The Promised Messiah and Mahdi — Page 215
THE PROMISED MESSIAH AND MAHDI. Prophet and his followers to Medina, a powerful political force. . Muhammad, the patient victim of the sarcasm and persecution of the. Quraysh, having been invested by God with the mission of defending himself from his enemies, was compelled to take up the sword and was thenceforth granted no respite by his enemies which could permit him to put it down. . Not even two years had elapsed from that memorable day when God granted the sorely persecuted Muslims permission to oppose force by force, which marks the beginning of the ascendancy of Islam and of a real social and political revolution, when the followers of Muhammad won their first battle over the people of. Mecca. From that day, except for a few, perhaps inevitable checks,. Islam witnessed an unbroken series of encounters, battles and conquests in the religious as well as in the political fields. In the eighth year these culminated in an event of surpassing importance, namely, the conquest of Mecca itself. . "Arabia was now unified. The disruptive activities of the. Bedouins, who tried to revive the anarchy of the pre-Islamic period, did not achieve their objective, being defeated and overcome by the government at Medina. This may well be claimed the first miracle of the new religion: a country which for centuries had been the field of continuous and fratricidal battles, at last knew security and peace!. . . . . . . . "The Caliphs who succeeded Muhammad as Heads of the. Islamic State, being the faithful interpreters of his thinking, followed the road which he had opened, and carried the flag of Islam to the centre of Asia on the East and to the Atlantic Ocean on the West. . . . . . . . "Two civilizations and two religions have been demolished, a new stream of intense life began to flow in the veins of these exhausted peoples. There unfolded before the eyes of an astonished world a new religion, a simple, easy, one which speaks to the heart and to the brain; a new form of government, far superior in its moral principles and qualities to those existing at that time, was established; gold that had been hidden in the safes of plutocrats began changing hands and going to the poor, starting a system of 215