First, what is the actual phrase? I’ve heard it as “Mohammed moved the mountain,” meaning someone with great will and determination (metaphorically “Mohammed”) has gotten some very prominent, esteemed, and/or stubborn person (metaphorically “the mountain”) to change thier mind on something.
I’ve also heard it rendered as “If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed will go to the mountain,” meaning roughly the same thing as “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
Which of these is correct? Both? Neither? And what is the original intended meaning?
Which brings us to my second issue – where did this phrase come from? I can’t find it in Bartlett’s. My Muslim friends don’t know of any stories in the Quran or elsewhere that might have been the origin.
The story as it was originally told to me.
Mohommed was talking to a gathering and made the statement “With sufficient faith in Allah, all things are possible. Why with even a little faith you could move that mountain” The group then responded
“If you have so much faith then move the mountain for us”
Mohommed concentrated on the mountain, stared at it, thought about it and got down on his knees and prayed for the mountain to be moved.
It stayed put.
Mohommed being a pragmatic soul picked up his staff, dusted of his sandles as began to walk toward the mountain. When the crowd asked where he was going his reply was
“If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed then Mohommed will come to the mountain”
I have no idea of it’s origins.
That story has nothing to do with the Prophet of Islam, also named Muhammad. That explains why no Muslims you know have ever heard of it.
(The spelling “Mohammed” incidentally shows how outdated this story is, because the spelling “Muhammad” has been the preferred spelling for the Prophet’s name for at least 20 or 30 years now.)
I read an article by James Michener written in the 1950s when he explained that the “Mohammed” in this anecdote was a rogue teacher, like the more famous Nasruddin. Such teachers would act out little absurd skits to point up the follies of human nature.
Gaspode’s story sounds a lot like the one about England’s King Canute the Dane. Apparently some of his people were so convinced of his superpowers that they started a story about how he could even command the tides. He had to go to the beach and order the tides to cease to prove his normality. Could the Muhammad-mountain story be a kind of evolved cultural meme?
Its not about the Prophet Muhammad. He did not perform or profess to perform miracles. Islam is based on the fact and Muslims believe in christ’s miracles and moses performing “physical” miracles, but in the case of Muhammad, his greatest miracle is his character which was preserved in the sense that his whole life is known to man and can be followed which pretty much leaves out the issue of whether he had his episode with the mountain.
P.S spellings are not really an issue, since in Quran and Koran are two spellings of the same word, and Muslims do not distinguish true from false on the basis of english spellings since the arabic spellings are the only ones that can be accounted for.
There is a story about moving a mountain in the travels of Marco Polo. It goes something like this: A sultan who has been persecuting the Christian minorities in his country comes up with a pretext for demanding that they all convert to Islam or be slaughtered. Citing a passage from the New Testament about how you could move a mountain if you had as much faith as a mustard seed, the Sultan commands that the Christians have a week to move a certain mountain or else. The Christains find a holy man of extreme piety, and on the appointed day he prays to God for the mountain to move, and it does, to the dumbfoundement of the Sultan and his army.
Whoops!