Tahia Al-Ismail - The Life of Muhammad (SAAS)

Table of Contents

Tahia Al-Ismail

Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd.

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Copyright 1988 Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd.

Second Revised Edition: October 2006

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Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd.

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Written by: Tahia Al-Ismail

First Edition edited by: Abdalhaqq Bewley

Second Edition edited by: Dr. Abia Afsar-Siddiqui

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Al-Ismail, Tahia

The life of Muhammad : his life based on the earliest

sources. - 2nd ed.

1. Muhammad, Prophet, d. 632 - Biography

I. Title II. Bewley, Abdalhaqq III. Siddiqui, Abia Afsar

297.63

ISBN-13: 978 1842000 80 9 (Paperback)

ISBN-13: 978 1842000 82 3 (Hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84200-147-9 (ePub)

Book Designed and Typeset by: Shakir Abdulcadir opensquares.co.uk

CONTENTS

Please always invoke the following salutations:

PREFACE

Before approaching the wonderfully exciting life of the Prophet Muhammad and the account of his overwhelmingly successful struggle to fulfil against heavy odds the mission with which he was entrusted by his Lord, which was to establish the best possible human situation which has ever existed on the face of the earth, it is necessary to have an overview of the nature of prophethood and human history in general.

It is essential to see the story of the Prophet Muhammad and his community not as an isolated historical event but in the context of the whole of history. If we do not do this, then a vital part of its significance will be missed and we are in danger of misunderstanding the nature of what happened during those few years which were scant in number, yet vast in effect.

To start with it is necessary to jettison the commonly held modern superstition that we have now reached the summit of a slow and laborious process of evolution during the course of which the human creature somehow emerged out of a remote bestial past into a savage pre-human and then into the supposedly advanced, civilised creature of this time. As with many superstitions of this kind, quite the reverse is true.

It is true that the surface of the earth was made ready to receive the human being and that this happened in several quite clearly defined stages. What is not true is that human beings evolved out of other animal forms. The early accounts are true, the later ones fabricated. The human creature was created complete and perfect and with a totally different function to anything else in existence. Everything else was created to fulfil a limited defined role in creation in unconscious submission to the complex network of laws that governed its existence. The human being on the other hand, by virtue of faculties not present in any other creature, has the capacity to comprehend existence and, therefore by extension, worship the Creator of the universe. Human beings were created to recognise and worship their Creator and Lord. That is why we are here. Everything else was created to make this possible.

However it is in the nature of things that human beings are prone to lose sight of their true nature and fall prey to a short-sighted absorption in the world that surrounds them, becoming in the process virtually indistinguishable from animals and occasionally considerably worse. But because Allah is inexhaustibly merciful and desires the best for His creatures, human history was punctuated by the expression of that mercy in the form of messengers and prophets from Allah to His human creatures. These were men inspired directly by Allah Himself to recall their fellow men to the Truth, reminding them that worship of Allah is the cornerstone of their existence and restoring the harmonious and just social situation which is the inevitable outcome when human beings live in tune with their real nature.

Not one human community was left without guidance and the stories of those who brought and re-brought this guidance from their Lord - a guidance which was in each case essentially the same but which varied in certain respects according to the particular time and place - follow a largely predictable pattern. They appear in communities which had either not previously received revealed guidance or who had received it in the past and then neglected it and fallen into decadence. Their call to their fellows was largely ignored and frequently ridiculed since they affirmed the power of Allah which is invisible against the power structure of their society, which was all that was manifest to their people. In the face of continual opposition, frequently accompanied by physical persecution, they persevered in their task of delivering Allahs message that there is no god except Him and that justice and harmony in human society are only possible when this is recognised and put into practice, following the example of the messenger and those who were sent before him. After a time they usually succeeded in gathering around them a larger or smaller group of followers, often from among the poor and oppressed in their society. Finally in the face of the continuing obduracy of those who opposed them, they were inspired to deliver warnings of the inevitable destruction of those who stand against the power of Allah. This was generally to little avail with the result that that society was wiped out with the exception of the messenger and his band of followers who survived to form the basis of a new community. In its turn, this new community expanded and flourished under the guidance of the messenger and his immediate successors until it, in its turn, went the way of the previous communities into decline and decadence. Then once more another messenger would be sent and the story repeats itself again. This cycle of renewal, growth and decay occurring in conjunction with the appearance of envoys from Allah mirroring as it does all natural processes, is the true picture of human history. There is no steady unbroken line of evolution, progress or advancement as the modern myth makers would have us believe. Rather there have been a great number of these human cycles, some simple and unpretentious, others of unbelievable complexity and sophistication, stretching right back to the very beginning of the human story.