From pre-Islamic times to Islam
The Prophets’ Method of Reform and Change:
The world that Muhammad, peace be upon him, faced:
Muhammad ibn Abdullah, may God bless him and grant him peace, sent a scholar to a building that had been struck by a severe earthquake, which shook it violently. Everything in it was out of place. Some of its foundations and furnishings were broken, some were twisted and bent, some were displaced from their proper place and occupied another, and some were piled up and heaped up.
He looked at the world with the eyes of the prophets and saw a human being who had devalued his humanity. He saw him prostrating to stones, trees, rivers, and everything that does not possess the power to benefit or harm itself.
He saw a person whose mind had been corrupted, so that he could no longer accept the obvious, nor comprehend the clear, and his system of thought had been corrupted, so that the theoretical became self-evident to him and vice versa; he doubted where certainty was required and believed where doubt was needed. His taste had been corrupted, so that he found pleasure in the bitter, enjoyed the vile, and relished the harmful. His senses had been dulled, so that he no longer hated the unjust enemy nor loved the sincere friend.
He saw a society that was a microcosm of the world, where everything was out of place or in the wrong form, where the wolf had become a shepherd and the unjust adversary a judge, where the criminal had become happy and fortunate, and the righteous were deprived and miserable. In this society, I do not deny what is good, nor do I know what is evil. He saw corrupt customs that hasten the demise of humanity and drive it to the abyss of destruction.
He saw the drinking of alcohol to the point of addiction, debauchery and immorality to the point of recklessness, usury to the point of rape and theft of money, greed and lust for money to the point of avarice and gluttony, and cruelty and injustice to the point of burying children alive and killing them.
He saw kings who took God’s lands as states and God’s servants as slaves. He saw rabbis and monks who became lords besides God, consuming people’s money unjustly and hindering them from the path of God.
He saw human talents lost or misguided, not benefiting from them or being directed correctly, so they became a calamity for their owners and for humanity. Courage turned into savagery and barbarity, generosity into wastefulness and extravagance, pride into pre-Islamic zeal, intelligence into cunning and deception, reason into a means of inventing crimes, and creativity into satisfying desires.
He saw human beings and human bodies as raw materials that had not been given a skilled maker to use in the structure of civilization, and as wooden planks that had not been given a carpenter to build a ship from them to cut through the sea of life.
He saw nations as flocks of sheep without a shepherd, politics as a raging camel with its rope on its back, and the Sultan as a sword in the hand of a drunkard with which he wounds himself, and wounds his children and brothers.
Aspects of corrupt life:
Every aspect of this corrupt life attracts the attention of the reformer and occupies his mind. If he were an ordinary reformer, he would devote himself to reforming one aspect of it, and he would spend his whole life dealing with and suffering from one of the defects of society. But the human psyche is complex in structure, delicate in texture, with many openings and doors, and hidden in its escape and evasion. If it deviates or becomes crooked, it will not be affected by reforming one of its defects and changing one of its habits until it changes its direction from evil to good and from corruption to righteousness, and uproots the germ of corruption from the human soul that may sprout with the corruption of society and the disruption of education, just as demonic weeds sprout in fertile soil, and the substance of evil is cut off and the love of goodness, virtue, and fear of God Almighty is planted in it.
Every ailment afflicting human society and every flaw of the present generation requires a lifetime to rectify, a lifetime that may even extend through the lifetimes of a group of reformers, and still not be eradicated. If someone were to pursue alcohol in a land built on luxury and extravagance, a land steeped in frivolity and pleasure, he would be overwhelmed and his efforts futile, for drinking alcohol is nothing more than the result of a psychological inclination towards it.
Pleasure is found even in poison, and ecstasy is sought even in sin, so do not abandon it merely because of advertising, publications, books, sermons, and explanations of its medical harms.
And its moral corruptions, and by enacting severe laws and strict punishments it will not be abandoned except by a profound change of the soul, and if it is forced to leave it without this change, it will slip into other types of crime and make it permissible by changing names and images.
