The Excellent Exemplar - Muhammad — Page 2
THE EXCELLENT EXEMPLAR — MUHAMMAD 2 proceeded from a quarter entirely unexpected. Religion, philosophy, and learning were at a low ebb. The spirit, the mind, and the intellect languished. Mankind had entered upon a decline. The earth seemed to be dying. It was the darkest period of the Dark Ages. There was only an occasional glimmer of light here and there. As the Quran says: “Corruption had overtaken both land and water, in consequence of that which the hands of men had wrought” (30:42). * * “Land” here signifies peoples who did not profess belief in any Divine revelation, while “water” refers to peoples who professed belief in such revelation. In Arabia the gloom was almost unrelieved. The peninsula was an outlying and neglected region, its inhabitants innocent of learning, philosophy, and science. Although indifferent toward both the arts of peace and the regulations of war, the Arabs were good fighters. The hard and unrelenting struggle for existence in a waste and arid region left little margin for any other pursuit. The need of water to sustain human and animal existence was urgent and insistent, and largely determined the pattern of life. With the exception of a few townships, Arab life throughout the peninsula was tribal and nomadic. Each tribe moved with its few be longings, its camels and sheep, in search of water and pasture, within a roughly defined area, according to the season of the year and the vagaries of the rainfall. Mecca, forty miles from the Red Sea, enjoyed a degree of preeminence on account of the Sanctuary attached to the Ka’aba, the House of God, a pilgrim resort traditionally built or rebuilt by Abraham and his son Ishmael. Meccans claimed descent from