Abdul Ala Mawdudi
Need for the Guidance of Allah
It is an undeniable fact that the source of all knowledge is Almighty Allah
Who made this universe and created man to populate it. Who else but Him can
know the realities of this universe. Who else possesses the knowledge of
human nature and its true elements? The Creator alone knows His
creatures. Human awareness is circumscribed by what has been revealed by the
Creator, for man has no independent means of his own to get at the truth.
In this connection, the difference between two different aspects of reality
must be fully grasped so as to avoid any fallacy in discussion. There are
things which you perceive through the senses, and having gathered a body of
knowledge by means of these senses, you can proceed to classify this
information with the help of reflection, argumentation, observation or
experimentation and to deduce laws from them.
For this type of information no revelation from heaven is needed. This is
the province of your personal discoveries, explorations, meditations,
reflections, research and deductions. It has been left to you to explore the
world around you and discover the forces which operate; to understand the
laws under which these realities function, so that you may stride forward
along the path of development. Yet in this matter too, your Creator has not
deprived you of His help.
All through the course of history, Allah has been unfolding before you, no
matter how imperceptibly, His created world through an evolutionary process.
He has opened up new vistas of knowledge before you, and at certain points
of history He has inspired men to invent new techniques or to discover new
laws. But the fact remains that in this domain man must gather knowledge by
himself, without the help of a Divine Messenger or a Divine Book. Man has
been endowed with all the resources to collect the information necessary in
this sphere.
But the second category of reality is transcendental , beyond the reach of
our perception; things which we are powerless to comprehend; things which
cannot be weighed or measured by scales, nor discovered by pressing into
service any of the instruments for acquiring knowledge which we have at our
disposal. The theories of philosophers and scientists on this subject are
mere conjectures and they do not come under the scope of knowledge. Here our
ultimate Realities and rational theories about them cannot be taken as
definitive even by the very expounders of these theories. But if the authors
of these theories possess any awareness of the boundaries of their limited
knowledge, they cannot have faith in the validity of their notions. Nor can
they call upon others to believe them.
Need for Following the Precedent of the Prophets(pbuh)
Knowledge is obtained through the Guidance of Allah, for Allah alone is
aware of realities. Allah offers this knowledge to man by means of
Revelation. Revelation is transmitted to none but the Prophets (pbut). Allah
has never published a Book and, having distributed to each individual, told
him to study it to ascertain for himself the reality of his own existence
and that of the universe. To realize his role in the practical world in the
context of this reality. Allah has always appoint the Prophets(pbut) to
convey this message to man, so that the Prophets(pbut) should not rest
content with merely propagating their mandate, but driving it home,
demonstrating it in action, recalling to the right path, those who defy the
Divine mandates and organizing the believers into a society where every
aspect bears practical evidence of this knowledge.
It is evident from this brief exposition that, for Guidance, we are wholly
dependent upon the character displayed to the world by a Prophet of God
(pbuh) A non-Prophet who does not believe in a Prophet is not eligible to be
our leader, even though he may be a sage, a deeply learned and wise man.
This is because such a person bereft of this knowledge is incapable of
devising a true and just system of life for us.
Why we cannot obtain Guidance from the Prophets other than Muhammad (pbuh) Let us now consider the question of
why, of all of the venerable men whom we
know as Prophets, and all the and all the leaders of religions who
conceivably may have been Prophets, we prefer to seek a message from the
character of Muhammad (pbuh). Is this prejudice or is there a reasonable
ground for doing so?
I submit that there is a rational basis for this. We certainly acknowledge
and believe in the Prophet hood of all those who have been named in the Holy
Quran as Prophets. But, we lack reliable information by authentic sources on
their teaching and their character. There is no doubt about the Prophet hood
of Hadrat Noah, Ibrahim, Ishaque, Yusuf, Moses and Jesus Christ (peace be
upon them ) and we believe in all of them. But none of the Scriptures
revealed to them has come down to us in its original form so that we may
benefit from its pristine message. Similarly, the life-history of none of
these Prophets (pbut) has been handed down by any authentic means enabling
us to follow their example in the various spheres of individual and
collective existence.
A person who undertakes to prepare an account of the teaching and characters
of all these Prophets (pbut) cannot write more than a few pages and these
too, entirely with the help of the Quran , for nowhere else is authentic
material extant about them except in the Holy Quran.
The Jewish Scriptures and the Prophets (pbut)
It is said that an account of Moses and the later Prophets (pbut) and of
their teachings is contained in the Old Testament. But consider the Bible
from the historical viewpoint. The original text of the Torah, as revealed
to Hadrat Moses (pbuh), had been destroyed at the time of the sack of Bait- ul-Maqdas in 6 BC, and along with it the scriptures of the former Prophets
(pbut) had perished. In 5 BC, when the tribe of Israel arrived in Palestine
after their release from the Captivity in Babylon, the Prophet Ezra (pbuh),
assisted by some venerable collaborators, prepared an account of the life of
Moses (pbuh) as well as a history of the tribe of Israel. In this work were
incorporated in appropriate places such verses of the Torah as were readily
available to the author and his associates.
In the period falling between the fourth and second century BC, Various
authors penned down the Scriptures ( from which sources we know not) of
those Prophets who had preceded them by several centuries. In 300 BC, to
cite an instance, an unknown writer wrote a book in the name of Hadrat Yunus
(pbuh) and incorporated it in the Bible, despite the fact that Hadrat Yunus
was a Prophet of the 8th century BC. The Zubur (Psalms) were committed to
writing five centuries after the death of Hadrat Daud (pbuh) and to them
were added sonnets composed by some hundred poets. We have no knowledge of
the sources from which the compilers of the Zubur (Psalms) had gleaned those
Sonnets.
Hadrat Sulaiman (pbuh) died in 933 BC, and Amsal-i-Sulaiman ( An Anthology
of Solomans Proverbs) was compiled in the year 250 BC which also
incorporated the maxims of several other sages.
In short, no book of the Bible bears an authentic connection with any
Prophet to whom it is ascribed. Furthermore, even these books of the Jewish
Bible perished at the second sack of Bait-ul-Maqdas in 70 AD, leaving only
their Greek translation extant, a translation dating back to the period
falling between 258 BC and the first century BC.
In the second century AD, the Jewish scholars prepared a Jewish Bible with
the help of manuscripts which had survived the vicissitudes of time. The
oldest copy of this Bible now extant dates back to 916 AD. Apart from this,
no other Jewish manuscript exists anywhere today.
The Jewish scrolls discovered in the cave of Qumran on the Dead Sea are not
older than the first and second century BC, and even those contain a few
scattered fragments of the Bible.
The earliest manuscript comprising the first five books of the Bible current
among the Samaritans was written in the eleventh century AD. The Greek
translation prepared in the second and third century BC was marred by
countless errors. A retranslation from Greek into Latin was done in the
third century AD. By what standard can we judge this material as an
authentic source of the life-histories and teachings of Moses (pbuh) and
the later Prophets of the Jews?
Finally, there were certain unwritten legends known as oral law, current
among the Jews. For a span of thirteen or fourteen centuries they remained
unwritten until, in the later part of the second and the beginning of the
third century AD, a priest known as Yahuda B. Shamun committed them to
writing under the title of Mishnah. Commentaries on this work by the
Palestinian Jewish scholars under the name of Halaka and by Babylonian
scholars under the title Haggada appeared in the third and fifth century
respectively. The Talmud is, in fact, an anthology of these three works.
Significantly, authoritative evidence which may reveal the chain of
transmission is lacking in the case of all traditions incorporated in these
books.
Christian Scriptures
A similar state of affairs exists in the case of Hadrat Isas character and
teachings. Jesus (pbuh) conveyed orally to the people the Bible which God
originally revealed to him. His disciples, too, propagated it among the
people by the spoken word in such a manner that they presented an admixture
of their Prophets life-story and the revealed verses of the Bible. None of
this material was put into writing during the lifetime of Jesus (pbuh) or
even in the period following him. It fell to the lot of the Christians whose
vernacular was Greek to transform these oral traditions into writing. It
must be borne in mind that Christs native tongue was Syriac or Aramaic and
his disciples spoke the same language as well.
Most Greek-speaking authors heard these traditions in the Aramaic vernacular
and committed them to writing in Greek. None of these writings is dated
prior to the year 70AD; there is not a single instance in these works where
the author has cited an authority for an event or maxim attributed to Hadrat
Isa (pbuh) in order that we might construct a chain of transmission.
Furthermore, even these works have not survived. Thousands of Greek
manuscripts of the new Testament were collected, but none of them is older
than the fourth century AD; the origin of most of them does not go beyond
the period spanning the 11th to the 14th centuries.
Some scattered papyrus fragments found in Egypt can lay claim to no greater
antiquity than the third century. We cannot say when the Bible was
translated from Greek into Latin. Nor do we know the writers name.
In the fourth century AD, the Pope commissioned a review of the Latin
translation. In the sixteenth century, this version was discarded and a
fresh translation from Greek into Latin was prepared. The Four Bibles were
most probably rendered into the Syriac language from Greek in 200 AD, but
the oldest Syriac manuscript extant was written in the 4th century. A
handwritten copy dated back to the 5th century AD contains, in frequent
parts, a different version.
Among the Arabic translations made from the Syriac none is known to have
been prepared before the 8th century AD. It is curious that some seventy
different versions of the Bible were prepared, four of which were approved
by the leaders of the Christian religion, while the rest was rejected. We
have no information concerning the grounds for their approval or rejection.
But can this material be credited to any extent with authenticity as regards
the character and message (gospel ) of Jesus (peace be upon him)? With
regards to other leaders of religion the situation is not dissimilar. Take,
for example, Zoroaster whose birth date is not shrouded in mystery. The most
that can be said about him is that there is evidence of his existence some
250 years before the subjugation of Persia by Alexander. In other words, his
life can be dated some five centuries before Christ (pbuh). His book "Avasta,"
in its original language, is extinct today; the language in which the book
was originally written or orally propagated is dead.
In the 9th century AD, a translation of "Avasta" was published in nine
volumes, out of which the first two volumes perished. The earliest surviving
manuscripts of the book dates from the middle of the 13th century. Such is
the condition of Zoroasters book. As for his character, our information
does not extend beyond the detail that he began preaching his religion at
the age of forty. Two years earlier, King Gustaph became his disciple and
Zoroasters creed turned into a State religion. Zoroaster lived to be 77,
and after his death, as time went on, legends were spun around his life, all
of them apocryphal.
One of the renowned religious personalities of the world was Buddha. Like
Zoroaster, he might have been a Prophet. Yet he left no boo, nor did his
followers claim that he had given one. A hundred years after his death, a
movement was started which lasted for several centuries to collect his
maxims and the account for his life. But no compiler of the Buddhist
scriptures produced during this period furnishes a chain of evidence for the
maxims and teachings of Buddha. It is evident that even if we wished to turn
for guidance to other Prophets (peace be upon them) and religious leaders, we
could not come by a reliable source from which might be derived authentic
and unassailable information on their history and teachings.
We are left with no alternative but to turn to the Holy Prophet Muhammad
(pbuh) who left a trustworthy Book free of any excisions or adulterations;
the Prophet (pbuh) whose detailed history, sayings and practices were
transmitted to us by authoritative sources so that we would be guided by his
example. In the entire course of history such a leader could only be found
in the sublimely gifted person in Muhammad (pbuh). The Holy Prophet(pbuh)
put forth a Book ( the Holy Quran) with the definite claim that it was the
Word of God which had been revealed to him. On scrutiny, we positively feel
that this Book is free of interpolations. The Book does not incorporate a
single maxim of the Holy Prophet(pbuh) ; rather, the inclusion in this Book
of any sayings of the Prophet(pbuh) has been scrupulously avoided.
In this Book, the Holy Prophets life (pbuh) , the history of the Arabs and
the events which occurred during the period of the revelation of the Quran
have not been mingled with the Divine verses, as is the case with the Bible.
The Quran is the pure Word of God. Not one word therein is not divine. Not
a single word has been deleted from its text. The Book has been handed down
to our age in its complete and original form since the time of Muhammad (pbuh). From the time the Book began to be revealed, the Holy Prophet(pbuh)
had dedicated its text to the scribes. Whenever some Divine Message was
revealed, the Holy Prophet(pbuh) would call a scribe and dictate its words
to him. The written text was then read to the Holy Prophet(pbuh), who having
satisfied himself that the scribe had committed no error in recording, would
put the manuscript in safe custody. The Holy Prophet(pbuh) also used to
instruct the scribe about the sequence in which a revealed message was to be
placed in a particular Surah. In this manner, the Holy Prophet(pbuh)
continued to arrange the texts of the Quran in systematic order until the
end of the chain of revelations. Again, it was ordained from the beginning
of Islam that a recitation of the Holy Quran must form an integral part of
worship. Hence the illustrious Companions (pbut) would commit the Divine
verses to memory as soon as they were revealed. Many of them learned the
entire text by heart and an even greater number memorized different portions
of it.
Besides, those of the Companions (pbut) who were literate used to keep a
written record of several portions of the Holy Quran. In this manner, the
text of the Holy Quran was preserved in four different ways during the
lifetime of the Holy Prophet(pbuh):
The Holy Prophet(pbuh) had the whole text of the Divine Messages from
beginning to end committed to writing by the scribes of revelations.
Many of the Companions (pbut) learned the entire text of the Quran, syllable
upon syllable, by heart.
All the illustrious Companions (pbut), without exception, had memorized at
least some portion of the Holy Quran, for the simple reason that it was
obligatory for them to recite it during worship. An estimate of the number
of the illustrious Companions (pbut) may be obtained from the fact that one
hundred forty thousand Companions (pbut) participated in the Last Pilgrimage
performed by the Holy Prophet(pbuh).
A considerable number of the literate Companions (pbut) kept a private record
of the text of the Quran and satisfied themselves as to the purity of their
record by reading it out to the Holy Prophet(pbuh).
It is an incontrovertible historical truth that the text of the Holy Quran
extant today is, syllable for syllable exactly the same as the Holy Prophet
(pbuh) had offered to the world as the Word of God. After the demise of the
Holy Prophet(pbuh), the first caliph Hadrat Abu Baker (pbuh) assembled all
the Huffaz (those who have memorized the Quran) and the written records of
the Holy Quran and had the whole text written in Book form. In the time of
Hadrat Uthman (pbuh) copies of this original version were made and
officially dispatched to the capitals of the Islamic world. Of these copies
extant in the world today, one is in Istanbul and the other in Tashkent.
Whoever is so inclined may compare any printed text of the Holy Quran with
those two copies. He shall find no variation. And how can one expect any
discrepancy, when there have been several million Huffaz in every
generation since the time of the Holy Prophet(pbuh) and in our own time?
Should anyone alter one syllable of the original text of the Quran, these
Huffaz would at once expose the mistake. In the last century, an Institute
of Munich University in Germany collected forty-two thousand copies of the
Holy Quran including manuscripts and printed texts produced in each period
in the various of the Islamic world. Research was carried out on these texts
for half a century, at the end of which the researchers concluded that apart
from copying mistakes, there was no discrepancy in the text of these forty- two thousand copies, though they belonged to periods spanning the first
century Hijrah to the 14th century Hijrah and had been procured from all
parts of the world. This Institute, unfortunately was destroyed in the
bombing raids on Germany during World War II , but the findings of the
research project survived. Another point that must be kept in view is that
the word in which the Quran was revealed is a living language in our own
time. It is still current as the mother tongue of some hundred million
people from Iraq to Morocco. In the non-Arab world also hundreds of thousands
of people study and teach this language.
The grammar of the Arabic language, its lexicon, its phonetic system and its
phraseology, have remained in tact for fourteen hundred years.
A modern Arabic speaking person can comprehend the Holy Quran with as much
proficiency as did the Arabs of fourteen centuries ago. This, then, is an
important attribute of Muhammad (pbuh), which is shared by no other Prophet
or Leader of Religion. The Book which God revealed to him for the guidance
of mankind today exists in its original language without the slightest
alteration in its vocabulary.
Authenticity of the Character and Precedent of the Holy Prophet(pbuh)
Now take the second attribute of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) by which he stands
unique among all Prophets (pbut) and leaders of religion. Just as the Book
transmitted to him, amounts of his character have also been preserved to
serve as a beacon for us in all walks of life. From early childhood to
the close of his life, a large number of those who saw him, witnessed the
events of his life and heard his conversation, addresses, exhortations or
warnings, had retained them in memory and passed them onto their successors.
Some of the research scholars believe that the number of those who had
passed on to the next generation eyewitness accounts or reports of events
that they had heard during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) number a
hundred thousand people. The Holy Prophet (pbuh) himself dictated some
commands and handed or dispatched them to certain people. These were later
bequeathed to the succeeding generations.
There were at least six Companions (pbut) who had recorded the Traditions of
the Holy Prophet (pbuh) and tested the authenticity of their records by
reading them out to the Holy Prophet(pbuh). These writings were also
inherited by posterity. After the death of the Holy Prophet(pbuh), some
fifty Companions (pbut) undertook to collect accounts of the circumstances
and incidents of the Prophets life and his holy utterances. The material
gathered from this source also came into the hands of those who later
accomplished the task of collecting and compiling the Traditions of the Holy
Prophet (pbuh).
Besides, as I have mentioned earlier, the number of the Companions who
transmitted orally their knowledge of the Holy Prophets character (pbuh)
runs to one hundred thousand, according to the estimate of some researchers.
Little wonder, when we take into account the fact that the Holy Prophet
(pbuh) performed his last Hajj, known as the Farewell Pilgrimage, in the
company of one hundred and forty thousand people! All these believers saw
him at the time of Hajj, learned from him the rituals of Hajj and listened
to the addresses which the Holy Prophet (pbuh) delivered during this last
Pilgrimage. It is improbable that when this assembly, who had attended such
an important occasion as the Hajj, disperse to their own homes, their
friends, relations and fellow-citizens should not have questioned them on
the circumstances of their journey or failed to ascertain from them the
injunctions about Hajj. One can well judge from this, after the Holy Prophet
(pbuh) had departed from the world, how eagerly the people must have
questioned those who had seen him and listened to his speech, on the details
of his life, his sacred utterances, commands and instructions.
The procedure that had been adopted from the beginning regarding the
traditions bequeathed to the later generations by the illustrious Companions
(pbut) was that whoever ascribed an event or saying to the Holy Prophet
(pbuh) had to state his source and furnish a chain of evidence. In this way,
the sources of a particular tradition were traced through all connecting
links back to the time of the Holy Prophet(pbuh) in order to determine
whether their connection with the person of the Prophet of God (pbuh) was
demonstrably true. If any links were found to be missing in the chain of
transmission, the authenticity of the tradition fell into suspicion. When in
the case of a tradition, a complete line of evidence had been set up to the
time of the Holy Prophet(pbuh), and even one of the reporters along the line
had been recognized as unreliable, the tradition was discarded. If you
ponder this a while, you will realize that circumstances relating to no
other man in history have been recorded with such rigorous scrutiny. It is
the distinction of Muhammad (pbuh) that no tradition ascribed to him has
been accepted, save on authority. And while looking for the authority of a
tradition, it was not considered sufficient to establish a chain of evidence
up to the time of the Holy Prophet(pbuh) , but each one of the successive
transmitters was carefully scrutinized as well so as to determine his or her
reliability. For this purpose, the circumstances of all the reporters were
thoroughly investigated and full-scale books were compiled. Setting forth
details as to who was trustworthy and who was not; what sort of character
and personality each of them had; whose memory was sound and whose weak.
Furthermore, the reporter who had actually met the source from whom he had
derived the tradition was distinguished from the one who merely named the
source without ever having met him. Information about all these reporters
has been documented on such a comprehensive scale that today we can easily
determine in the case of each tradition whether it has been derived from
trustworthy or fake sources. Is there any other person in the history of
mankind whose life story has been derived by such authentic means? Is there
another single instance in which, while discovering the history of one
individual person, comprehensive books were compiled on the life stories of
thousands of reporters who had narrated some tradition about that person?
The primary motive behind the vigorous campaign of the modern Christian and
Jewish scholars is to cast doubt on the authenticity of the tradition is
jealousy, for they know full well that the authority on the genuineness of
their own Scriptures as well as for that of the histories of their Prophets
is non-existent. It is owing to this jealousy that they have dispensed with
all intellectual honesty in their criticisms on Islam, the Holy Quran and
the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).
( This address was delivered in the University (new Campus) at the invitation of
the Punjab University Students Union on October 22, 1975)
