Question
I am a student based in New Zealand currently doing a course on religious studies. In one our lectures we discussed about epilepsy and God-spot, which goes to say that some people including Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) sufferred from epilepsy. On searching the web I came across shocking articles that claimed Prophet Mohammad’s (pbuh) revelations as nothing but epilectic seizures.
According to the researchers epilectic patients also experience God or presence of something extraordinary.
Most of these studies have been done by non-muslims and I would like to know if any muslim has done anything to refute their claims. It is very confusing to me why no muslim researcher has not responded to this strange claim.
I will really appreciate if you can provide me some kind of insight.
Regards
Answer
Whatever epilepsy does for the “God-experience” it has no bearing on Islam or its Prophet. The research you have come across is not only faulty but lacks any merit as it regards to the Prophet Muhammad, whom God’s peace and blessings be upon. Let us assume that epilepsy does indeed give the feeling of God’s presence but how does that explain the words that flowed from him, which took the Arabian Peninsula and the greatest of Arab poets and stunned them into submission? What form of epilepsy produces coherent messages that relate to real life events? Moreover, on what basis has this research been done on the Prophet? Is this a deduction of sorts or is it a post-analysis done without any empirical evidence? The questions become endless when such a baseless and conjectural statement is made based on defamatory induced theoretic and unobserved phenomena. You will find that such articles are baseless and have no academic worth. A refutation of them, hence, is unwarranted as they provide nothing in the way of evidence except suppositions. There is no data to study and nothing to refute except guesswork.
I hope I have clarified the issue.
God knows best.