Part 3
Atif
The Era of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
Here I want to raise an important question. In that age, when darkness, gloom, oppression, tyranny and the like had reached their peak, was there a need for a prophet to be sent to put an end to ignorance, folly, savagery and so on?
The answer is that the Prophet’s mission was an important necessity and a natural, innate need of human beings, because a divine book alone, without a teacher, would not be as effective in guiding humanity as it should be. For this reason, Allah (SWT) sent a prophet to explain the way, to guide people toward the truth and to separate the right path from the wrong, so that the truth would become clear to everyone.
The Prophet’s mission was the start of the struggle against every kind of Shirk, superstition and intellectual, doctrinal and practical deviation, and it meant a fight against all the aberrations that conflict with Islamic civilization.
In the light of Quranic perspectives, the Hadiths of the Prophet and the sources of Islamic history, we must examine how the Prophet’s mission and his effective approach to guiding and changing the intellectual, social and cultural condition of the people of the Arabian Peninsula managed to influence a people in whose culture injustice, ethnic and racial boasting, slavery, burying daughters alive, plunder, breaking agreements, murder and eating carrion were common in daily life. They lived in clear misguidance.
In short, people were living in an age when humanity was enveloped in an atmosphere of vengefulness, hatred, discord, tribal fanaticism and hundreds of other cruelties and forms of corruption. Every person and every ethnic group considered itself superior to other people and groups, and took ethnicity, race, tribe and color as the measure of its superiority.
