{"product_id":"the-merchant-the-prophet-a-pagan-reckoning-with-muhammads-moral-descent-9798197205124","title":"The Merchant \u0026 The Prophet: A Pagan Reckoning with Muhammad's Moral Descent","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Atarius Cassius\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Islam - History\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBefore the cave, he was al-Amin - the trustworthy. A monogamous husband. A successful merchant. A man whose word held across the dangerous distances of Arabian trade. The pagan world of sixth-century Mecca produced, in Muhammad ibn Abdullah, one of its most admirable figures.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThen something seized him in the dark.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThis book makes a single, documentable, and - for the tradition - devastating claim: that the man who entered the cave at Hira in 610 CE was better, by every measurable standard, than the Prophet who emerged from it. Working entirely from Islam's own authenticated sources - Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, the Quran itself - it traces the arc of one man's moral life and finds it running, consistently and without reversal, in the wrong direction.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAlong the way it asks questions the tradition has never been required to answer. Who identified the entity in the cave as Gabriel - and what qualified him to do so? What does it mean to trust a religion whose founder's own first instinct was that he had been seized by something malevolent? Why does the universal moral exemplar for all humanity require a God who calls himself the best of deceivers? And what are we to make of the scribe who tested Muhammad, concluded he was a fraud, was sentenced to death for saying so, was pardoned, and became governor of Egypt?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eWritten from the perspective of a political pagan - one who believes that the plurality of the sacred is not a problem to be solved but a freedom to be defended - this book is neither a secular dismissal of the spiritual nor a competing religious claim. It is something rarer: an honest reckoning with what the evidence shows, conducted inside the tradition's own framework, using the tradition's own words.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003ePagan Muhammad was the better man. The tradition has been keeping his secret for fourteen centuries.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47891786530967,"sku":"9798197205124","price":879.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9798197205124.webp?v=1781184801","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/the-merchant-the-prophet-a-pagan-reckoning-with-muhammads-moral-descent-9798197205124","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}