Class session: Tuesday, September 22
Guest summarizers: Sadra Bowie and William Moody
Class today focused on Muhammad, the wives, the Quran, and to a lesser extent the hadith. We discussed a lot about how the Quran is a miracle, that it’s different from other religious texts because it is the direct verbatim word of God, and that masters of language at the level of the Arab tribes of Mecca were not able to write at the level of the Quran. Then we moved to a discussion of Muhammad and how important it is that Muhammad is fundamentally human, that he makes mistakes, the people around him call him out, and that he changes. There’s a tendency to fight to perceive Muhammad as either a hero or a villain, but really, maybe he’s neither, because people rarely fall fully into those boxes. It helps us to forgive ourselves when we see that he also made mistakes and fell into those human categories, and also it’s important that we see the ways that he is influenced by others around him, like the wives and the other people in his community, providing us with other people to look to as examples.