Muhammad and Joseph Smith

Alma 29:8-"the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have"
    Since I didn't have time this Sunday for a post, I decided to post a paper that I wrote for my Islam and the Gospel class.  This paper is in response to a prompt and has a word limit and thus is much more narrow than all the things I would love to say about Muhammad and Joseph Smith.  Anyone that knows me knows that I love and respect Islam, so this paper needs to be taken in that context. In other words, this paper assumes someone already sees the similarities between Muslims and Mormons but this paper's intent is to help us know why we can't be over the top in this comparison and why we shouldn't allow others to label Joseph Smith as an "American Muhammad".

The question at hand is “why should one observe some caution in comparing Muhammad and Joseph Smith?”  Initially as I began to ponder on this question I could only see reasons in support of comparing Muhammad and Joseph Smith.  For instance, both were from humble beginnings but then received divine revelation that allowed them to restore the truth about God to help the religiously corrupt society in which they lived.  For Muhammad it was helping his countrymen abandon their idols, for Joseph Smith it was helping his countrymen abandon their abominable creeds.  I saw that both were prophets of God and have caused much good in the world, however, I wasn’t able to see the danger in comparing these two men until after reading an article by Arnold H. Green entitled The Muhammad-Joseph Smith Comparison: Subjective Metaphor or a Sociology of Prophethood.

         Essentially, by comparing Joseph Smith to Muhammad we run the risk of people thinking that everything that Muhammad believed, preached, and did applies to Joseph Smith as well.  This obviously is not the case.  By saying that Joseph Smith is the "American Muhammad" causes people to make the immediate jump to think that Joseph Smith doesn’t see Jesus Christ as our Savior and other such conclusions. A more appropriate way of comparing them would be to show some attributes or teachings that they have in common, such as: charitable, humble, faithful, prayer, fasting, revelation, etc.  By doing so we compare positive traits between the two without saying that one is a copy of the other or that they both had the same religious mindset.  Likewise, it is crucial to point out the glaring differences.  Arnold Green mentions a few, namely: lack of priesthood, lack of continuous revelation, concept of Deity, etc.

         In addition to these concerns, we should note that there is no reason to alienate these two prophets from the rest of the more “mainstream” Old Testament Hebrew Prophets.  Why can’t we compare Muhammad to Moses or Joseph Smith to John the Baptist?  Both of those comparisons have equal validity, however, Western Christianity sees Muhammad as a heretic and thus wants to clump Joseph Smith with him as being from the same tree.  As Arnold Green put it, “this intriguing comparison, which has existed in the literature for nearly 150 years, has thus been pursued for questionable reasons and with questionable methods: to discredit Mormonism by equating its founder with Muhammad, who was presumed to be a fraud and a heretic.” 

         In conclusion, although many of the similarities between Joseph Smith and Muhammad are faith inspiring and help us see God’s hand extended towards all his children, it is necessary to be cautious in comparing Muhammad and Joseph Smith for several important reasons.  First off, you never know what stigmas your audience already has when they think of who Muhammad was.  Secondly, there are some significant difference between Joseph Smith and Muhammad that must be pointed out.  Lastly, by so doing you diminish their roles and leave them as “lesser prophets” whereas they should be just as legitimately compared to all the prophets that have ever lived.