How Was The Qur'anic Doctrine Announced To the World? (1)

HOW WAS THE QUR’ANIC DOCTRINE

ANNOUNCED TO THE WORLD?(1)

All the world knows generally what the Qur’anic Doctrine of what we call Islam is. However, this knowledge is very often limited to exterior features. It is said that Islam is that religious, social and moral Reform which, as soon as it had appeared on the coast of the Red Sea, at the beginning of the VII^th Century A.D., advanced so victoriously northwards, southwards, eastwards and westwards that it spread in a relatively short time over half of the world of that time.

An event with no precedent in the whole history which has ceased neither to captivate human attention nor to excite the curiosity of historians of morals and religions. So they tried in vain to find its prototype in the antiquity. They compared it sometimes to the conquest of Alexander the Great which was rapid and expansive but had never realized change whether in the ideas or in the morals and customs of people and with the spread of Islam, it did not leave any trace behind it.

Alexander's works had never passed the field of urbanism by establishing new beautiful cities in the Orient where the economic life became very prosperous, but the mass of people and the peasantry had always kept intact their proper character, language, habits and political and economic regime. Even in the cities, the Hellenism profoundly affected only a minority of the middle class. Later, Greek colonists were subjugated by other conquerors and those cities were progressively ruined under the Roman Empire.

In the domain of ideas, it is obvious that the Macedonian conqueror adopted unconditionally the current ideas of the conquered countries and affiliated to their divinities. His successors, no better than him did not revolutionize anything in this domain. Generally, during the Greek and Roman periods, the philosophical and religious ideas which are essentially oriental doctrines, had used the Greek vehicle to be transported to Europe under the names of Neo-Platonism and Christianity. So that, we have the right to say here that it was the Orient which had really conquered its conquerors.

At last, Islam arrived and everything changed in an extremely short time. Change not only occurred in the political and economic facade but also deeply in the hearts of the people. Language, ideas, laws, aspirations, customs and the conceptions of the universe and of God transformed all at once [1]. This conquest of the spirit did not only influence the souls in which it penetrated, but it tends always to spread out and to gain ground anywhere it went showing its primitive simplicity and purity.

This observation, however, contradicts the opinion propagated and spread by those who state that Islam was founded on arms. The actual influence which it exercises at the present time is a tangible proof that it has an internal force and a particular affinity with the human nature and the reality of things?