The World Before Islam

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Beyond Arabia, the two great empires were no better guided. Persia followed Zoroastrianism, tending an ever-burning sacred fire and dividing the cosmos between the lords of light and darkness (Ahura Mazda and Ahriman), a form of paganism. Rome, the Byzantine Empire, was Christian, but its Christianity had been transformed.

❧How Christianity was changed

After ʿĪsā ﷺ was raised, within a generation his followers split into strands. One was Gnosticism, a wholly philosophised, mystical understanding, now essentially gone. The two great strands were what academics call the Jewish Christians and the Pauline Christians. The Jewish Christians held that they were Jews still bound by the Law of Mūsā, circumcised, keeping the kosher laws; that ʿĪsā was a prophet sent to the Children of Israel and the promised Messiah, which is precisely what we believe. Paul, who was never a disciple but claimed to have seen ʿĪsā in a vision, began a new theology: that ʿĪsā had elements of divinity, that he came to set the Law aside so that belief in him replaced the Sharīʿah, that circumcision was no longer required, and the beginnings of the Trinity.

For three centuries Christians debated, and Rome, then pagan, was their worst persecutor; the Emperor Nero is said to have burned Christians alive as torches to light the city. Then a miracle, from their perspective: with Christians perhaps three or four percent of the empire, the Emperor Constantine converted, the first Roman Emperor to do so. He would not tolerate the bickering, so he convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, fixed the official version as essentially Pauline Christianity, chose the gospels that agreed with it and had the rival books burned in his presence, and from his decision came much of what followed. Those who held the older belief were driven out; some fled to the kingdom of the Najāshī, some to Persia. From Pauline Christianity descend the Orthodox, the Catholic, and the Protestant, some ninety-nine percent of Christians today; the Jewish Christians all but vanished, and it is thought some of the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumrān were remnants of them.

❧A surviving remnant

Yet a remnant of the old believers survived, and the greatest witness to them is Salmān al-Fārisī. The son of a Zoroastrian fire-keeper of Persia, he left his father's faith for Christianity and journeyed from teacher to teacher across Syria, teachers who pointedly were not of the empire's church. The last of them told him the time of the awaited Prophet had come, and gave him three signs: he would appear in a land of date-palms; he would accept a gift but never charity; and he would bear the seal of prophethood (خَاتَمُ ٱلنُّبُوَّةِ) between his shoulders. Seeking him, Salmān was betrayed into slavery and sold to the Jews of Yathrib, the very land of dates. There, when the Prophet ﷺ arrived, Salmān tested the three signs, found them true, and embraced Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ purchased his freedom.

❧Heraclius, so near and yet refusing

Even the Emperor Heraclius, learned in scripture, came near the truth. When the Prophet ﷺ wrote to him, أَسْلِمْ تَسْلَمْ, "Accept Islam and you will be safe", and questioned Abū Sufyān at Jerusalem about the new Prophet, Heraclius concluded, "If what you say is true, this is the Prophet whose coming was foretold in our scriptures", though there is no such prediction in the present New Testament, so he had access to what others did not. He wrote to a bishop who confirmed the signs. Yet he would not surrender his throne to follow it, for when a man is the most powerful on earth the temptation is too great, and he died upon his faith.

❧Into that darkness

So the Prophet ﷺ described the world into which he was sent, in a report in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim:

إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ نَظَرَ إِلَىٰ أَهْلِ ٱلْأَرْضِ فَمَقَتَهُمْ، عَرَبَهُمْ وَعَجَمَهُمْ، إِلَّا بَقَايَا مِنْ أَهْلِ ٱلْكِتَابِ

"Allah looked upon the people of the earth and despised them, Arab and non-Arab alike, save for a remnant of the People of the Book" (and maqt is the harshest degree of anger). It was into that Jāhiliyyah that he ﷺ was sent, a light, and a mercy to the worlds; and because of him there will never again be a Jāhiliyyah like it.