Tabligh Guide — Page 82
(American Edition) 82 Indeed, Mu ḥ ammad was frequently in deadly peril and his survival was a near-miracle. But he did succeed. By the end of his life he had laid an axe to the root of the chronic cycle tribal violence that afflicted the region and paganism was no longer a going concern. The Arabs were ready to embark on a new phase of their history. ” (Karen Armstrong, Mu ḥ ammad: A Biography of the Prophet P 53-54) “Finally it was the West, not Islām, which forbade the open discussion of religious matters. At the time of the Crusades, Europe seemed obsessed by a craving for intellectual conformity and punished its deviants with a zeal that has been unique in the history of religion. The witch-hunts of the inquisitors and the persecution of Protestants by the Catholics and vice versa were inspired by abstruse theological opinions which in both Judaism and Islām were seen as private and optional matters. Neither Judaism nor Islām share the Christian conception of heresy, which raises human ideas about the divine to an unacceptably high level and almost makes them a form of idolatry. The period of the Crusades, when the fictional Mahound was established, was also a time of the great strain and denial in Europe. This is graphically expressed in the phobia about Islām. ” (Karen Armstrong, Mu ḥ ammad: A Biography of the Prophet, P. 27) “History m akes it clear however, that the legend of fanatical Muslims sweeping through the world and forcing Islām at the point of the sword upon conquered races is one of the most fantastically absurd myths that historians have ever repeated. ”(Islām at the Crossroa ds, London, 1923, p. 8) “In the year 565 Justinian died, master of a great empire. Five years later Mu ḥ ammad was born into a poor family in a country three quarters desert, sparsely peopled by nomad tribes whose total wealth could hardly have furnished the sanctuary of St. Sophia. No one in those years would have dreamed that within a century these nomads would conquer half of Byzantine Asia, all Persia and Egypt, most of North Africa, and be on their way to Spain. The explosion of the Arabian peninsula into the conquest and conversion of half the Mediterranean world is the most extraordinary phenomenon in medieval history. ” ( The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant) “Whatever opinion the reader may form when he reaches the end of this book, it is difficult to deny that the call of Mu ḥ ammad seems to bear a striking resemblance to innumerable other accounts of similar visions, both in the Old and New Testaments,