Guide for all of creation

ON the 12th of Rabiul Awal in Amul Fil, or the Year of Elephant (570 Anno Domini), the benighted world was blessed. Ahmad Mujtaba Muhammad Mustafa (peace be upon him) was born as a Guide for all of creation. "The advent of this great teacher, whose life from the moment of his Ministry is a verifiable record," says Syed Ameer Ali in The Spirit of Islam, "was not a mere accident, an unconnected episode in the history of the world. The same causes, the same evils, the same earnest demand for an 'assured trust' in an all-pervading Power, which led to the appearance on the shores of Galilee, in the reign of Augustus Caesar, of a Prophet, operated with greater force in the sixth and the seventh centuries."
The end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh centuries were epochs of disintegration. They pointed to the necessity of a revelation of Divine Government. The holy flames kindled by Zoroaster, Moses, and Jesus (peace be upon them) had unfortunately been drenched in the blood of man. The sublime and glorious moral teachings of Gautama were almost hidden from view.
Mrs. Rhys Davies points out: "Theories grew and flourished, each new step, each new hypothesis demanded another, until the whole sky was filled with forgeries of the brain and the nobler and the simpler lessons of the founders of the religions were smothered beneath the glittering masses of metaphysical subtleties."
Distorted versions of the great religions had "stifled the voice of humanity, and turned some of the happiest portions of the globe into a veritable Aceldama. Incessant war for supremacy, perpetual internecine strife, combined with the ceaseless wrangling of creeds and sects, had sucked the life-blood out of the hearts of nations, and the people of the earth, trodden under the iron heels of a lifeless sacerdotalism, were crying to God from the misdeeds of their masters. Never in the history of the world was the need so great, the time so ripe, for the appearance of a Deliverer."
Such indeed was Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), whose Mission was not for the Arabs alone. He was not sent for an age or clime, but "for all mankind to the end of the world." God, in His infinite Mercy, sent Muhammad (pbuh) as Rahmatul-lil-Alameen -- mercy not only for the entire humanity but also for every creation in the universe.
The holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), with the amazing soberness and incomparable self-control with which he entertained his all-absorbing visions, rose to the occasion with all the sincerity, conviction and determination under the sun. The challenge was daunting, the task stupendous. "Many a less sincere man, many a real hero," says Major Arthur Glyn Leonard in Islam: Her Moral and Spiritual Value, "would have shrunk from and succumbed before an ordeal so terrific, a contest so supremely titanic. But Mohammed was made of a sterner stuff, of the spirit gods are made of. Failure was a word that he did not recognise. With God at his back, success was an absolute certainty -- a foregone conclusion."
It was indeed a unique success. Even a devout Christian like Rev. Bosworth-Smith unhesitatingly admits in Mohammed and Mohammedanism: "Islam is the most complete, the most sudden and the most extraordinary revolution that has ever come over any nation on Earth." Thomas Carlyle says this beautifully in On Heroic, Hero Worship and The Hero in History: The Hero As Prophet: "A poor shepherd people roaming unnoticed in the deserts since the creation of the world. A Hero Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe. See, the unnoticed becomes world noticeable, the small has grown world great, within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Granada on this, and Delhi on that; glancing with valour and splendour and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section of the world." Phillip K. Hitti also acknowledges in History of the Arabs: "The sterile Arabia seems to have been converted as if by magic into a nursery of heroes, the likes of whom, both in number and quality, is hard to find anywhere."
The teachings of Muhammad (pbuh) had indeed wrought a marvellous and mighty work. The symbolic meaning given to Arabia to commune with a power above flesh and blood in Mohammed became more than a symbol. Arabia itself became the land of the hour, the Prophet of Islam its concentrated word.
There must be something so fascinating, so arresting in the personality of this great Arabian who without any standing army, without any palace, without any huge resources to fall back upon, without the slenderest human backing and against the heaviest material odds could so effectively revolutionise the social, political, moral, and spiritual outlook of the wild hordes, the barbarous savages of Arabia, creating a new orientation, developing a new phase of action, a new angle of vision, giving a new direction to human thought, a new interpretation of human life and destiny.
There must be something chivalrous about this giant among men that, alone among the great teachers of mankind, he conferred the first legal status of honour and responsibility upon women making them Sui Juris, ensuring their economic independence and providing them opportunities in all spheres of human activity, guaranteeing their rights in the properties of the deceased parents and of the dead husband and children.
There must be something so generous and magnanimous about this Seer of Arabia that alone among the prophets of God he sympathised with slaves in their deep distress and did not merely liberate them after the Battle of Hunain and inspired his companions to emulate his noble example, but also laid down the principles with proper religious sanctions with a view to emancipating them for good.
There was something so noble and humane in this orphan child of the desert, bereft in his infancy of the father's care and the mother's affection, that he responded so readily to the cry of distress from orphans, soothed their troubled hearts, enjoining upon his followers genuine sympathy and punctilious regards for their just rights, giving strict orders against encroachment upon their rights and properties in any shape or form, creating the noblest urge for the establishment of orphanages all over the world.
There was something so creative in the amazing genius of this great man of vision and imagination that he reconciled the divergent claims and conflicting interests of all classes and conditions of people, combining various aspects of human life -- the individual with the social, the national with the international, the material with the spiritual, the herewith with the hereafter -- laying down principles for all stages and conditions of human society aiming at the perpetual growth of the human race.
There was something so rational, so dynamic, so material, nay so original, in his magnificent conception of God and His relation with man and the system of universes that he could with his simple humility, with his democratic conception of the Divine Great, with his appeal to reason and the ethical faculty of mankind, lay the foundation of the modern world, establishing liberty, equality and fraternity, both in theory and practice, twelve hundred years before the French Revolution.
There was something not only original but unprecedented in his concept of the ethics of war and principles of warfare, which had never been conceived of before, that furnished the guidance for conduct of warfare.
No wonder that it is not the Muslims alone who claim that the holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was the greatest and most influential among the salt of the earth in the annals of civilisation. Even non-Muslim saints and seers unhesitatingly admit that there was none greater than the Prophet of Arabia.
John William Draper, who claims that the Renaissance owed its birth to Islam, acknowledges in unambiguous terms in A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe: "Four years after the death of Justinian, in AD 569, was born at Mecca in Arabia, the man (Muhammad) who, of all men, has exercised the greatest influence upon the human race.
The Encyclopedia Britannica unhesitatingly testifies in the article on the Koran in its 11th edition: "Muhammad is the most successful of all prophets and religious personalities."
The renowned astronomer and historian Michael H. Hart declares in The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History: "My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and the secular levels. It is this unparalleled combination of secular and religious influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in history."
Alfred De Lamartine sums up the great virtues and the excellent qualities of the last and the greatest Prophet in Histoire de la Turquie: "If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astounding results are the three criteria of human genius, who could dare to compare any great man in history with Mohammed. Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without image; the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire, that is Mohammed. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask, 'is there any man greater than he?' "
Syed Ashraf Ali is a former Director General of the Islamic Foundation.