Muhammad (saw) – The Perfect Man — Page 958
CHAPTER 42 The Greatest and the most Successful Prophet 958 a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. . . . Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments,…nay enjoyments of any kind. . . . No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial, I find something of a veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself. . . . To the Arab Nation it was a birth from darkness into light; Arabia first became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in its 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-notable, the small has grown world-great; within one century afterwards,. . . the Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame. " 26 (23) One of the greatest historians the world has ever produced, Edward Gibbon (1794), writes: "The genius of the Arabian prophet, the manners of his nation, and the spirit of his religion, involve the causes of the