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Mohammed
by
Aleister Crowley (circa December 1939, written as information for Frieda Harris)
You do not give me the slightest indication as to what you want about him. The most readable life is that by Washington Irving, and it is scholarly enough; it is as unprejudiced as you could expect from an Uninitiate. There is also a book "The Successes of Mohammed", a sequel to the above, which should also be read. Of course, the great authority is Burton, but his remarks are scattered and there is an edition of the Koran in the S.P.E. series which is very helpful in the study of Islam.
The important matter from the point of view of the Initiate, is that Mohammed was a Magus. (I think you have a copy of the Book of Wisdom or Folly), which has some remarks on the subject. The essential thing about a Magus is that he should concentrate his doctrine in a single word, and that this word should represent the key of the progress of humanity for his period. Thus the word of Mohammed was Allah, which was for his time what the word Thelema, with the explanatory words, Agape and Abrahadabra, is for ours.
There is another very interesting point about Mohammed. He is one of those Masters, who from being quite a conventional individual, became a Master suddenly after a period of magical retirement. This is a phenomenon of Yoga and is described in my Book IV, Part I, Chapter 1. Every true artists has this in his or her own experience in a lesser degree. One has all sorts of conscious calculation leading to bewilderment and bafflement until the problem is referred to the unconscious and the answer comes suddenly and spontaneously as what is called inspiration.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Mohammed was his simplification of the problem of religion: in Islam every man is directly responsible to the Most High: there is no priestcraft, no intermediary: "he is the Eternal One, He hath no Son equal or companion".
On the other hand, of course, this doctrine is philosophically untenable, but then so are all the others, and Islam is certainly the noblest of the religions then existing and the only honest one. The most fatal disease which the soul is liable is the dodging of responsibility, of trying to put everything on some kind of mediator, whether actually human or imaginatively designed: you will object perhaps that Buddhism in its own way taught the same thing: there is no getting away from Karma and there is no question of placating angry deities, but the attitude of Buddhism to life is so fundamentally futile, and what is worse from a practical point of view, the doctrine is so philosophically exalted as to be quite beyond the comprehension of any but the most highly trained philosophers, with the result that as a working religion it never got clear of animism and superstition, while even its central doctrine, like Nibbana, were misinterpreted, even in the bosom of the Sangha itself.
Please tell me if this is what you want about Mohammed: the best thing would be perhaps, if you would send me a lot of questions.
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