Perhaps no other human being in the history of mankind has been venerated, loved, and idealised (and idolized, irony notwithstanding) as much as Prophet Mohammed ¹. It doesn’t matter what the actual conditions of his life were. The history, the opinions, the surviving evidences, conjectures and theories - they all fail to capture the man. And his legend is so big, so expansive, global, independently carried and celebrated in masth, yet fiercely guarded, narrowly defined and worse, described inadequately within communities and cultures across the globe. And his story has grown so much to make facts irrelevant, and as I have once described else where - objective history based on facts and evidence fail to capture the surreal beauty of the man, his times, his legacy.

What captivates me is the way love for Mohammed is created and transmitted across the globe. In that sense, it should be treated as an intangible heritage of humanity ². Preservation, celebration and time to time blooming of the love towards the Prophet is an art in itself. So powerful is this intensely human phenomenon that, even my sceptic’s fingers move on the keyboard as if on a Tabla, waxing and waning as an unpredictable stream of music flows through me. My mind is swaying to Mast Qalandar, rendered by Sami Yusuf; as if I am stepping into Light. I was always captivated by the hundred thousand ways one could be Muslim. And it is not the theoretical possibilities that excite me. But what captures my imagination is the the lived realities - the similarities and differences different communities bring to the same identity.

And in all those realities, you see Mohammed being loved. Perhaps his detractors are most perplexed by this. The facts surrounding his life has little to do with the way his followers or others feel about him. And it is exactly the point that most frustrates those who don’t know enough about him - and that includes not just historical facts around Mohammed. To know Mohammed, one should also know about how his story has grown over and above historical Mohammed. The way it has been interpreted and taken into the pantheon of beliefs that dot various landscapes across the world.

The Mohammed of Persia, Abyssinia, Mongols, Ottomans, Mughals, and the people that came after them. All are different. And he keeps evolving as time changes, cultures change. The way he is loved changes too. He is loved in various languages; traditions of music, the way he is described in poems, miniatures, geometrical tributes - and architectural marvels. Almost all avenues of human excellence have been dedicated to expressing the love for Mohammed.

Categorically, it is forbidden to worship Mohammed. And hence, this devotion of his followers falls squarely in the territory of love. However, one could argue that this distinction could be lost on the people who throws themselves into this mighty sea of love. It is no secret that the various strands of Islam treats his learnings, as well as the core constitution of the man differently. Stories about the life of the Prophet is aplenty, but there is scarce agreement in the way they have to be understood in the context of the present. Practically, the most fraught point of religious debate is when a religious doctrine meets the present. There, it leaves the domain of hermeneutics and touches the socio-political reality of a people. Once material interests are at stake, spiritual argument alone cannot settle anything. There, the legend of the prophet as understood by the community comes handy. Perhaps the biggest irony of the Muslim world is this internecine fight that fails to see the shared love for the prophet, amongst other things that they share.

I am talking about this love now, because its stratospheric proportions bare a few things about the promise of humanity. For one, it shows the amount of love that human beings are capable of. If a religion with such diverse set of cultures and communities that live within it can celebrate this kind of love, it demonstrates a radical possibility. A possibility tha whole of humanity can emulate. The kind of love commanded by Jesus Christ ³, Mohammed and the like shouldn’t be just objects of curiosity. They should also teach us about the possibilities of love. In a world that is captivated only by emotions opposite to love, and the polities require mechanisms to divide to just survive, they function as great tools to exposit the virtues that bind human beings of varied qualities together.

The scope of this article is not to study what fuels this unending love towards Mohammed. I am just standing here, appreciating its scale, and what it means to the whole of humanity. Of course, I have tried tearing it down to basics and understand how it operates, but I will keep the inferences for another day.