Islam can’t be reformed. You need to have an authority with a rank similar or superior to the one claimed by Muhammad to be able to reform Islam. But that can’t be done, because Muhammad said he was the last prophet. The atrocities perpetrated by Muhammad exceeded anything that anyone had experienced before. Amazingly, his followers, taken aback by his utter lack of conscience and his monstrous inhumanity, thought he must be supported by some invisible force for they could not understand how a human being could be so ruthless and kill so many people with such conviction while praising God at the same time and inviting people to be pious. Criminals do not talk about God. They often have a trace of conscience left in them and are often overtaken by remorse. But not the psychopaths! Psychopaths do not have a conscience. They feel entitled to kill, and they believe they are doing God’s work. This is what Hitler said:

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York : Mariner Books, 1999, p. 65]

Muhammad offset his follower’s balance of right and wrong. He overloaded it with so much evil that it broke.

We humans have an inner balance with which we weigh good and evil. This balance, in Muslims stopped working. The indicator is stuck on zero. Muhammad’s companions could no longer register right and wrong. Because it’s hard to envision how a human being could be this ruthless, they persuaded themselves that he must be from God. As for why this god is so demonic, they fooled themselves with the lies that he told them. He told them that it is not up to man to question God. This absurd explanation satisfied his benighted followers. They resorted to fideism and argued that reason is irrelevant to religious belief. The great Imam Ghazali (1058 1111) said: “Where the claims of reason come into conflict with revelation, reason must yield to revelation.” Upon this belief in absurdity fideism is founded and it is the position that has been adopted by Muslims. This fideistic attitude allowed the early believers to abandon reason and accept whatever Muhammad did, even his blatant crimes, without questioning him.

However, mostly they WANTED to believe because they had no other choice. Muhammad had become their only source of sustenance and survival.

The city of Yathreb (Medina) was devastated by the Muslims. Its original inhabitants those who ran the businesses and provided employment, who were artisans, tradesmen and farmers the Jews, were either banished or killed. The Arabs had been working for the Jews. Now, with the Jews gone or massacred, they were out of work and depended on Muhammad and his raids for their sustenance. It was not convenient to think critically about what they were doing. They let themselves go with the flow and kept themselves fooled. They got their confirmation by watching the zealotry of their coreligionists. Each follower encouraged others, and among them they created a mass hysteria that has lasted up to this day. “How can all these people be wrong?” was their rationale. This is the same rationale Muslims use today to keep their faith alive. This is what happens in cult compounds. The members lose their identity and surrender their rational faculty to the guru. They become an extension of the group and a reflection of the cult leader. The cultish nature of Islam has not changed a bit. Fourteen hundred years later, if you join Islam, you are received with cheers and hugs, but if you decide to leave, you’ll be chased down and killed.

You say that violence was the norm in those days. Even if this were true, which it is not, did Muhammad come to follow the bad practices of his people or set new standards?

Now, the most important question is WHY: Why keep Islam and honor Muhammad? Can we do the same thing with Nazism? Can we reform Nazism pretend that Hitler was an innocent product of his time, and pick and choose, only the good parts of his Mein Kampf? How much must we fool ourselves, and WHY?

What we have to understand is that Muhammad, like Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Charles Manson, and millions of other less known monsters, was a pathological narcissist. These celebrated men were not normal. They were sick in the mind.