually the three daughters of the main Deity Hubal (aka Allah) inside the Kaba. Hearing this from Mohammed Kuraish rejoiced. This news was spread even to Medina and Abyssinia; many migrated Muslims came back to Mecca. And only then, under pressure from some of his most ardent followers Mohammed realized that these verses were not right and so he revealed the following “replacement” verses instead of No.19-22:
“Have ye thought upon al-Lat and al-Uzza , And Manat, the third, the other? Is the male for you and for Him the female? That indeed is a division most unfair!”Quran, 53:19-22)
Full Details of Satanic verses are here – Satanic Verses-1 (http://www.answering-islam.org/Responses/Saifullah/sverses.htm#part2b), Satanic Verses-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_Verses)
However, Mohammed then found himself under attack for changing the “revelation”. Thus “Allah” sent him the following verse:
“And We did not send before you any messenger or prophet except that when he spoke [or recited], Satan threw into it [some misunderstanding]. But Allah abolishes that which Satan throws in; then Allah makes precise His verses. And Allah is Knowing and Wise”.(Quran 22: 52)
Very cleverly Mohammed is trying to suppress this devilish incident saying the above verse. Now the question is – how can his “Allah” allow Satan to send satanic verse to him and if he does, who will believe him later? Was his Allah sleeping then? Another problem is this: how will we know which are satanic verses and which are from his Allah when it is already proved that even Satan could come to him and could tell the messages by the name of his Allah? How can we be sure that the whole Quran is not from Satan? The Above Quranic ayah shows that sometimes Mohammed can get messages from Satan, so if such is the case, how can we be sure that Mohammed would not receive messages from Satan all time?
But in the whole Old Testament we never see any prophet who unknowingly received any message from Satan.
So, “in the name of Allah” Mohammed preached Satan’s words among people and he was severely punished by God for these devilish activities (which fits the Old Testament prophecy). We know of many prophets from Old Testament, none died such a painful and degrading death like Mohammed did. Therefore it follows from the claim of the Islamic scholars themselves as well as the Old Testament that Mohammed must be a false prophet and most probably he was a messenger from Satan.
Since the advent of Mohammed in this world for last 1400 years, we have seen how Muslims have damaged all the societies into which they have entered.
If we view the Muslim dominated countries in this world, we cannot say that they are really civilized.
We see all kinds of devilish activities are dominating those Muslim countries and societies.
And now they are entering into civilized societies and trying to damage them too.
Now is the time to stop and resist this Satan and to save this civilized human society.