Non Muslims View on Prophet Muhammad Essay Sample
My pick of Muhammad to take the list of the world’s most influential individuals may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others. but he was the lone adult male in history who was supremely successful on both the spiritual and secular degrees.
Of low beginnings. Muhammad founded and promulgated one of the world’s great faiths. and became an immensely effectual political leader. Today. 13 centuries after his decease. his influence is still powerful and permeant.
The bulk of the individuals in this book had the advantage of being born and raised in centres of civilisation. extremely cultured or politically polar states. Muhammad. nevertheless. was born in the twelvemonth 570. in the metropolis of Makkah. in southern Arabia. at that clip a backward country of the universe. far from the centres of trade. art. and larning. Orphaned at age six. he was reared in modest milieus. Islamic tradition tells us that he was nonreader. His economic place improved when. at age 20 five. he married a affluent widow. However. as he approached 40. there was small outward indicant that he was a singular individual.
Most Arabians at that clip were heathens. who believed in many Gods. There were. nevertheless. in Makkah. a little figure of Jews and Christians ; it was from them no uncertainty that Muhammad foremost learned of a individual. almighty God who ruled the full existence. When he was 40 old ages old. Muhammad became positive that this one true God ( Allah ) was talking to him. and had chosen him to distribute the true religion.
For three old ages. Muhammad preached merely to shut friends and associates. Then. about 613. he began prophesying in public. As he easy gained converts. the Makkahn governments came to see him a unsafe nuisance. In 622. fearing for his safety. Muhammad fled to Madinah ( a metropolis some 200 stat mis north of Makkah ) . where he had been offered a place of considerable political power. This flight. called the Higra. was the turning point of the Prophet’s life. In Makkah. he had had few followings. In Madinah. he had many more. and he shortly acquired an influence that made him a practical dictator. During the following few old ages. while Muhammad’s following grew quickly. a series of conflicts were fought between Madinah and Makkah. This war ended in 630 with Muhammad’s exultant return to Makkah as vanquisher. The staying two and one half old ages of his life witnessed the rapid transition of the Arab folk to the new faith. When Muhammad died. in 632. he was the effectual swayer of all of southern Arabia.
The Bedouin tribesmen of Arabia had a repute as ferocious warriors. But their figure was little ; and plagued by disunity and internecine warfare. they had been no lucifer for the larger ground forcess of the lands in the settled agricultural countries to the North. However. unified by Muhammad for the first clip in history. and inspired by their ardent belief in the one true God. these little Arab ground forcess now embarked upon one of the most amazing series of conquerings in human history. ( However. one should observe that these were non offencive wars. restriction of clip and infinite will non let us to brood onto a elaborate analysis of these wars and conquerings ) . To the nor’-east of Arabia lay the big Neo Persian Empire of the Sassanids ; to the northwest lay the Byzantine. or Eastern Roman Empire. centered in Constantinople. Numerically. the Arabs were no lucifer for their oppositions. On the field of conflict. though. the divine Arabs quickly conquered all of Mesopotamia. Syria. and Palestine. By 642. Egypt had been wrested from the Byzantine Empire. while the Iranian ground forcess had been crushed at the cardinal conflicts of Qadisiya in 637. and Nehavend in 642.
But even these tremendous conquerings — which were made under the leading of Muhammad’s close friends and immediate replacements. Abu Bakr and ‘Umar ibn al Khattab did non tag the terminal of the Arab progress. By 711. the Arab ground forcess had swept wholly across North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean. There they turned north and. traversing the Strait of Gibraltar. overwhelmed the Visigothic land in Spain. For a piece. it must hold seemed that the Muslims would overpower all of Christian Europe. However. in 732. at the celebrated Battle of Tours. a Moslem ground forces. which had advanced into the centre of France. was at last defeated by the Franks. Nevertheless. in a light century of contending. these Bedouin tribesmen. inspired by the word of the Prophet. had carved out an imperium stretching from the boundary lines of India to the Atlantic Ocean — the largest imperium that the universe had yet seen. And everyplace that the ground forcess conquered. big scale transition to the new religion finally followed.
Now. non all of these conquerings proved lasting. The Persians. though they have remained faithful to the faith of the Prophet. have since regained their independency from the Arabs. And in Spain. more than seven centuries of warfare eventually resulted in the Christians reconquering the full peninsula. However. Mesopotamia and Egypt. the two cradles of ancient civilisation. have remained Arab. as has the full seashore of North Africa. The new faith. of class. continued to distribute. in the intervening centuries. far beyond the boundary lines of the original Muslim conquerings. Presently. it has 10s of 1000000s of disciples in Africa and Central Asia. and even more in Pakistan and northern India. and in Indonesia. In Indonesia. the new religion has been a consolidative factor. In the Indian subcontinent. nevertheless. the struggle between Muslims and Hindus is still a major obstruction to integrity.
How. so. is one to measure the overall impact of Muhammad on human history? Like all faiths. Islam exerts an tremendous influence upon the lives of its followings. It is for this ground that the laminitiss of the world’s great faiths all figure conspicuously in this book. Since there are approximately twice as many Christians as Muslims in the universe. it may ab initio look unusual that Muhammad has been ranked higher than Jesus. There are two chief grounds for that determination First. Muhammad played a far more of import function in the development of Islam than Jesus did in the development of Christianity. Although Jesus was responsible for the chief ethical and moral principles of Christianity ( in so far as these differed from Judaism ) . St. Paul was the chief developer of Christian divinity. its chief proselytizer. and the writer of a big part of the New Testament.
Muhammad. nevertheless. was responsible for both the divinity of Islam and its chief ethical and moral rules. In add-on. he played the cardinal function in proselytising the new religion. and in set uping the spiritual patterns of lslam. Furthermore. he is the writer of the Muslim sanctum Bibles. the Quran. ( nevertheless. the Muslims believe and seek to turn out that it is the actual word of God ) . a aggregation of certain of Muhammad’s penetrations that he believed had been straight revealed to him by Allah. Most of these vocalizations were copied more or less dependably during Muhammad’s life-time and were collected together in important signifier non long after his decease. The Quran. therefore. closely represents Muhammad’s thoughts and instructions and to a considerable extent his exact words. No such elaborate digest of the instructions of Christ has survived. Since the Quran is at least as of import to Muslims as the Bible is to Christians. the influence of Muhammad through the medium of the Quran has been tremendous. It is likely that the comparative influence of Muhammad on Islam has been larger than the combined influence of Jesus Christ and St. Paul on Christianity. On the strictly spiritual degree. so. it seems likely that Muhammad has been as influential in human history as Jesus.
Furthermore. Muhammad ( unlike Jesus ) was a secular every bit good as a spiritual leader. In fact. as the drive force behind the Arab conquerings. he may good rank as the most influential political leader of all clip.
Of many of import historical events. one might state that they were inevitable and would hold occurred even without the peculiar political leader who guided them. For illustration. the South American settlements would likely hold won their independency from Spain even if Simon Bolivar had ne’er lived. But this can non be said of the Arab conquerings. Nothing similar had occurred before Muhammad. and there is no ground to believe that the conquerings would hold been achieved without him. The lone comparable conquerings in human history are those of the Mongols in the 13th century. which were chiefly due to the influence of Genghis Khan. These conquerings. nevertheless. though more extended than those of the Arabs. did non turn out permanent. and today the lone countries occupied by the Mongols are those that they held prior to the clip of Genghis Khan.
It is far different with the conquerings of the Arabs. From Iraq to Morocco. there extends a whole concatenation of Arab states united non simply by their religion in Islam. but besides by their Arabic linguistic communication. history. and civilization. The centrality of the Quran in the Muslim faith and the fact that it is written in Arabic have likely prevented the Arab linguistic communication from interrupting up into reciprocally unintelligible idioms. which might otherwise hold occurred in the intervening 13 centuries. Differences and divisions between these Arab provinces exist. of class. and they are considerable. but the partial disunity should non blind us to the of import elements of integrity that have continued to be. For case. neither Iran nor Indonesia. both oil bring forthing provinces and both Islamic in faith. joined in the oil trade stoppage of the winter of 1973 74. It is no happenstance that all of the Arab provinces. and merely the Arab provinces. participated in the trade stoppage.
We see. so. that the Arab conquerings of the 7th century have continued to play an of import function in human history. down to the present twenty-four hours. It is this alone combination of secular and spiritual influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential individual figure in human history.
