Mohammedan (also spelled Muhammadan, Mahommedan, Mahomedan or Mahometan) is a Western term for a follower of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.[1] As an archaic English language term, it is used as both a noun and an adjective, meaning belonging or relating to, either Muhammad or the religion, doctrines, institutions and practices that he established.[2][3] The word was formerly common in western usage, but the terms Muslim and Islamic are more common today.
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The OED cites 1663 as the first recorded usage of the English term, along with the older term Mahometan that dates back to at least 1529. The English term is derived from New Latin Muhammedanus, while Wyclif has Macamethe (c.1380).
In Christian Western Europe, down to the 13th century or so, there was a mistaken belief that Muhammad had either been a heretical Christian or that he was a god worshipped by Muslims.[4] Some works of Medieval European literature referred to Muslims as "pagans" or by sobriquets such as the paynim foe. Depictions, such as those in the Song of Roland, depict Muslims praying to a variety of "idols", including Apollo, Lucifer, Termagant,[5] and Mahound. When the Knights Templar were being tried for heresy, reference was often made to their worship of a demon Baphomet, which was notable, by implication, for its similarity to Muhammad's name when transliterated in to Latin, "Mahomet", that was used by contemporary Christian authors, given that Latin would be for another 500 years the language of scholarship and erudition for most of Europe.[4]
These and other variations on the theme were all set in the "temper of the times" of the Muslim-Christian conflict as Medieval Europe was becoming aware of its great enemy in the wake of the quickfire success of the Muslims through a series of conquests shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, as well as the lack of real information in the West of the mysterious east.[6]
The term has been largely superseded by Muslim, Moslem or Islamic, but was commonly used only in Western literature until at least the mid-1960s. (See for instance the second edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by HW Fowler, revised by Ernest Gowers (Oxford, 1965)). Muslim is more commonly used today than Moslem, and the term Mohammedan is widely considered archaic or in some cases even offensive.[7]
al-Muḥammadīya ('the Muhammadians' or 'the Muhammadans') are members of sects regarded as heretical by mainstream Islam. In Indonesia, Muhammadiyah is the name of a Sunnite reforming movement, which has adapted Western institutions, i.e. Boy Scouts, to Islamic ends).[8]
Many Muslims have objected to the term,[9] saying that the term was not used by Muhammad himself or his earlier followers, and that the religion teaches worshiping Allah and not Muhammad. It is held and argued[10][11] by several commentators and academics[12] that Allah was an alter-ego (or fiction) of convenience for Muhammad, which he used to satisfy his lust for wealth, women, and power, as evidenced by the divine sanctions for Muhammad's taking his adopted son's wife (in direct contradiction to his earlier laws), his taking of a minimum of eleven wives (directly breaking the law that the Koran says Allah revealed for the entire community which established a maximum of four wives),[13] a total of one-eleventh of the Koran being spent discussing Muhammad's sex life, wives, and domestic disputes,[14] and the doctrine of abrogation, or naskh, by which polar-opposite contradictory verses are reconciled in traditional Islamic thought (by establishing a chronology, and having later verses cancel earlier ones)[15][16] thus making the worship of Allah very much the worship of Muhammad, or "Muhammadanism".[17]
However, Muslims insist that "Mohammedan" is a misnomer. Muslims believe that "Islam" is the divinely-verbalised name of the final form of Allah's commandments (lit. "submission to [Allah's] will") revealed through a series of Prophets of Islam, which are generally the same as the Judaeo-Christian ones, except for some genealogical differences (i.e. Jesus is said in the Koran to be the son of Miriam, sister of Aaron and Moses, daughter of Imran [Eng. Amram ], thus making Jesus a contemporary of Moses), and the addition of a few prophets (i.e. Alexander the Great and/or Cyrus the Great are considered Prophets of Islam and are spoken of in the Koran, using legendary stories and apocryphal material from the genre of Alexander romance,[18] called Dhul Qarnayn[19] and/or al-Khidr - see Alexander the Great in the Qur'an and Cyrus the Great in the Qur'an). Muslims claim that all of the Judaeo-Christian prophets preached Islam - including Moses and Jesus - and none were Jews or Christians, and all denounced Judaism and Christianity as being corruptions of Islam, the religion Muslims claim they preached, which they also hold to be the primordial religion, of which all others are corruptions.[20] The historical evidence for this - the preaching of anything resembling Islam by the Biblical prophets - is completely absent, and in all cases contradictory: it is established by all reliable sources and non-Islamic scholarship that Jesus was a Torah-observant Jew, that Ezra was a Jewish priest and scribe, and that Alexander and Cyrus the Great were both Pagans, although Cyrus the Great was instrumental in ending the Jewish exile.