I am not a religious person. Not when I live in a world the worst of which we've seen in the USA over just the last year, let alone what came before it. It's been a year - and not the first over the last four - where the US's allies must have despaired over the USA, and the US's enemies must have salivated. In times like this in particular, it makes sense to me that too many people are blindly desperate for religion. Indeed, we've seen what amounts to a religious cult created since 2016 in the US, but religion itself makes zero sense to me, and it doesn't matter which religion it is. They're all as bad.
The real problem is that the prospective adherents to a religion fail to actually listen to the teacher of the religion - the founder. Why is that? The founder is pretty much always a white guy isn't it? People of color sometimes do start a religion, but women barely get a look in, and when any of these do, they rarely get far with their endeavor. That ought to make everyone suspicious! But even when the message is delivered directly from the mouth of the founder, the adherents fail to take it to heart and instead of internalizing the message, they become obsessed with blind ritual and mimickry instead of following what's been taught to them.
According to the New Testament, for example, a specific message was taught and it was delivered to the children of the House of Israel. It was never intended to spread beyond those people. Yet when Paul derailed the original message, he perverted it to apply to everyone, and spread it way beyond its intended recipients. Christianity as it's practiced in the world today bears no relation to what was originally taught. Worse, it has been spread not through love and compassion, and through turning the other cheek, but through pograms and burning of heretics. In short, the original message was lost and instead, it became a perversion of what had originally been intended.
Here's another issue with the word being given to humanity: Mohammed was, when his life began, a nobody who no-one expected anything from. He was an orphan who was passed around and adopted by various kinsmen and tribes; he was never expected to become any lind of a leader, so why was he chosen? For that matter, why Abraham? Why Moses? Instead of one of these initially obscure people, why not pick someone who is charismatic and powerful, and who can get the word out everywhere and quickly?
Why was it Abraham instead of Alexander the Great, who was a man controlled a huge amount of territory? Why was it Mohammed instead of, say, Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan who had access to a far wider territory to spread the word than ever did Mohammed. It makes no sense to me, and it's clearly the reason why so many of these religions fail to take off. For every one of them that comes to world prominence, there are scores upon scores which fail completely or which at best become a niche religion. Once in a while, one will grow and succeed (if you can call it that), such as Christianity did, and later Islam did, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule, so something is obviously and clearly wrong with this system of dissemination somewhere along the line.
And why are the religions so contradictory? All three major monotheistic religions came out of Middle East roots, yet none of the three can agree on much! If Christianity was better than Judaism - more accurate, more true or whatever its advantage was supposed to be - then why didn't the Judaists adopt it? Why do they still remain Judaists? And if Jesus was the last word, as Christians maintain, then why was Mohammed called to step up? Conversely, if Islam is the last word, why wasn't it adopted by both the Judaists and the Christians? Again, to me, it makes no sense.
There's another way in which this makes no sense, and while there are many fantastical stories in this particular book, I think it's best exemplified in the legend of Mohammed's sojourn in a cave while on his way to Medina. We're told he was chosen as a prophet to spread the true word, yet he was, as usual, rejected by his people and at one point was forced to flee for his life. According to this book he took an unexpected route to throw pursuers off his trail, and he encamped in a cave for a while. So far so good.
These behaviors are smart, and they make perfect sense if you're threatened and have no protection. They make no sense if a god is supposed to have your back. Why did his god make him run? Why didn't his god help - by for example transporting him to his destination instead of leaving him to fend for himself? We see this kind of thing routinely in religious stories - no matter what the religion is. The Bible is full of them.
But this is where this story wandered once more into the fantastical and why I quit reading at this point, because by this time it had seriously begun to feel much less like a biography that I had been seriously interested in reading, and much more like a work of fiction. We're told spiders came by in the hundreds and wove cobwebs over the cave mouth so it looked derelict, and thus he escaped attention. He had a camel to complete the journey and finally settled where the camel gave up the trip and settled down itself. I just don't get why, if his message was so important, he wasn't given more support in getting it out! Why did he pretty much have to do everything himself? And why do we see this same circumstance so often in so many different religion-founding stories?
Most seriously for me though, was that this same kind of question arose when it came to the content of the book. Obviously none of the above quesitosn were addressed, which was a problem for me, but additionally there's clearly a real story of a man's religious experience here, and surrounding that is the inevitable mythology which unfortunately grows up around these events. I don't feel the author did a good job of demarcating the two. There seemed to be far too much speculation, not over events, many of which are recorded and not in dispute, but in imputing people's motivation, and what they 'must have been thinking'.
We can guess at that of course, but we can't know, and it seemed both disingenuous and disrepectful to assume so much. This for me was the core reason why I must reject this biography. All religions have a mythology and some of it is quite beautiful, as was much of it here, but I wanted to understand the man behind the mythology, and I felt like I really didn't get a fair shot at that from this book, which is why I cannot commend this as a worthy read.
