Captioning provided by MUHSEN (www.muhsen.org)
The final prophet, Muhammad, SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam,
had accomplished the rare feat
of providing the world impeccable clarity
on the identity of God and his oneness,
and his absolute perfection.
It was a clarity that aligned so well
both with human nature and our faculty of reason
that it became the hallmark of Islam.
It became its most appealing teaching without exception.
When the Pew Research Center, which often notes how Islams,
the fastest growing religion in the world
and in the Western world as well,
it tried to probe further to better understand,
what was it about Islam that caused it to rise
so swiftly among the populations wherever it went?
And when it surveyed these factors
the number one and the number two reason
were just this,
that Islam restores for people that perfect unblemished
indivisible unity of the one true god.
They answered that it was the belief system, number one.
And that I read the text first hand,
the theology I found when I read those texts myself,
that compelled me to Islam above all else.
So Muhammad SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam
had restored for humanity and unearthed for them
their long lost sanctuary
without which they were most vulnerable.
And that was direct, unbridled access to the almighty
the most merciful, the creator of the heavens and the earth
the one and only, the one true god.
Such a clear belief system. Such a powerful belief system.
Such an empowering and intuitive belief system.
Compare it, for example,
with the intellectual history of Christianity,
how many vicious disputes there were in the very earliest
centuries on the nature of God and his person and his
identity? Disputes that were so ferocious
that they were only settled by the power of the state
when the state finally picked one of many doctrines
of the time.
Namely, Trinitarian theology, and imposed it on the people
and codified it in the fourth century's famous
council of Nicaea or Nicaea.
But when the Father, Son, and Holy spirit was in reality
not three aspects of the one true God,
it was the Son who was clearly a human being,
a mortal from this world, and the Holy spirit
which was the arc angel, Gabriel, another created being.
And then the Father, God, only God is God,.
That conflation of God and Angel and human prophet
could not sit well with people
and thus with the passage of time,
and more and more access to the texts of Christianity
we tend to find greater and greater disenfranchisement,
disillusionment, lack of conviction regarding that theology.
As for the Muslims, the followers of the Prophet Muhammad,
peace and blessings be upon him, as Edward Gibbon puts it,
"The Muhammadins", he means the Muslims,
"have uniformly,"
meaning throughout history, "withstood that human tendency
that temptation to reduce their God
and their object of worship
to anything that could be conjured up by the imagination."
He says they never allowed their god to be reduced
or relegated or regarded to the visibility
of even the imagination in the senses
which would in turn necessitate idolatry.
He says, "Instead they kept God as God.
And even the honor of their prophet
never transgressed the bounds of human virtue."
In that, lies the secret of the extraordinary,
explanatory power of Islam
and the pure monotheism found uniquely in Islam's theology.
It had both the spiritual, intuitive,
and intellectual rational appeal that drew people to it
from every corner of the world
until our day and age, here and now.
And of course, restoring the unity of God in people's lives
meant restoring meaning and purpose as well.
The prophet Muhammad SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam
liberated the world through such a theology,
through such a pure belief system
from seeing life as some destinationless journey
or from seeing themselves as the powerless victims
of competing forces and supreme beings
at odds with each other at their expense in this universe.
And when the famous French historian, Alphonse de Lamartine,
was marveling at the power of such an accomplishment
of Muhammad SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam,
he said, "Just think about it. This man took on the world.
He wrestled humanity away from thousands upon thousands
of superstitions and dogmas, indefensible beliefs,
false gods."
He says, "And he was uniquely able to restore God to man
and man to God."
Meaning, he was able to liberate the true conceptualization
of the real god to humanity.
And he was able to return through that man
to sincere devotion to that god
because only that god would be worthy
of our worship and our love and our our adoration,
and our subservience.
May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon Muhammad
who restored for us the unity of God until the end of time.
Captioning provided by MUHSEN (www.muhsen.org)