Source: Ahmadiyya Times, by Casey Michel (Houston Press).
“We want to publicize the fact that Muhammad was a peace-loving individual — that he wasn’t a womanizer, that he didn’t love war.”
The imam smiled. He’d been waiting for this question, it seemed. It was a soft Saturday afternoon, and this imam, Azhar Haneef, the national vice president of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA, had just finished an hour-long tour of videos displaying the prophet Muhammad’s pacifism at the Baitus Samee Mosque in north Houston.
The imam smiled, because a man — one of the mosque’s neighbors, a non-Muslim asking a question with neither malice nor intent — had wanted to know something about Muhammad. This neighbor had just heard an hour’s worth of praise poured upon the prophet’s piousness, on his pacific character. He’d just heard an hour’s worth of material set to counter a bubbling narrative that has painted the prophet as a hedonistic opportunist — one whose followers are apparently as ravenous as they are dedicated, as piggish as they are bloodthirsty.