I'm leaning towards the belief that he was probably epileptic or something else, and at least sometimes had what he genuinely believed were revelations. With the stipulation that, as his wife Aishah said, his lord 'hastened to satisfy his desire' with revelations that happened to sanction something he already wanted. Ahem ahem. I think he lived out the values and lifestyle that would have been the norm for a tribal chieftain at the time and that the reason he can't be a truly eternal prophet for all people and times - besides the fact that this stuff just doesn't exist - is that those values and lifestyles are no longer considered acceptable, just as medieval Arabian superstitions are now codified as Islamic practise for all peoples in all times.
I'm no so sure, I mean if his epileptic visions are what he took as coming from god, there would still have to have been a certain amount of cunning in the way he turned it around to satisfy his own whims. During his epileptic fits, whatever he saw or did not see would have been completely beyond his control and yet every order or vision he claimed to recieve was completely about his control, so it would appear that to me he was a charlatan.
I'm not sure if I'm doing the quote within a quote right.
Well, I said that at least sometimes had what he believed to be genuine revelations. Some of that stuff had nothing to do with hastening his desires or giving him power. Other times, I'm thinking he just faked it. He must have known what it looked like when he did have a spell, and the way he looked upon 'receiving revelation' has been described in a variety of ways, which leads me to think that he just did what was required or convenient at the time. I'm rather wary of this need to turn him into the most evil person of all time, because I believe that he was precisely behaving as a man of that status in that time and place would have, certainly no different than any other chieftain or king of his time or of later periods. But there is a reason we call it medieval and there is a reason it was called the Dark Ages. Because what was acceptable or even necessary then is not acceptable or necessary now, and society has changed, evolved.
He died praying for forgiveness, so afraid of what would happen to him when he died you know, the only thing I can see he had to fear was the way he turned it all to serve his own needs.
Which would mean that he believed that at least some of it was genuine revelation. Except that I don't think he was scared of anything, not based on my reading of the seerah. I don't think he thought he had anything to be forgiven for. After all, he told a sahabi shortly before he died that he had been given the choice of eternal life on earth or eternal life in heaven and that he chose the latter so that he could finally 'meet with' his lord. I think he was probably just doing what he needed to do to consolidate and hold on to political and spiritual power, by any means necessary. Unifying the tribes, however fragile and even short lived some of it was, was an important achievement that I think, strategically, he felt justified the means.
Other than that, I don't think about him too much.
I think about him because I try so hard to understand what motivates evil.
Again, I don't see him as being the root of all evil in the world. I don't necessarily think that studying his life or thinking about him will lead one to an understanding of someone like Hitler or Stalin or bin Ladin or any of the rest of them. I don't know that he should be assigned more guilt for evil in the name of Islam than any of the hundreds of thousands of jurists that came after him and codified this overly boring poem and a telephone game into a massive body of rulings and writings and do and don't lists.
Topic: As an ex muslim what are your views on Mohammed now?