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by Michael H. Hart:
My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of
the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and
may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in
history who was supremely successful on both the religious and
secular levels. Of humble origins, Muhammad founded and
promulgated one of the world's great religions, and became an
immensely effective political leader. Today, thirteen centuries
after his death, his influence is still powerful and pervasive.
The majority of the persons in this book had the advantage of
being born and raised in centers of civilization, highly cultured
or politically pivotal nations. Muhammad, however, was born in the
year 570, in the city of Mecca, in southern Arabia, at that time a
backward area of the world, far from the centers of trade, art,
and learning. Orphaned at age six, he was reared in modest
surroundings. Islamic tradition tells us that he was illiterate.
His economic position improved when, at age twenty-five, he
married a wealthy widow. Nevertheless, as he approached forty,
there was little outward indication that he was a remarkable
person. Most Arabs at that time were pagans, who believed in many
gods. There were, however, in Mecca, a small number of Jews and
Christians; it was from them no doubt that Muhammad first learned
of a single, omnipotent God who ruled the entire universe. When he
was forty years old, Muhammad became convinced that this one true
God (Allah) was speaking to him, and had chosen him to spread the
true faith. For three years, Muhammad preached only to close
friends and associates. Then, about 613, he began preaching in
public. As he slowly gained converts, the Meccan authorities came
to consider him a dangerous nuisance. In 622, fearing for his
safety, Muhammad fled to Medina (a city some 200 miles north of
Mecca), where he had been offered a position of considerable
political power. This flight, called the Hegira, was the turning
point of the Prophet's life. In Mecca, he had had few followers.
In Medina, he had many more, and he soon acquired an influence
that made him a virtual dictator. During the next few years, while
Muhammad s following grew rapidly, a series of battles were fought
between Medina and Mecca. This was ended in 630 with Muhammad's
triumphant return to Mecca as conqueror. The remaining two and
one-half years of his life witnessed the rapid conversion of the
Arab tribes to the new religion. When Muhammad died, in 632, he
was the effective ruler of all of southern Arabia. The Bedouin
tribesmen of Arabia had a reputation as fierce warriors. But their
number was small; and plagued by disunity and internecine warfare,
they had been no match for the larger armies of the kingdoms in
the settled agricultural areas to the north. However, unified by
Muhammad for the first time in history, and inspired by their
fervent belief in the one true God, these small Arab armies now
embarked upon one of the most astonishing series of conquests in
human history. To the northeast of Arabia lay the large
Neo-Persian Empire of the Sassanids; to the northwest lay the
Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople.
Numerically, the Arabs were no match for their opponents. On the
field of battle, though, the inspired Arabs rapidly conquered all
of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. By 642, Egypt had been
wrested from the Byzantine Empire, while the Persian armies had
been crushed at the key battles of Qadisiya in 637, and Nehavend
in 642.
But
even these enormous conquests-which were made under the leadership
of Muhammad's close friends and immediate successors, Abu Bakr and
'Umar ibn al-Khattab -did not mark the end of the Arab advance. By
711, the Arab armies had swept completely across North Africa to
the Atlantic Ocean There they turned north and, crossing the
Strait of Gibraltar, overwhelmed the Visigothic kingdom in Spain.
For a while, it must have seemed that the Moslems would overwhelm
all of Christian Europe. However, in 732, at the famous Battle of
Tours, a Moslem army, which had advanced into the center of
France, was at last defeated by the Franks. Nevertheless, in a
scant century of fighting, these Bedouin tribesmen, inspired by
the word of the Prophet, had carved out an empire stretching from
the borders of India to the Atlantic Ocean-the largest empire that
the world had yet seen. And everywhere that the armies conquered,
large-scale conversion to the new faith eventually followed. Now,
not all of these conquests proved permanent. The Persians, though
they have remained faithful to the religion of the Prophet, have
since regained their independence from the Arabs. And in Spain,
more than seven centuries of warfare 5 finally resulted in the
Christians reconquering the entire peninsula. However, Mesopotamia
and Egypt, the two cradles of ancient civilization, have remained
Arab, as has the entire coast of North Africa. The new religion,
of course, continued to spread, in the intervening centuries, far
beyond the borders of the original Moslem conquests. Currently it
has tens of millions of adherents in Africa and Central Asia and
even more in Pakistan and northern India, and in Indonesia. In
Indonesia, the new faith has been a unifying factor. In the Indian
subcontinent, however, the conflict between Moslems and Hindus is
still a major obstacle to unity. How, then, is one to assess the
overall impact of Muhammad on human history? Like all religions,
Islam exerts an enormous influence upon the lives of its
followers. It is for this reason that the founders of the world's
great religions all figure prominently in this book . Since there
are roughly twice as many Christians as Moslems in the world, it
may initially seem strange that
Muhammad has been ranked higher than Jesus. There are two
principal reasons for that decision. First, Muhammad played a far
more important role in the development of Islam than Jesus did in
the development of Christianity. Although Jesus was responsible
for the main ethical and moral precepts of Christianity (insofar
as these differed from Judaism), St. Paul was the main developer
of Christian theology, its principal proselytizer, and the author
of a large portion of the New Testament. Muhammad, however, was
responsible for both the theology of Islam and its main ethical
and moral principles. In addition, he played the key role in
proselytizing the new faith, and in establishing the religious
practices of Islam. Most of these utterances were copied
faithfully during Muhammad's lifetime and were collected together
in authoritative form not long after his death. The Koran
therefore, closely represents Muhammad's ideas and teachings and
to a considerable extent his exact words. No such detailed
compilation of the teachings of Christ has survived. Since the
Koran is at least as important to Moslems as the Bible is to
Christians, the influence of Muhammed through the medium of the
Koran has been enormous It is probable that the relative influence
of Muhammad on Islam has been larger than the combined influence
of Jesus Christ and St. Paul on Christianity. On the purely
religious level, then, it seems likely that Muhammad has been as
influential in human history as Jesus. Furthermore, Muhammad
(unlike Jesus) was a secular as well as a religious leader. In
fact, as the driving force behind the Arab conquests, he may well
rank as the most influential political leader of all time. Of many
important historical events, one might say that they were
inevitable and would have occurred even without the particular
political leader who guided them. For example, the South American
colonies would probably have won their independence from Spain
even if Simon Bolivar had never lived. But this cannot be said of
the Arab conquests. Nothing similar had occurred before Muhammad,
and there is no reason to believe that the conquests would have
been achieved without him. The only comparable conquests in human
history are those of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, which
were primarily due to the influence of Genghis Khan. These
conquests, however, though more extensive than those of the Arabs,
did not prove permanent, and today the only areas occupied by the
Mongols are those that they held prior to the time of Genghis
Khan. It is far different with the conquests of the Arabs. From
Iraq to Morocco, there extends a whole chain of Arab nations
united not merely by their faith in Islam, but also by their
Arabic language, history, and culture. The centrality of the Koran
in the Moslem religion and the fact that it is written in Arabic
have probably prevented the Arab language from breaking up into
mutually unintelligible dialects, which might otherwise have
occurred in the intervening thirteen centuries. Differences and
divisions between these Arab states exist, of course, and they are
considerable, but the partial disunity should not blind us to the
important elements of unity that have continued to exist. For
instance, neither Iran nor Indonesia, both oil-producing states
and both Islamic in religion, joined in the oil embargo of the
winter of 1973-74. It is no coincidence that all of the Arab
states, and only the Arab states, participated in the embargo. We
see, then, that the Arab conquests of the seventh century have
continued to play an important role in human history, down to the
present day. It is this unparalleled combination of secular and
religious influence which I feel entitles
Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in
human history. |
