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Briefly, Muhammad appeared in the desert of Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula, which was a treeless and barren wilderness: sandy, desolate in the extreme, and in some places, such as Mecca and Medina, exceedingly hot. Its inhabitants were nomads, had the morals and manners of desert-dwellers, and were entirely bereft of knowledge and learning. Even Muhammad Himself was illiterate, and the Qur'an was originally written upon the blade-bones of sheep or on palm leaves. Infer then from this the conditions prevailing among the people to whom Muhammad was sent! (7:11) His first reproach to them was this: "Why do you reject the Torah and the Gospel, and wherefore do you refuse to believe in Christ and in Moses?" This statement came indeed hard upon them, for they asked: "What then is to be said of our fathers and forefathers, who did not believe in the Torah and the Gospel?" He answered, "They had gone astray, and it is incumbent upon you to renounce those who do not believe in the Torah and the Gospel, though they be your own forefathers." (7:12) It was in such a land and amidst such barbarous tribes that an illiterate Man brought forth a Book in which the attributes and perfections of God, the prophethood of His Messengers, the precepts of His religion, and certain fields of knowledge and questions of human learning have been expounded in a most perfect and eloquent manner (7:13) For example, as you know, before the observations of the renowned astronomer of later times,[5] that is, from the first centuries down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, all the mathematicians of the world were unanimous in upholding the centrality of the earth and the movement of the sun. This modern astronomer was the source of the new theory that postulated the movement of the earth and the fixity of the sun. Until his time, all the mathematicians and philosophers of the world held to the Ptolemaic system, and whosoever uttered a word against it was considered ignorant. It is true that Pythagoras, and Plato during the latter part of his life, conceived that the sun's annual movement around the zodiac did not proceed from the sun itself but from the earth's movement around it, but this theory was entirely forgotten and the Ptolemaic theory was universally accepted by all mathematicians. But in the Qur'an a number of verses were revealed which contradicted the Ptolemaic system. One of them, "The sun moves in a fixed place of its own",[6] alludes to the fixity of the sun and its movement around an axis. Likewise, in another verse, "And each swims in its own heaven",[7] the movement of the sun, the moon, the earth, and the other celestial bodies is specified. When the Qur'an was spread abroad, all the mathematicians scoffed and attributed this view to ignorance. Even the Muslim divines, finding these verses contrary to the Ptolemaic system, were obliged to interpret them figuratively, for the latter was accepted as incontrovertible fact and yet was explicitly contradicted by the Qur'an. (7:14) com1 It was not before the fifteenth century of the Christian era, nearly nine hundred years after Muhammad, that new observations were made by a famous mathematician,[8] that the telescope was invented, that important discoveries were made, that the rotation of the earth and the fixity of the sun were proven, and that the latter's movement about an axis was likewise discovered. Then it became evident that the explicit text of the Qur'an was in full agreement with reality and that the Ptolemaic system was sheer imagination. (7:15) com2 In short, multitudes of Eastern peoples were reared for thirteen centuries under the shadow of the Muhammadan Faith. During the Middle Ages, while Europe had sunk to the lowest depths of barbarity, the Arabs excelled all other nations of the earth in sciences and crafts, mathematics, civilization, governance, and other arts. The Educator and Prime Mover of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, and the Founder of the civilization of human perfections among those contending clans, was an illiterate Man, Muhammad. Was this illustrious Man a universal Educator or not? Let us be fair
(7:16)
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