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THE
ETHOS CREATED BY GOD’S MESSENGER
This is the tribute
of Lamartine, a French historian, to the person of the holy
Prophet of Islam:
Never
has a man set himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a
more sublime aim, since this aim was superhuman: to
subvert superstitions which had been interposed between
man and his Creator, to render God unto man and man unto
God; to restore the rational and sacred idea of divinity
amidst the chaos of the material and disfigured gods of
idolatry then existing. Never has a man undertaken a work
so far beyond human power with so feeble means, for he had
in the conception as well as in the execution of such a
great design no other instrument than himself, and no
other aid, except a handful of men living in a corner of
desert. Finally, never has a man accomplished such a huge
and lasting revolution in the world, because in less than
two centuries after its appearance, Islam, in faith and
arms, reigned over the whole of Arabia, and conquered in
God’s name Persia, Khorasan, Western India, Syria,
Abyssinia, all the known continent of Northern Africa,
numerous islands of the Mediterranean, Spain, and a part
of Gaul.
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 to Muhammad? The most famous
men created arms, laws, and empires only. They founded, if
anything at all, no more than material powers which often
crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only
armies, legislation, empires, peoples, and dynasties, but
millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world;
and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the
religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls. On the
basis of a Book, every letter of which has become law, he
created a spiritual nationality which has blended together
peoples of every tongue and of every race. He has left to
us the indelible characteristic of this Muslim
nationality, the hatred of false gods and the passion for
the One and immaterial God. This avenging patriotism
against the profanation of Heaven formed the virtue of the
followers of Muhammad: the conquest of one-third of the
earth to his creed was his miracle. The idea of the Unity
of God proclaimed amidst the exhaustion of fabulous
theogonies, was in itself such a miracle that upon its
utterance from his lips it destroyed all the ancient
temples of idols and set on fire one-third of the world.
His life, his meditations, his heroic reviling against the
superstitions of his country, and his boldness in defying
the furies of idolatry; his firmness in enduring them for
thirteen years at Makka, his acceptance of the role of the
public scorn and almost of being a victim of his
fellow-countrymen: all these and, finally his incessant
preaching, his wars against odds, his faith in his success
and his superhuman security in misfortune, his forbearance
in victory, his ambition which was entirely devoted to one
idea and in no manner striving for an empire; his endless
prayer, his mystic conversations with God, his death and
his triumph after death; all these attest not to an
imposture but to a firm conviction. It was his conviction
which gave him the power to restore a creed. This creed
was two-fold, the Unity of God and the immateriality of
God; the former telling what God is; the latter telling
what God is not. Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator,
warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas,
of a cult without images; the founder of twenty
terrestrial states and of one spiritual state, that is
Muhammad. As regards all standards by which human
greatness may be measured, we may well ask: is there any
man greater than he?1
Lamartine
is right. It is really difficult for men of this century to
understand the Prophet Muhammad fully, for the universe, life
and man himself are compartmentalized and, as a result, people
are devoid of unitary vision. However, in the person of the
Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, the intellect
of a philosopher, the valor of a commander, the genius of a
scientist, the sagacity of a sage the insight and administrative
ability of a statesman, the spiritual profundity of a Sufi
master and the knowledge of a scholar were combined in perfect
harmony and in the highest degree. Philosophers produce
students, not followers; social leaders or leaders of
revolutions make followers but not complete men; masters of
Sufism make ‘lords of submission’, not active fighters or
intellectuals. But in the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace
and blessings, we find the characteristics of the philosopher,
the characteristics of a revolutionary leader, the
characteristics of a warrior and statesman, and the
characteristics of a Sufi master. His school is the school of
the intellect and thought, the school of revolution, the school
of submission and discipline, and the school of goodness,
beauty, ecstasy and activism.
The
Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, made desert
men - crude, ignorant, savage and obstinate - into an army of
skilled fighters, a community of sincere devotees of a sublime
cause, into a society of gentleness and compassion, and an
assembly of sainthood, and into a host of intellectuals and
scholars. In no community of the world and in the followers of
no great man of history, including the Prophets, do we see
fervor and ardor combined with gentleness, kindness, sincerity
and compassion, as history has shown among the sincere followers
of the Prophet Muhammad in every century.
The
school of the Prophet Muhammad - Islam - has been a ‘garden’
rich in every kind of ‘flower’; through it, like water
cascading, God has brought forth grain and plants, and gardens
luxuriant.
Abu Bakr,
‘Umar, ‘Uthman and ‘Ali, and the others in succeeding
centuries, like ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Mahdi al-Ab-basi,
Harun al-Rashid, Alp Arslan, Mehmed the Conqueror, Salim and
Sulayman were not only statesmen of the highest caliber and
invincible commanders, but they were also men of profound
spirituality, deep knowledge, eloquence and literature.
In the
blessed, pure climate of God’s Messenger, upon him be peace
and blessings, invincible generals of world-wide genius have
grown. Among them, in the first generation, Khalid, Sa‘d ibn
Abi Waqqas, Abu ‘Ubayda, Shurahbil ibn Hasana, and ‘Ala al-Khadrami
are almost unparalleled in world history. They were succeeded by
world-famous generals of military genius as well as human
tenderness and religious conviction and devotion, such as Tariq
ibn Ziyad and ‘Uqba ibn Nafi. When ‘Uqba, the Muslim
conqueror of North Africa, took leave of his family and mounted
his horse for the great adventure which was to lead him through
two thousand miles of conquest to the Moroccan shores of the
Atlantic, he cried out: ‘And now, God, take my soul’. He
also said: ‘O God, but for this sea stretching before me, I
would convey Your Holy Name across to other lands!’2
We can hardly imagine Alexander the Great having such thoughts
as he set out eastward to Persia. Yet, as conquerors, the two
men were to achieve comparable feats; the idealism of ‘Uqba
and his submission to the Divine Will were to be transmuted into
irresistible action in this world. The empire of Alexander
crashed after his death but in the lands conquered by ‘Uqba,
Islam - the creed of ‘Uqba - is still the only dominant
world-view, creed and life-style of the people after fourteen
centuries despite the concerted attacks and efforts the Western
powers have made to eradicate it for centuries.
Tariq was
a victorious commander, but not only when he defeated the
Spanish army of ninety thousand men with a handful of
self-sacrificing valiants, but also, and more than that, when he
stood before the wealth and treasures of the King, saying: ‘Be
careful, Tariq! You were a slave yesterday. Today you are a
victorious commander. And tomorrow you will be under the earth.’
Yavuz Selim, who came centuries later as an Ottoman Sultan, and
regarded the world as too small for two rulers, was truly
victorious, not only when he crowned some kings and dethroned
others, but also, and more than that, when he entered the
capital city - Istanbul - after the conquest of Syria and Egypt,
in silence at bedtime so as not to receive the enthusiastic
welcome and applause of the people. He was also victorious when
he ordered that his robe which had been soiled by the mud from
the horse of his teacher should be put over his coffin because
of its sanctity.
During
the rapid conquests after the Prophet, upon him be peace and
blessings, many of the conquered people were distributed among
the Muslim families, where they were brought up as the greatest
scholars of their time. Those emancipated slaves were the
foremost in religious sciences: in Basra Hassan ibn Hassan al-Basri,
in Makka ‘Ata’ ibn Rabah, Mujahid, Sa‘id and Sulayman ibn
Yasar, in Madina Zayd ibn Aslam, Muhammad ibn al-Munkadir and
Nafi’ ibn Abi Nujayh, in Kufa Ibrahim and Alqama ibn Qays al-Naha’i,
Aswad ibn Yazid, Hammad and Abu Hanifa Nu’man ibn Thabit, in
the Yemen Tawus ibn Kaysan and Ibn Munabbih, in Khorasan ‘Ata’
ibn ‘Adbullah al-Khorasani, in Damascus Maqhul were all among
emancipated slaves and yet the greatest of the jurists of a
certain period. They all opened as splendid ‘flowers’ of the
sweetest fragrance in the ‘garden’ of the Prophet Muhammad,
upon him be peace and blessings. They established the code of
the Islamic law and brought up thousands of jurists, who wrote
and complied volumes that are still valued as references in the
field of the Islamic law.
Among
those jurists, Imam Abu Hanifa, for example, is the founder of
the Hanafi School of conduct, which has hundreds of millions of
followers today. This great Imam brought up great scholars like
Imam Abu Yusuf, Imam Zufar and Imam Muhammad Hasan al-Shaybani,
the teacher of Imam Muhammad Idris al-Shafi‘i. The notes that
Abu Hanifa dictated to Imam Muhammad al-Shaybani were expounded
centuries later by Imam Sarakhsi, known as the sun of Imams, in
thirty volumes under the title of al-Mabsut.
Imam
Shafi‘i is regarded as a reviver or renewer (mujaddid)
in the religious sciences. He is the first to establish the
principles of the methodology of the Islamic law. However, when
his students once told Imam Sarakhsi that Imam Shafi‘i had in
memory three hundred fascicules of the Prophetic Traditions, the
former answered: ‘He had the zakat - one fortieth - of
the Traditions in my memory.’
Imam
Shafi’i or Abu Hanifa, or Imam Malik or Ahmad ibn Hanbal and
the others, all were brought up in the School of the Prophet
Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings.
Besides
the jurists, the interpreters of the Qur’an such as Ibn Jarir
al-Tabari, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Ibn Kathir, Imam Suyuti, Allama
Hamdi Yazir and Sayyid Qutb and the world famous figures of
Hadith such as Imam Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, Ibn
Maja, Nasa’i, Ibn Hanbal, Bayhaqi, Darimi, Daraqutni, Sayf
al-Din al-Iraqi, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani and many others are
ever-shining ‘stars’ in the ‘luminous sky’ of Islamic
sciences, who have all received their light from the
ever-shining ‘sun of the sky of mankind’, that is, the
Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings.
God,
according to Islam, has created man on the best pattern, and as
the most universal and all-embracing theatre of Divine Names and
Attributes, but man, because of his heedlessness, might fall to
the lowest of the low. With its inner or spiritual dimension,
Islam is also the way leading man to perfection or enabling him
to re-acquire his primordial angelic state. Islam has also
brought hundreds of thousands of saints in its history of
fourteen centuries. What is more, since the metaphysical quest
of man or gnosis has never been separated in Islam from the
study of nature, many great saints were also scientists. ‘Abd
al Qadir al-Jilani, Shah Naqshiband, Ma’ruf al-Karkhi, Hasan
Shazili, Ahmad Badawi, Shaykh al-Harrani, Ja’far al-Sadiq,
Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi, Mawlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, and
many others have illumined the way of people to the truth and
trained them in purification of the self. Being the embodiments
of sincerity, Divine love and purity of intention, the Sufi
masters have become the motivating factor and the source of
power behind the Islamic conquests and the Islamization of
conquered lands and peoples. The figures like Imam al-Ghazali,
Imam al-Rabbani and Bediuzzaman Said Nursi are the ‘revivers’
or ‘renewers’ of the highest degree, who combined in their
persons both the enlightenment of sages, knowledge of religious
scholars and spirituality of the greatest saints.
Islam is
the moderate religion. One finds in Islam an elaborate hierarchy
of knowledge integrated by the principle of Divine Unity (al-Tawhid).
There are juridical, social and theological sciences, and there
are metaphysical ones, all deriving their principles from the
source of Revelation which is the Qur’an. Then there have
developed within Islamic civilization elaborate philosophical,
natural and mathematical sciences, each of which has its source
in one of the Beautiful Names of God. It is the Name the
All-Healing that shines on medicine; geometry and engineering
depend on the Names the All-Just, the All-Determiner and the
All-Shaper and the All-Harmonizing. Philosophy reflects the Name
the All-Wise. And so on. On each level of knowledge nature is
seen in a particular light. For the jurists and theologians it
is the background for human action. For the philosophers and
scientists it is a domain to be analyzed and understood. On the
metaphysical level it is the object of contemplation and the
mirror reflecting supra-sensible realities. The Author of Nature
has inscribed His Wisdom upon every leaf and stone and has
created the world of nature in such a way that every phenomenon
is a sign (ayah) singing the glory of His Oneness.
Since
there has always been in Islam an intimate connection between
the sciences and other fields of Islamic studies, the education
of the Islamic scientist, particularly in the early ages, was
broad enough to comprise most of the sciences of the day. But
later in life each scientist became, through his aptitude and
interest, an expert and specialist in one or more of the
sciences.
There can
be no doubt that institutions - academies, libraries,
observatories, etc. - played a major role in the continuing
vitality of Islamic science. These, together with the readiness
of students to travel hundreds of miles to learn from
acknowledged scholars, ensured that the whole corpus of
knowledge was kept intact and transmitted from one place to
another and from one generation to the next, with continual
expansion and enrichment. There are, today, hundreds of
thousands of Islamic manuscripts in the world’s libraries,
most of them in Arabic, of which a large number deal with
scientific subjects. George Sarton, in his monumental
Introduction to the History of Science, divided his work
chronologically into chapters, giving each chapter the name of
the most eminent scientist of the period in question. For the
period from the middle of the second century AH (after Hijra)
(eighth century C.E.) to the middle of the fifth century AH
(eleventh century C.E.), each fifty-year period carriers the
name of a Muslim scientist; there are seven in all. Thus, we
have the ‘Time of al-Khwarizmi’, the ‘Time of al-Biruni’,
etc. Within these chapters we have the names of many other
important Islamic scientists and their main works. For example,
Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Kindi, known as ‘The Philosopher of the
Arabs’, wrote, in addition to philosophy, upon a variety of
subjects including mineralogy, metallurgy, geology, physics and
medicine, and himself was an accomplished physician. Ibn al-Haytham
was one of the principal Muslim mathematicians and without any
doubt the greatest physicist. The names of over a hundred of his
works are known to us, and some nineteen of these, on
mathematics, astronomy and physics, have been studied by modern
scholars. His work exercised a profound influence on later
scholars, both in Islam and the West, where he was known as
Alhazen. One of his works on Optics was translated into Latin in
1572.
Al-Biruni,
Abu’l-Rayhan, was one of the greatest scholars of medieval
Islam, and certainly the most original and profound. He was
equally well versed in mathematics, astronomical, physical, and
natural sciences and also distinguished himself as a geographer
and historian, chronologist and linguist, as well as an
impartial observer of customs and creeds. Al-Khwarizmi in
mathematics, Ibn Shatir in astronomy, al-Khazini in physics,
Jabir ibn Hayyan in chemistry were other leading figures
remembered instantly. Andalusia (Spain) was the main centre from
which the West derived knowledge and enlightenment for
centuries.
Islam
founded the most brilliant civilization in human history. This
should not be regarded as something strange since the Qur’an
begins with the injunction, Read: In the Name of Your Lord
Who creates (96.1). The Qur’an orders man to read at a
time when there was nothing yet to read, this means he is
commanded to read the universe itself as the book of creation of
which the Qur’an is the counterpart in letters or words. Man
has to observe the universe and perceive its meaning and
content, and as he perceives it he comes to know more deeply the
beauty and splendor of the Creator’s system and the infinitude
of His Might. Thus, it is incumbent upon man to penetrate into
the manifold meanings of the universe, discover the Divine laws
of nature and found a world where science and faith complement
each other so that man will be able to attain true bliss in both
worlds.
Muslims,
obeying the injunctions of the Holy Qur’an, and following the
example of the Prophet, upon him be peace and blessings, studied
both the book of Divine Revelation, the Qur’an, and the book
of creation, the universe, and founded a magnificent
civilization. Scholars from all over the ‘old’ world
benefited from the centers of higher learning at Damascus,
Bukhara, Baghdad, Cairo, Faz, Qayrawan, Zaytunah, Cordoba,
Sicily, Isfahan, Delhi and other great cities throughout the
Muslim world. Historians liken the Muslim world of medieval
ages, dark for Europe but golden and luminous for Muslims, to a
beehive. Roads were full of students, scientists and scholars
traveling from one center of learning to another.
For
almost the first ten centuries of its existence, the realm of
Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the
world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques and quiet
universities, the Muslim East offered a striking contrast to the
Christian West, which was sunk in the night of the dark ages.
This bright civilization lasted for a long time. Despite the
terrible disaster of the thirteenth century C. E., it still
displayed vigor and remained far ahead of the Christian West.
Although
Islam ruled two-thirds of the old civilized world for at least
eleven centuries, laziness and negligence of what was going on
in the neighborhood was responsible for the decay of the Islamic
civilization, but not of Islam itself. Military victories and
superiority that lasted as far as the eighteenth century induced
Muslims to be content with what they had already achieved and to
neglect further researches in the sciences. They abandoned
themselves to living their own lives, reciting the Qur’an but
without ever studying its deeper meanings. Meanwhile the Western
world made great advances in sciences, which they had borrowed
from the Islamic civilization. As already mentioned in this
book, the sciences are in reality the languages of the Divine
book of creation, which is another aspect of Islam. Therefore,
whoever neglects to study this book is destined to lose in the
worldly life, and this negligence was the reason why Muslims
fell under the domination of the West in later centuries. The
cruelty, oppression and the imperialistic tendencies of the West
have also made great contributions to this result.
It is
impossible that Western civilization will last long since it is
materialistic and far from satisfying man’s perennial needs.
Western sociologists such as Oswald Spengler and others have
predicted the collapse of this civilization, which is against
human nature and values. Islam has been available to humanity
for fourteen hundred years, and the bright world of the future
can be founded upon the firm foundation of the Islamic creed,
ethics, spirituality and its law and socio-economic and
political structure.
1.
Historie de la Turquie, 2.276-7.
2. I. Al-Athir, al-Kamil fi l-Tarikh, 4.107.
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