Imam Ali (a.s.) A Beacon of Courage
By Sulaiman Kattani, translated by I. K. A. Howard

The Birth of the Prophet
The birth of Muhammad was a beginning and an end, the beginning of a new era, the end of an old era.

The fact was that it had been ordained that the Arabian Peninsula, which had been long absent from the field in which the existence of man as man had been established, was to receive in this field the wonderful birth of a great man. This man would lay down, in the field of thought, a program which would compensate for the long stagnation in which that peninsula had been submerged in darkness for generations.

Out of the self-same land, the great Apostle brought his great Message to be, even beyond the Arabian Peninsula, a religion and a constitution, which would link it to the ideals of thinking man, which would create for it a civilization comparable with the civilization around it to the East and to the West . . . and which would then raise its society from nomadic tribal decadence to the level of sophisticated unity insofar as it was to be established on the basis of a productive and well-developed economy.

Under the care of the noble Prophet, Ali b. Abi Talib, it thrived. No sooner had he opened his eyes to the Message which was thrust before him than the hungry lad had greedily swallowed it up, equally understanding all its ideas and aims both short-term and long-term. He became part of it and it became part of him, as he was of what it was linked to.

He considered it the substance of redemption for a people whom it would free from their miserable economy, whom it came upon in the abyss of primitive, out-dated traditions and whom it would separate from the deprivations of negative reasoning and values.

There can be no doubt that coincidences are many . . . for it happened that the son of Abu Talib lived at a time which was the most dazzlingly auspicious which the atmosphere of the Arabian Peninsula had ever come upon.

The Prophet, that winged intellect, brought up a second man, who was Ali b. Abi Talib, another pivotal centre for the human intellect. For the Arabian Peninsula,  this  was  good   fortune  with 

Next Page