Just want to clarify something. I've stated my own opinion of Muhammad above, so, I'm not trying to be an apologist for him. But I've taught classes in world religions and philosophy of religion for a long time. So, part of my instinct here is that I get uncomfortable when I see people going off on a religious tradition that they often (not always) don't know that much about. I trust people would not like it if others did that to their own tradition. Secondly, I think Americans get themselves in trouble, especially in foreign policy matters, by making very quick judgments about large traditions and regions that they have often not made much of an effort to understand well. There are more than 2 billion Muslims in the world (more than one-third of the world's population), and if believing in Islam made them all evil (the presumption above being that the founder of the tradition was evil), then the world would be in a great deal more of a crisis than it is now. And, like I said, I have lots of Muslim friends that are peaceful and devout and good citizens of wherever they are living (a lot of them belong to peace movements; you'd be amazed at how many Gandhian (non-violence) Muslims there are in South Asia, where, by the way, most of the world's Muslims live). So, when I see a topic construed like this (Was Muhammad a hero or evil??), it looks to me like a default for asking people what they think of Muslims in general, and I don't think it's right. How would the Christians on this forum react if somebody posted a topic with the prompt: "Jesus: God's son or false messiah and ignoramous?" There can be lots of legit disagreements about who Jesus was and what the significance of his life was, but I think Christians would not feel so good about the question. So, that's the reason for my reaction.
Agreed with most of it.
According to what I know of Islam and of the life of this prophet and of the situation in Arabia at the time he started to preach, I've nothing to reproach to Mohamed, except the fact that he claimed that he spoke in the name of something he called "God", but that's because I'm not monotheist and that's anyway an other debate.
Then, what a constructive and pertinent way to see the world: "Freedom Fighter" or "Horrible person". Outside of the fact that these terms are more or less empty, it's kinda like: "Live or die".
Poll
