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Lo!
My worship and my prayers and my life and my death are for Allah, Lord
of the worlds. He hath no partner. This I am commanded, and
I am the first of the Muslims (those who surrender (unto Him».
(al-Qur'an,6: 163-164). THE
Muslims form a nation over fourteen centuries old, and comprise at
present more than 1000
million human beings in all parts of the world. The Prophet Muhammad was
the
teacher and its guide. He lived and died in the full memory of history.
The evolution of
his personality,
religion, and nation assumed the force of a human history
of the greatest magnitude, witnessed not only by his contemporaries but
also by the rest of the world in subsequent times. The hero of this story
did not die until his Message was delivered and a Muslim nation
established in the Arabian peninsula. Says Bernard Lewis, 'In an essay
on Mohammad
and the origin of Islam Ernest Renan remarks that, unlike other
religions which were cradled in mystery, Islam was born in the full
light of history. "Its roots are at surface level, the life of
its founder is as well
known to us as those of the Reformers of the sixteenth century"
During the half-century following the death of the Prophet (in
A.D. 632), his Message was carried forth by five of his Companions, who
adhered closely to the precedents which he had established for ruling
his nation. Four of them were intimate, reliable friends and students
who had followed him from the earliest days of his call, through
persecution and ultimate triumph. The fifth Caliph was Mu'awiyah, son of
Abu-Sufyan, the formidable leader of the opposition to Muhammad.
Mu'awiyah's career as Caliph was longer than that of
his predecessors. He
presided over the affairs of the Islamic community for forty years as
governor of Syria, then caliph. Yet
in spite of the wealth of historical facts available to us, perhaps no
prophet and religion are so little known or understood by the Western
world as Muhammad and Islam. The West, which has maintained now for
several centuries a tradition of freedom of thought, a high grade of
literacy, and boundless knowledge in all spheres of human learning,
knows far less about Muhammad both as a prophet and as a leader of men
who exercised a direct influence on the course of human events -than
about Alexander or Caesar, whose influences have been less than those of
Muhammad and Islam. What
is the cause of such indifference in a world so eager to learn and to
understand? Two explanations merit consideration. The first is from the
pen of a distinguished Swedish scholar, who writes: The
cause. ..may perhaps be best expressed by the proverb: Relatives
understand each other least of all. A Christian sees much in Islam which
reminds him of his own religion, but he sees it in an extremely
distorted form. He finds ideas and statements of belief clearly related
to those of his own religion, but which, nevertheless, turn off into
strangely different paths. Islam is so familiar to us that we pass it by
with the careless indifference with which we ignore that which we know
and know only too well. And yet it is not familiar enough to us to
enable us really to understand its uniqueness, and the spirit by which
it has won its own place in the sphere of religion, a place which is
still rightly occupies by virtue of
its
very existence. We find it much easier to understand religions that are
completely new and strange to us -as, for example, the religions of
India and China. A greater degree of insight and of
spiritual
freedom is required of
him
who would understand the Arabian Prophet and his book. A
second explanation is presented by another scholar: History
has been such that the West's relations with the Islamic world have from
the first been radically different from those with any other
civilization. ..Europe has known Islam fourteen centuries, mostly as an
enemy and a threat. It is no wonder that Muhammad
more than any other of the world 's religious leaders has had a poor
press in the West, and that Islam is the least appreciated there
of
any
of
the world's other faiths. Until Karl Marx and the rise of communism, the
Prophet had organised and launched the only serious challenge to Western
civilization that it has faced in the whole course of its history
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