TOWARDS GLOBAL PEACE

Further we have the example of the Peace Treaty of Hudaibiya where the Prophet unilaterally accepted all the conditions of the opponents. This treaty was broken by the opponents resulting in their surrender. The Prophet, in spite of the atrocities they had done did not even allow them to be insulted and, instead, announced a general pardon in the following words: “Go, you all are free”. If we were to objectively study the entire 23 years of prophetic life, it would be absolutely clear that the Prophet Muhammad was a prophet of peace. If we compare the Prophet’s battles with other battles in history, we will find that the mission of the Prophet was a nonviolent mission; and the battles that happened were defensive in nature and under exceptional circumstances. The number of people killed in these battles was very few when compared to the casualties of many other battles in history. Battle/War Period Duration Casualties World War II 1939 – 1945 6 years About 65 million American Civil War 1861 – 1865 4 years About 500,000 Battle of Panipat 14 Jan 1761 1 day Over 100,000 Gulf War Aug-1990– Feb1991 7 months 25,000 Iraq War Mar. 2003–Dec. 2011 8 ½ years 35,000 In comparison to the above sampling of battles from history, the defensive battles fought by the Prophet were those at Badr, Uhud and Hunain. The combined total duration of actual fighting was equivalent to only 1½ days. The total number of casualties in all these battles was 1,018. Because of a lack of objective understanding of the Prophet’s life, Muslim biographers have misrepresented the facts by ignoring the prevailing customs and culture of the time. Due to this, their writings about the Prophet’s life show a war-like pattern. On the other hand, non-Muslim biographers of the Prophet have adopted a different approach. These people have largely ignored the main events of the Prophet’s life choosing to focus on a few, exceptional incidents that they have used as the basis of a picture of the Prophet’s life they have painted, that portrays him as a warrior prophet.