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Volume 2, No. 10 - March 2003 << Back to formatted version


Wahi: The Supernatural Basis of Islam

Part VI  - Dr. Somers’ diagnosis of Mohammed’s mental condition (2)
Dr. Koenraad ELST

[Editor's Note: Kashmir Herald is honored to have Dr. Koenraad ELST write a series of articles exclusively for Kashmir Herald. His series of 5 exclusive articles on "The Supernatural Basis of Islam" will be published exclusively here on Kashmir Herald.]

Of all the founders of religions, none has left a more detailed biography than the Prophet of Islam. So, what useful information about Mohammed’s psyche can be distilled from the core texts of Islam in order to give more body to our suspicion of a paranoid condition?  

About his childhood (admittedly the less public part of his life and hence less likely to yield information that was widely remembered), a few strange data emerge which can be interpreted as prodromes or pre-symptoms. As a three-years-old, he was found lying on the ground, pale and in shock, and he complained to his foster-parents (townspeople often put their children in the care of poor country folk) that two white-clad men had come and opened his belly, looking for something. His foster-mother Halima even considered returning him to his real mother, not wanting to bear the responsibility if something went wrong with the boy, and she opined to her that the boy might “have a jinn” or ghost. As indications of a latent mental problem, this is still pretty vague, but this much is clear that even as a boy, Mohammed was noticed as a special case. 

When he became a young man and his vital powers were strong, these strange traits were not in evidence, but as he entered middle age, they returned. In the years preceding the start of the Quranic revelations, we know that his wife Khadija thought he had the “evil eye”. For this reason, she sent him to exorcists for treatment. This again we only know in very general terms, but it corroborates the suspicion that Mohammed was predisposed to developing a mental problem, and that his contemporaries were aware of his unusual psychic complexion. When the prophetic trances became really serious, involving the vision of the archangel Gabriel, Khadija took him to the godman (but not psychiatrist) Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who certified the genuineness of Mohammed’s visions. From that point onwards, her supportive attitude to her husband’s initially desperate attempts to come to terms with his trances took on the character of a folie à deux: though not afflicted herself, she went along with his self-delusion. She became the first believer, the first one to surrender (Islam) her common-sense judgment and take his claims as true. 

Intolerance as a symptom
More than these corroborative indications, however, it is the contents of Mohammed’s hallucinations which clearly mark him as a paranoia patient. A loud voice localized in heaven or in a gigantic heavenly person speaks to him in the second person: you are the prophet, chosen to convey the words of the Creator of the Universe. He is given a uniquely central role in the cosmic scheme of things: God’s final spokesman, the rightful ruler of mankind as God’s vice-regent on earth, mediator for sinful mortals on the impending Day of Judgment.
 

The disproportion between his new self-perception and his actual social status as an ordinary businessman and later as a derided cult leader was unbearable. In fact, intolerance of others’ scepticism, along with vengefulness, is a typical trait of paranoia patients. And so, we find Mohammed singling out each of his critics for assassination or execution. Not that other, more regular tyrants haven’t executed critics, but it fits Mohammed’s paranoid personality and only the non-occurrence of his campaign of vengeance against his doubters would have given us reason to doubt the diagnosis of paranoia. Incidentally, not a few of these other tyrants may also have exhibited traces of paranoia, a condition which (unlike schizophrenia and other psychopathological syndromes) is not incompatible with worldly success. Megalomania, in particular, often provides a strong motivation for the climb to centrality and power. 

Physical basis of mental problem?
Mohammed’s megalomania may partly have been an overcompensation for the misery he had suffered, the early death of his parents and of his little sons. Yet, this purely psychological explanation of the Freudian type cannot fully explain the strange phenomena surrounding the development of his delusion: the hallucinations and their neurological infrastructure. The denial of physical determinants in favour of purely socio-psychological explanations (for problems ranging from poor school performance to impotence), so popular from Freud down to the 1970s, has given way to a restored respect for the materiality of the human being: as a conscious subject, he may establish his freedom by skilfully sailing on the sea of his material being, but he is affected by its storms, which are not of his own making. The immediate impact of psychotropic drugs on one’s mental condition, for better or for worse, provides experimental proof for the relative materiality of our minds.
 

Therefore, it may be apt to search for physical problems underlying the Prophet’s mental troubles. Of Mohammed’s physical traits, one which draws the attention is that he suffered of chronic headaches, which he tried to remedy by bleeding himself in two veins in his neck. While in itself not enough to indicate a brain problem, it certainly fits that picture once more indications are found. 

The mention of his falling on the ground once during a trance was earlier interpreted as an indication of epilepsy, e.g. by the Byzantine author Theophanes in his Chronographia. But this is clearly unsatisfactory, not only because epilepsy is not typically accompanied by a permanent self-delusion, but mainly because one of its typical symptoms is the complete forgetfulness about even the occurrence of an epileptic fit after the recovery. Paranoid (or similar) hallucinations, by contrast, leave a very strong impression on the mind. 

Closer to an explicit symptomatology is Mohammed’s own description of the physical sensations accompanying his trance. During the initial revelations, he felt the angel’s presence exerting an enormous, suffocating pressure on him. To Abdullah ibn Umar he once described the sensations typically accompanying the trance: loud noise, being hit by a mighty blow, feeling outside himself. The intensity of the sound was unbearable to his oversensitive ears (or rather his auditory brain centre), which is also why he disliked live music, a dislike later emulated by Padeshah Aurangzeb and Ayatollah Khomeini as a matter of piety. Ibn Sa’d records the Prophet’s words: “Revelation comes to me in two ways. Sometimes Gabriel comes and speaks to me from man to man, but I forget what he says then. But sometimes he comes to me with the sound of a bell, like the roaring of many waters, so that I get into confusion. But what is revealed to me in this manner never lets go of me again.” 

This indicates an identifiable neuropathological basis for Mohammed’s hallucinations. As a hypothetical physiological explanation of Mohammed’s mental problems, Dr. Somers suggests that very near the main sensory (auditive and visual) nerves in the mid-brain and on the front part of his pituitary gland, Mohammed had developed a tumour. But this is more speculative than the well-attested psychopathological diagnosis of Mohammed’s paranoia condition. Future researchers may determine more definitely what we must leave as a mere interesting hypothesis for now. Mohammed’s paranoia, by contrast, is an obvious, widely attested and diagnostically articulate fact. 

(to be concluded)

[Born in Leuven, in the year 1959, Koenraad Elst grew up in the Catholic Community in Belgium. He was active for some years in what is known as the new Age movement, before studying at the famed Catholic University of Leuven (KUL). He graduated in Chinese Studies, Indo-Iranian Studies and Philosophy. He earned his doctorate magna cum laude with a dissertation on the politics of Hindu Revivalism.

He took courses in Indian philosophy at the Benares Hindu University (BHU), and interviewed many Indian leaders and thinkers during his stay in India between 1988 and 1992. He has published in Dutch about language policy issues, contemporary politics, history of science and Oriental philosophies; in English about the Ayodhya issue and about the general religio-political situation in India.

A few of his latest books are:

  • Who Is a Hindu? (2002)

  • Ayodhya: The Case against the Temple (2002)

  • The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of 'Hindu Fascism' (2001)

  • Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (2001)

  • Gandhi and Godse (2001)

  • Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam,

  • Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid, and

  • Ayodhya and After.

While doing research in Indian philosophy at Benares Hindu University, he started taking an interest in the ongoing Rushdie and Ayodhya controversies and the larger debate on secularism. He published several books on the historical Ayodhya file. He is currently working as a free-lance scholar and columnist.]

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