| Muhammad (saw) |
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If one were to close one's eyes and imagine oneself in the world of 1400 years ago, one would find that it was a world completely different from ours. How few and far between the opportunities for the exchange of ideas! How limited and undeveloped were the means of communication! How meager was man's knowledge! How narrow his outlook! How enveloped was he in superstition and wild ideas! In that benighted era, there was a territory where darkness lay even heavier than elsewhere. The neighboring countries of Persia, Byzantium and Egypt possessed a glimmer of civilization and a faint light of learning. But Arabia stood isolated, cut off by vast tracks of desert.Arab traders traveling great distances, which took them months, carried their wares to and from these countries, but they had little chance to find out anything about them. In their own country, they did not have a single educational institution or library. Although they did posses a highly developed language capable of expressing the finest shades of human thought in a remarkable manner, a study of the remnants of their literature reveals how limited was their knowledge, how saturated were their minds with superstitions, how barbarous and ferocious were their thoughts and customs, and how decadent were their moral standards. It was a country without a government. Each tribe considered itself to be an independent sovereign unit. There was no law except the law of the strongest. Whatever notions they had of morals, culture and civilization were primitive in the extreme. They could hardly discriminate between pure and impure, lawful and unlawful.
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