Who is Muhammad's Angel Gabriel?

The Angel of Peace - Fatima

The Story of Muhammad 

and Gabriel the Genie

Could those who blindly follow Muhammad as their heaven-sent prophet and leader and adhere to Islam as the one divinely revealed religion and the only true way to salvation possibly be deceived by Satan?

City Journal, Spring 2004, published an article by Theodore Dalrymple, titled When Islam Breaks Down. Dalrymple said, “No Muslim in an Islamic society would dare to suggest that the Koran was not divinely dictated through the mouth of the Prophet but rather was a compilation of a charismatic man’s words, and incorporating, with no very great originality, Judaic, Christian, and Zoroastrian elements.”

To be sure, Muslims believe that the Koran is of divine origin, eternal and co-existing in the very essence of Allah and is his sacred and direct word dictated in Arabic by the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad, containing Islamic revelations and doctrine. They believe that through Muhammad’s visions of the Archangel Gabriel, the Koran was revealed by installments, some at Mecca and some at Medina, over the span of twenty-three years. As the words flowed from Gabriel to the inspired lips of the Prophet Muhammad, they were written down upon palm leaves, leather or wood by his secretaries Zeid and Abdullah. 

However, the mostly unspoken story is that in 610 AD Muhammad retired with his family during the month of Ramadan to the famous cave on Mount Hira, and there, after spending time in pious exercises and meditations, he announced the secret of his mission to his wife, Khadija, revealing that the Angel Gabriel had just appeared to him and had told him that he had been appointed the “Apostle of God”.

Gabriel gives the Qur'an to Muhammad
Ottoman miniature, 15th century
Topkapi Museum, Istanbul, Turkey

Apparently the Angel Gabriel – a huge vision looming in the sky with its feet on the horizon – had enveloped Muhammad in a terrifying embrace, strangling him so that he felt as if his breath was being forced from his body. It was not until the third time the angel strangled Muhammad, demanding he recite words, that he finally did so. Alfred Guillaume’s 2002 translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah – The Life of Muhammad, Oxford University Press, 1955, says of Muhammad’s encounter with Gabriel: “Gabriel came to me while I was asleep with a coverlet of brocade whereupon was some writing, and said, ‘Read!’ I said, ‘What shall I read?’ He pressed me with the book so tightly that I thought it was death.” Three times Gabriel pressed the book down on Muhammad’s chest until Muhammad had no breath left. Finally, Muhammad said, “So I read it, and Gabriel departed from me.”

After Muhammad’s terrifying and violent encounter with the spirit in the cave, he believed that a jinn (genie or demon) possessed him. In addition, not only Muhammad suspected a demonic source of his revelations, but also many of his contemporaries believed his revelatory experiences were demonic and he was demon possessed: “Yet they run away from him and say: A man possessed!” (Sura 44:14; Yusuf Ali) and “What! Shall we give up our gods for the sake of a poet possessed?” (Sura 37:36; Yusuf Ali).

From that time the so-called revelations from Gabriel began to follow one after another in rapid succession. It is said that during the moments of these revelations with Gabriel it was a painful sight to behold the nervousness of Muhammad’s features, the distortion of his countenance and the anxiety of mind portrayed on his face. He would sometimes swoon and collapse to the ground, and even on the coldest day his forehead would be beaded with sweat. His epileptic fits, which had begun at the age of five, now greatly increased during his spiritual struggles on account of his mental excitement and nightly visions. Menezes says that as a result, many scholars have become convinced that Muhammad was either epileptic or demon possessed or both. 

Refuting the whitewashed, peaceful Muhammad of politically correct myth, Joel Richardson in his Islamic Antichrist, published by WND Books, 2008, says, “When attempting to discern the primary spiritual source of Islam, it is essential to see not only the dark nature of the initial seed but even more so its ultimate vision for the future – its fully mature fruit – as the demonic anti-biblical revelations that began in the Cave of Hira find their culmination with the killing of every Jew, Christian, and other non-Muslim in the world.”

Muhammad’s terrifying encounter stands in stark contrast to the gentle nature of angelic and divine encounters found throughout the Bible where angels almost always begin conversation with man with the comforting phrase, “Do not be afraid,” as the genuine St. Gabriel the Archangel did when speaking to the Blessed Mother at the Annunciation.

The three children of Fatima receiving
the message of the Angel of Peace

One year before the six 1917 apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, the three shepherd children, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, saw the Angel of Portugal, also known as the Angel of Peace, who appeared to the children three times, taught them prayers and how to adore Our Lord. During the third visit, the angel administered Holy Communion to the children. At the time Lucia was nine years old, Francisco was eight and Jacinta six. The three young children were not afraid of the angel, yet Muhammad, a 40 year-old married man, was terrified of the angel he encountered.

Would God, Who is immutable, send St Gabriel the Archangel to the Blessed Mother to announce the birth of His Son, Jesus Christ, then change His mind 600 years later, and resend Gabriel to earth to Muhammad as His supreme prophet to announce a new religion to supersede Christianity, thereby implying that Christ’s redeeming death on the Cross was incomplete? The answer is, no, God would not and did not rethink His salvation plan and send Gabriel to Muhammad to declare that he (Muhammad) was to start a new religion because Christianity just was not working out as first designed at the foundation of the world.

If Muhammad’s “Gabriel” is not the real St Gabriel the Archangel then who is he? Angels are real, and exist in the transcendent world of eternity. Satan is an angel, now categorized as a demon, with angelic powers and therefore can reveal himself to humans in various forms. Was Muhammad’s Gabriel then Satan in disguise? If Allah, Gabriel and Satan are one and the same, a sort of unholy trinity of hate, then Allah is a fallen angel, Satan himself, who needs to be worshipped in all his attributes of hatred, killing, destruction and death.

Admittedly Islam mirrors the attributes of Satan since the outward fruits of Islam are love of death, bloodshed, destruction, cruelty, stoning, stealing, violence, torture, hatred, beheading, murder, lying, constant jihad, subjugation, forced conversion, forced marriages, the barbaric practice of infibulation, kidnapping, slavery, dhimmitude, and the spread of Islam by brute force.

Since Christ founded Christianity in order to populate Heaven, why would the devil not think that he also must have an opposite religion, not only to thwart God’s plan, but also to populate hell? On a mountain Satan showed all the kingdoms of the world to Christ and said that they would be His if Christ would kneel down and worship him. Christ did not submit, so Satan withdrew until another day when, on another mountain, disguised as Gabriel, he offered Muhammad domination of all the kingdoms of the world through Islam if only he (Satan) would be worshipped as Allah. The terrified Muhammad submitted and in doing so was deceived by Satan.