If you ever lived in the Middle East, you are more likely than not to have heard the imam of the mosque using the loudspeakers, and making it heard to everyone on the surrounding streets and neighborhoods, saying the following: “ Allahumma salli ala sayyidina Muhammad wasallim.” A literal translation of this sentence may go like this: “ O’ Allah pray on our master Muhammad and say hello to him.” Now, I know, the translation does not make much sense. Well, the original Arabic sentence does not make much sense either. What does it mean to ask Allah (the Arabian god) to pray on someone, whether it be Muhammad or any other person of your choice? Does Allah need to pray too? Who is He going to be praying to? Prayer is usually performed between a created being who does the praying, and the creator who is prayed to. But lo and behold, in Islam things are different. Allah, the god of the Arabs, is asked to pray on Muhammad (whatever that means). The last word “wasallim” is asking Allah to say hello to Muhammad. Muhammad is dead now. He’s gone to be with Allah, who is omnipresent. So, if Allah is omnipresent, then Muhammad is always in his/her presence. We humans usually say “hello” to each other during the beginning of a meeting. We do not say “hello” during or at the end of a meeting. It just does not make sense for Allah to say “Hello” to Muhammad, since both are in the presence of each other. Even so, this nonsense sentence above is heard all over the Middle Eastern mosques. The odd thing is that people don’t even question such a sentence. In a way, this is telling of how much of a critical thinking is instilled into the educational systems of the Middle East.

Another part of that sentence installs Muhammad as a “Master”. Not just any master. He is “sayyidina” (our master). Are we to think of Muhammad as someone who is “a cut above” everyone else? Well, after 1400 years of writing books about the Qur’an and the Hadith and the Sunna and the history of Islam, I think we have reached some understanding about why Muhammad is to be viewed as a master. Not just any master, Muhammad is, as the imams convey through their loudspeakers in Middle Eastern mosques, “Sayyed El-Alameen”. In English, that expression translates to: “Master of the worlds” or “Lord of the worlds”. I would like to show the reader, why Muhammad is worthy of the name, through just one of his great acts. Clearly, a man of his caliber must have done some acts that made him worthy of the name “Lord of the worlds”. There are many stories that I can present to the reader. It was difficult for me to choose, but finally I decided on one story to reserve space. The story comes to us from Sir W. Muir’s book The Life of Muhammad, (Edinburg 1923, Pages 307-8). It is the story on how Muhammad accomplished the killing of Banu Qurayza’s adult males. History tells us their numbers were between 600 and 900 men:

“During the night, trenches sufficient to contain the dead bodies of the men were dug across the market place of the city. In the morning, Mahomet, himself a spectator of the tragedy, commanded that male captives to be brought forth in companies of five or six at a time. Each company as it came up was made to sit down in a row on the brink of the trench destined for its grave, there beheaded, and the bodies cast therein. … The butchery, begun in the morning, lasted all day, and continued by torchlight till the evening. Having thus drenched the market place with the blood of seven or eight hundred victims, and having given command for the earth to be smoothed over their remains, Mahomet returned from the horrid spectacle to solace himself with the charms of Rihana, whose husband and all her male relatives had just perished in the massacre.”

It is worth mentioning here that the killings of Banu Qurayza’a men rests ultimately on Muhammad’s shoulders. This has been shown by many researchers, and I won’t delve into the details of this matter here. What is important in this story is to see the lack of any positive human emotion toward Banu Qurayza’s men, women, or families. Muhammad just spent a day in the office, as we say nowadays, and then went to a “super 8” motel tent to have cheap sex with a woman he had just murdered her husband and male relatives.

The reader needs to realize that this is not an isolated incidence of bad judgment on the side of Muhammad. There are many many stories of multiple historical sources that shed a light on Muhammad’s persona. Such stories, when compared to people like Billy the kid, Hitler, Saddam and many others, make Muhammad a true “Sayyed Al-Kawn” (master of the universe) as one might have heard from the loudspeakers of mosques.