But our prophet Muhammad pbuh doesn’t make money. There is no tax or obligatory donation in an Islamic state. Every wealthy Muslim is required to find a poor person and give 1/40 of their wealth to them every year, and we do this ourselves where I am. No authority is involved.
Despite not really wanting to go into a historic or theological debate, I can't help but notice that the guy went on to be an actual king of sorts - so there definitely was something in it for him, at the time.
I do agree that, overall, the formal structure of Islamic clerical organisations looks somewhat more horizontal (look ma, no pope!), and precepts towards charity look more stringent than the average "try to be good" message of other religions; but it's hard to deny that there are - and were - a lot of very temporal benefits accruing towards people of power under Islamic rule. Some rulers even derive their legitimacy from dynastic relationships to the prophet - that's worth a lot of money...
No one denies our prophet pbuh was the ruler of the Islamic state. As are the caliphates after him. It’s Christianity which has no doctrine regarding governance of people, or modern Christians who have weird ideas like religion should not be involved in governance. Someone needs to rule and spread the religion through territorial expansion, as it is the only way people can be saved. Say what you like, but it’s coherent.
Muslims would be pretty firm that Mo was just a prophet. They're worshipping God, not this prophet bloke. The Christians have this neat hack where their prophet guy literally was God. If you haven't grown up with it, the logic of Trinitarianism is completely batshit but if you grew up around Christians it just seems normal. An Iranian friend was astonishing that Unitarianism wasn't the default because it seemed less crazy.
Now, we do say "God is dead" but by that we don't mean in the sense that "Mohammed is dead" or "Elvis is dead" or "Margaret Thatcher is dead". We're talking about the idea, and so that's rejected by the Faithful.
Please do note that not all Christians believe in the trinity. It’s mainstream, but far from universal. As an example, I am a Christadelphian, and we refute the doctrine of the trinity, as it simply doesn’t appear in the Bible, and is indeed well documented as having been developed from roughly 100–325 AD.
