Muhammad: Seal of the Prophets — Page 4
MUHAMMAD : SEAL OF THE PROPHETS 4 certain modern Orientalists, who look on him rather as a politician than a saint, as an organizer of Asia in general and Arabia in particular, against Europe, rather than as a religious reformer; there can be no difference as to the immensity of the effect which his life has had on the history of the world. To those of us, to whom the man is everything, the milieu but little, he is the supreme instance of what can be done by one man. Even others, who hold that the conditions of time and place, the surroundi ngs of every sort, the capacity of receptivity of the human mind, have, more than an individual effort, brought about the great steps in the world’s history, cannot well deny, that even if this step were to come, without Muhammad, it would have been indefi nitely delayed. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the civilized world stood on the verge of chaos. The old emotional cultures that had made civilization possible, since they had given to man a sense of unity and of reverence for their rulers, had broken down and nothing h ad been found adequate to take their place…. It seemed then that the great civilization which had taken four thousand years to construct was on the verge of disintegration, and that mankind was likely to return to that condition of barbarism where every tr ibe and sect was against the next, and law and order were unknown…. The new sanctions created by Christianity were creating divisions and destruction instead of unity and order. Civilization like a gigantic tree whose foliage had over - reached the world sto od tottering, rotted to the core. Was