Foreword to the First Edition
Ever since man appeared on earth he has been
anxious to penetrate the universe and discover its laws and secrets. The more he
came to know, the more he wondered at its greatness, the weaker he appeared to
himself and the less reason he saw for vanity. The Prophet of Islam-may God's
peace be upon him is very much like the universe. From the very beginning,
scholars worked hard to uncover various aspects of his great humanity, to grasp
the realization of the divine attributes in his mind, character and wisdom.
Certainly they achieved a fair measure of knowledge. Much however has escaped
them; and there still lies ahead a long and indeed infinite road.
Prophethood is a gift which cannot be
acquired. In His wisdom God grants it to whosoever stands prepared for it and is
capable of carrying it. He knows best when and where it will be of most benefit.
Muhammad-may God's peace and blessing be upon him-was indeed prepared to carry
the prophetic message unto all the races of mankind. He was equipped to carry
the message of the most perfect religion, to be the final conclusion of
prophethood, the unique light of guidance for ever and ever.
The infallibility of the prophets in the
conveyance of their message and the performance of their divine trust is a
matter on which the scholars have agreed for a long time. Once they are chosen
for their task, the prophets' conveyance of their message and their performance
of the duties entrusted to them carry no reward. Their work is a necessary
consequence of such divine revelation. Like all men, prophets are truly
fallible; their distinction lies in that God does not leave them in their error.
He corrects them and often even blames them therefore.
Muhammad-may God's peace and blessing be upon
him-was commanded to convey a divine message. But he was not shown how to carry
it out nor how to protect the fruits of his work. It was left to him as any
rational and sentient being to conduct his affairs as his intelligence and
wisdom might dictate. The revelation which he received was absolutely precise
and clear in all that concerns the essence, unity, attributes and worship of
God. But this was not the case as regards the social institutions of family,
village and city, the state in its relations with the said institutions and with
other states. There is hence wide scope for research on the Prophet's greatness
before his commission as prophet, as there is after his commission had taken
place. He became a messenger for his Lord, calling men unto Him, protecting the
new faith and guaranteeing the freedom and security of its preachers. He became
the ruler of the Ummah of Islam ['Ummah' is
not translatable into English. It "is
not merely the 'nation' of the English language, nor 'la nation' of
post-revolution France and European nationalism. It adds to the utilitarian,
practical connotation of the former, and the rationalistic idealistic meaning of
the latter, the cosmological sense of being the eternal reality in which
'nations' in the foregoing senses may come and go, and the religio-axiological
sense of being the real-existent substrate of divine will" (Faruqi, I. R., On
Arabism, 'Urubah and Religion, Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1962, p. 15). -Tr.], its
commander in war and teacher, the judge and organizer of all its internal and
foreign affairs. Throughout his career he established justice and reconciled
hopelessly disparate and hostile nations and groups. His wisdom, farsightedness,
perspicacity, presence of mind and resoluteness are evident in all that he said
or did. From him streams of knowledge have sprung and heights of eloquence have
arisen to which the great bend their heads in awe and wonder. He departed from
this world satisfied with his work, assured of God's pleasure and crowned with
the gratitude of men.
All these aspects of the Prophet's life
deserve special study and research. It is not possible for any one scholar to
give them their due; nor to exhaust the meanings inherent in any one of them.
Like that of any other great man, the
biography of Muhammad-may God's blessing be upon him and upon his house-has been
expanded by many an imaginary story, whether innocently or with ulterior motive,
deliberately or accidentally. Unlike all other biographies, however, a great
portion of it has been included in the divine revelation and has thus been
preserved forever in the pure Qur'an. Another fair portion has been safely
preserved for us by trustworthy narrators. From these unmistakable sources the
biography of the Prophet should be constructed, and on their basis its hidden
meanings and complicated problems should be investigated, and its moral
established. Its constitutive materials should be subjected to objective and
scholarly analysis taking well into consideration the circumstances of time and
environment as well as the prevalent beliefs, institutions and customs.
In his book, The Life of Muhammad, Dr.
Haykal gave us the biography of the Prophet-may God's peace and blessings be
upon him-which I have had the pleasure of reading in part before printing. Dr.
Haykal is well known to the Arabic reader; his many books obviate the need for
an introduction. He studied law and familiarized himself with logic and
philosophy. His personal circumstances and career enabled him to study ancient
as well as modern culture and to learn a great deal from both. He lectured on
and debated, attacked and defended many questions of belief, of social
organization and politics. The maturity of his mind is matched by the perfection
of his knowledge, and the wide range of his readings. He debates with powerful,
convincing arguments and he treats his subject with sound logic and a style all
his own. Such preparation stands behind Dr. Haykal's book. In his Preface, Dr.
Haykal wrote: "No one should think that research in the life of Muhammad is
completed with this work; and I am far from making any such claim. It is closer
to the truth for me to say that my work is really only the beginning of
scientific research in this field in Arabic. [See Preface to the First
Edition] The
reader might be surprised if the strong resemblance of the modern scientific
method to the call of Muhammad is pointed out. The former demands that the
investigator suspend his own beliefs and refrain from prejudgment, to begin his
investigation with observation of the data, and then to proceed to
experimentation, comparison, classification and finally to conclusion based upon
these objective steps. A conclusion thus arrived at is scientific in that it is
itself subject to further testing and critical analysis. It is reliable only as
long as further scientific investigations do not disprove any of the premises on
which it is based. True, the scientific method is the highest achievement of the
human race in its effort to liberate man's thought, but it is precisely the
method of Muhammad and the foundation of his call.
Dr. Haykal's new-method is truly Qur'anic. For
he has made reason the judge, and evidence the foundation, of knowledge. He has
repudiated conservatism and castigated the conservatives. Agreeing with the
Qur'anic principle "opinion and speculation are no
substitute for true knowledge" (Qur'an, 53:28),
Dr. Haykal has chastised those who speculate without evidence; who regard the
old purely for its age, as sacred. He has imposed the teaching of the truth upon
all those who have the capacity to grasp it. "Muhammad-may God's peace and
blessing be upon him-had only one irresistible miracle-the Qur'an. But it is not
irrational. How eloquent is the verse of al Busayri : `God did not try us with
anything irrational. Thus, we fell under neither doubt nor illusion.' "
As for Dr. Haykal's claim that this method is
a modern method, that is rather questionable. In holding such a claim, Dr.
Haykal was reconciling the scholars who are his would-be critics. He himself has
acknowledged that this method was the method of the Qur'an. It is also the
method of Muslim scholars of the past. Consider the books of kalam [Kalam is
the discipline of Islamic thought. The
English concept of "theology" is inadequate because kaldrn includes
logic, epistemology and metaphysics and is always presented as critical, not
dogmatic, thought. "Philosophy" is equally inadequate on account of
the confusion its use might imply, namely, the assumption that all there is to
philosophical thought in Islam is the tradition which begins with al Kind! (d. 873
c.E.) and
ends with ibn Rushd (d. 1198 c.E.). -Tr.];
Some of them insisted that the first duty of the adult is to know God. Others
held that the first incumbent duty is to doubt; for there is no knowledge except
by means of proof and argument. Although the process of verification is a kind
of deduction, the premises of such reasoning must be either self evident,
mediately or immediately given to sense, or dependent upon unmistaken
experimentation and generalization, following the rules of logic. The slightest
error in any premise or in the form of reasoning vitiates the whole proof.
Al Ghazzali, the great teacher, followed
exactly the same method. In one of his books, he reported that he had decided to
strip his mind bare of all former opinions, to think and to consider, to compare
and to contrast, then to rethink all the proofs and all the evidence step by
step. After all this reconstruction he reached the conclusion that Islam is
true, and thus established a number of views and arguments regarding its nature.
He did all this in order to avoid conservatism, to achieve faith with certitude,
founded upon truth and argument. It is this kind of faith arising from rational
conviction which, all Muslims agree, cannot but be true and bring about
salvation.
The same method or deliberate repudiation of
all creeds, as a preliminary to investigation and scholarly study, is found in
most books of kalam. Doubt is indeed an old method; and so is experimentation
and generalization. The latter is founded upon observation; and it is not new
with us at all. Neglected and forgotten in the orient since it took to
conservatism and irrationalism, this old method was taken up by the West, purged
clean, and used with great benefit to science and industry. We are now taking it
back from the West thinking that we are adopting a new method of scientific
research.
This method then is both old and new. However,
to know a method is easy; to apply it is difficult: Men do not differ much in
their knowledge of a certain law; but they stand widely apart in their
application of it.
To suspend all prejudices, to observe, to
experiment, to compare, to deduct and to extrapolate are all easy words. But for
man standing under an inheritance of heavy biological and mental burdens,
struggling against an oppressive environment of home, village, school, city and
country, suffering under the tremendous weight of conditioning by temperament,
health, disease and passion-how could it be easy for him to apply the law? That
is the question, whether in the past or in the present. That is the reason for
the proliferation of views and doctrines. That is the reason for the movement
and change of these views from country to country and people to people. With
every generation, philosophy and literature don new robes very much like women
do. Hardly any theory or principal stands beyond attack, and none is an
impregnable fortress. Change has even attacked the theories of knowledge which
were venerated during long ages. The theory of relativity brought a whirlwind to
accepted scientific principles. But soon, it too was put under attack. Likewise,
the theories of nourishment and disease, of their causes and cures, are
undergoing continual change. A closer look, therefore, will convince us that
there is no security for the productions of our minds unless they are supported
by convincing proofs. But what is the proportion of such secure productions of
the mind to the long parade of theories which are produced by fancy, projected
by sick minds, imposed by politics, or created by scientists who simply love to
differ from their peers? This thought may perhaps sober such men of knowledge
and science who are too proud of reason and depend on it alone. Such a thought
may yet guide them one day toward the truth, to take shelter under the absolute
conviction which it provides, the conviction of true revelation, of the holy
Qur'an and the veritable Sunnah.[Sunnah
means the example of the Prophet as normative
concretization of the principles of Islam. -Tr.]
Let us now turn to Dr. Haykal and his book. A
number of mutakallimun[Mutakallimun
are those scholars who engage in kalam. -Tr.] have held
that the knowledge which astronomy and the dissection of the human body provide
clearly points to the fact that divine knowledge includes the most minute
details of existence. I concur that the discovery and establishment of the laws
and secrets of nature will, besides helping the human mind to penetrate what was
incomprehensible before, finally support religion. In this vein, God said, "We
shall show them Our signs in the horizons as well as within themselves, and We
shall continue to do so until they realize that Our revelation is the truth. Is
it not sufficient that your Lord witnesses everything?" (Qur'an,
41:53). The discovery of electricity and all the theories and inventions
to which it has led has made it possible for us to understand how matter may be
transformed into energy and energy into matter. Spiritualism has helped us to
understand the transcendent nature of the soul and shed light on the possibility
of its separate existence, of its capacity to travel through space and time. It
has helped explain many matters on which men differed in ignorance. Dr. Haykal
has used this new knowledge in his novel explanation of the story of Muhammad's
Isra'.[Isra' refers
to the night journey Muhammad undertook from Makkah to Jerusalem-whence he
ascended to heaven-and back.-Tr.]
To list the good points which Dr. Haykal has
made in his book would take many long pages. Suffice it then to point to these
contributions in a general way. Undoubtedly, the reader will realize the worth
of this work and will learn much from Dr. Haykal's well documented arguments,
fine logic, and penetrating insight. The reader will realize that Dr. Haykal's
whole devotion has been to the truth alone, and that he has approached his task
with a heart replete with the light and guidance of the revelation of Muhammad,
as well as with great awe for the beauty, majesty, greatness, and moral height
of the life of Muhammad-may God's peace and blessing be upon him. Dr. Haykal is
fully convinced that this religion of Muhammad will surely deliver mankind from
doubt, from dark materialism, and will open their eyes to the light of
conviction, guide them to the divine light with which they will come to know
God's infinite mercy. Dr. Haykal is confident that men will thereby come sooner
or later to acknowledge the glory of God as heaven and earth already do, and
praise the divine might before which all beings become humble. Indeed, he
writes: "Indeed, I would even go further. I would assert that such a study
may show the road to mankind as a whole to the new civilization to which it is
currently groping. If western Christendom is too proud to find the new light in
Islam and in its Prophet but willingly accepts it from Indian theosophy and
other religions of the Far East then it devolves upon the Orientals themselves,
Muslims, Jews or Christians, to undertake this study in all objectivity and
fairness in order to reach and establish the truth. Islamic thought rests on a
methodology that is scientific and modern as regards all that relates man to
nature. In this respect it is perfectly realistic. But it becomes personalist
the moment it leaves nature to consider the relationship of man to the cosmos as
a whole and to his creator." Dr. Haykal
goes on to say that "the pioneer fighters against this all-embracing
paganism of modern times, however, are clearly distinguishable under close
observance of the current flow of events. Perhaps, these pioneer forces will
grow and become surer of themselves when scholarship has found answers to these
spiritual problems through the study of the life of Muhammad, of his teachings,
of his age, and of the spiritual world revolution which he incepted."
Dr. Haykal's firm conviction is corroborated
by real events. What we have witnessed today of the West's concern for the study
of our heritage and the care with which western scholars study the legacy of
Islam, its various contents, its ancient and modern history and peoples, of the
fair treatment that some of them give to the career of the Prophet-may God's
peace and blessing be upon him-and finally, what we know by experience of the
necessary final victory of truth-all this leads to the consideration that Islam
will spread all over the world. In this process, the strongest protagonists of
Islam may well be its strongest enemies whereas its present alien antagonists
may be Islam's adherents and defenders. As in the early period the strangers
have supported Islam, strangers may yet help it achieve its final victory. It is
said that "Islam began as a stranger and will return as a stranger. God
bless the strangers!"
Since the Prophet-may God's peace and blessing
be upon him-was the last of the prophets, and the world is to have no prophet
after him, and since, as the revealed text has said, his religion is the most
perfect, it is not possible that the status quo of Islam will last. Its light
must necessarily eclipse all other lights as the rays of the sun eclipse those
of the stars.
Dr. Haykal related the events of the Prophet's
life closely to one another. His book therefore presents a closely knit
argument. In every case, he has elaborated strong evidence and articulated it
clearly and convincingly. His work is not only persuasive; it is pleasant
reading and it moves the reader to keep on reading to the very end.
Furthermore, the book contains many studies
which do not properly belong to the biography of the Prophet but are
necessitated by the author's pursuit of questions related thereto. Finally, let
me conclude this prefatory note with the prayer of the master of all men-may
God's peace and blessing be upon him, his house, and his followers: "God, I
take shelter under the light of Your face before Whom darkness became light, by
Whose command this world and the next were firmly established. Save me from Your
wrath and displeasure. To You alone belongs the judgment, harsh as it may be
when You are not pleased. There is neither power nor strength except in
You."
15 February, 1935
Muhammad
Mustafa al Maraghi
Grand Shaykh of
al Azhar
