In 1978 Michael H. Hart, Christian by faith, published a ranking of the 100 Most Influential Persons in History along with reasons for their rankings. Without adding or removing a single word, I copied the chapter of the Most Influential Person and the reasons for this ranking.
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Michael H. Hart Writes...
MUHAMMAD 570-632
My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential
persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but
he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the
religious and secular levels.
Of humble origins, Muhammad founded and promulgated one of the world's
great religions, and became an immensely effective political leader.
Today, thirteen centuries after his death his influence is still
powerful and pervasive.
The majority of the persons in this book had the advantage of being born
and raised in centers of civilization, highly cultured or politically
pivotal nations' Muhammad, however, was born in the year 570, in the
city of Mecca, in southern Arabia, at that time a backward aarea of the
world, far from the centers of trade, art, and learning. Orphaned at age
six, he was reared in modest surroundings. Islamic tradition tells us
that he was illiterate. His economic position improved when, at age
twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow. Nevertheless, as he approached
forty, there was little outward indication that he was a remarkable
person.
Most Arabs at that time were pagans, and believed in many gods. There
were, however, in Mecca, a small number of Jews and Christians; it was
from them, most probably, that Muhammad first learned of a single,
omnipotent God who ruled the entire universe. When he was forty years
old, Muhammad became convinced that this one true God (Allah) was
speaking to him (through the Archangel Gabriel) and had chosen him to
spread the true faith.
For three years, Muhammad preached only to close friends and associates.
Then, about 613, he began preaching in public. As he slowly gained
converts, the Meccan authorities came to consider him a dangerous
nuisance. In 622, fearing for his safety, Muhammad fled to Medina (a
city some 200 miles north of Mecca), where he had been offered a
position of considerable political power.
This flight, called the Hegira, was the turning point of the Prophet's
life. In Mecca, he had had few followers. In Medina, he had many more,
and he soon acquired an influence that made him virtually an absolute
ruler. During the next few years, while Muhammad's following grew
rapidly, a series of battles were fought between Medina and Mecca. This
war ended in 630 with Muhammad's triumphant return to Mecca as
conquerer. The remaining two and one-half years of his life witnessed
the rapid conversion of the Arab tribes to the new religion. When
Muhammad died, in 632, he was the effective ruler of all of southern
Arabia.
The Bedouin tribesmen of Arabia had a reputation as fierce warriors. But
their number was small; and plagued by disunity and internecine
warfare, they had been no match for the larger armies of the kingdoms in
the settled agricultural areas to the north. However, unified by
Muhammad for the first time in history, and inspired by their fervent
belief in the one true God, these small Arab armies now embarked upon
one of the most astonishing series of conquests in human history. To the
northeast of Arabia lay the large Neo-Persian Empire of the Sassanids;
to the northwest lay the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire, centered in
Constantinople. Numerically, the Arabs were no match for their
opponents. On the field of battle, though, it was far different, and the
inspired Arabs rapidly conquered all of Mesopotamia, Syria, and
Palestine. By 642, Egypt had been wrested from the Byzantine Empire,
while the Persian armies had been crushed at the key battles of Qadisiya
in 637, and Nehavend in 642.
But even these enormous conquests- which were made under the leadership
of Muhammad's close friends and immediate successors, Abu Bakr and umar
ibn al-Khattab- did not mark the end of the Arab advance. By 711, the
Arab armies had swept completely accross North Africa to the Atlantic
Ocean. There they turned north and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar,
overwhelmed the Visigothic kingdom in Spain.
For a while, it must have seemed that the Moslems would overwhelm all of
Christian Europe. However, in 732, at the famous Battle of Tours, a
Moslem army, which had advanced into the center of France, was at last
defeated by the Franks. Nevertheless, in a scant century of fighting,
these Bedouin tribesmen, inspired by the word of the Prophet, had carved
out an empire stretching from the borders of India to the Atlantic
Ocean- the largest empire that the world had yet seen. And everywhere
that the armies conquered, large-scale conversion to the new faith
eventually followed.
Now, not all of these conquests proved permanent. The Persians, though
they have remained faithful to the religion of the Prophet, have since
regained their independence from the Arabs. And in Spain, more than
seven centuries of warfare finally resulted in the Christians
reconquering the entire peninsula. However, Mesopotamia and Egypt, the
two cradles of ancient civilization, have remained Arab, as has the
entire coast of North Africa. The new religion, of course, continued to
spread, in the intervening centuries, far beyond the borders of the
original Moslem conquests. Currently, it has tens of millions of
adherents in Africa and Central Asia, and even more in Pakistan and
northern India, and in Indonesia. In Indonesia, the new faith has been a
unifying factor. In the Indian subcontinent, however, the conflict
between Moslems and Hindus is still a major obstacle to unity.
How, then, is one to assess the overall impact of Muahammad on human
history? Like all religions, Islam exerts an enormous influence upon the
lives of its followers. It is for this reason that the founders of the
world's great religions all figure prominently in this book. Since ther
are roughly twice as many Christians as Moslems in the world, it may
initially seem strange that Muhammad has been ranked higher than Jesus.
There are two principal reasons for that decision. First, Muhammad
played a far more important role in the development of Islam than Jesus
did in the development of Christianity. Although Jesus was responsible
for the main ethical and moral precepts of Christianity (insofar as
these differed from Judaism), it was St. Paul who was the main developer
of Christian theology, its principal proselytizer, and the author of a
large portion of the New Testament.
Muhammad, however, was responsible for both the theology of Islam and
its main ethical and moral principles. In addition, he played the key
role in proselytizing the new faith, and in establishing the religious
practices of Islam. Moreover, he is the author of the Moslem holy
scriptures, the Koran, a collection of Muhammad's statements that he
believed had been divinely inspired. Most of these utterances were
copied more or less faithfully during Muhammad's lifetime and were
collected together in authoritative form not long after his death. The
Koran, therefore, closely represents Muhammad's ideas and teachings and,
to a considerable extent, his exact words. No such detailed compilation
of the teachings of Christ has survived. Since the Koran is at least as
important to Moslems as the Bible is to Christians, the influence of
Muhammad through the medium of the Koran has been enormous. It is
probable that the relative influence of Muhammad on Islam has been
larger than the combined influence of Jesus Christ and St. Paul on
Christianity. On the purely religious level, then, it seems likely that
Muhammad has been as influential in human history as Jesus.
Futhermore, Muhammad (unlike Jesus) was a secular as well as a religious
leader. In fact, as the driving force behind the Arab conquests, he may
well rank as the most influential political leader of all time.
Of many important historical events, one might say that they were
inevitable and would have occured even without the particular political
leader who guided them. For example, the South American colonies would
probably have won their independence from Spain even it Simon Bolivar
had never lived. But this cannot be said of the Arab conquests. Nothing
similar had occurred before Muhammad, and there is no reason to believe
that the conquests would have been achieved without him. The only
comparable conquests in human history are thos4e of the Mongols in the
thirteenth century, which were primarily due to the influence of Genghis
Khan. These conquests, however, though more extensive than those of the
Arabs, did not prove permanent, and today the only areas occupied by
the Mongols are those that they held prior to the time of Genghis Khan.
It is far different with the conquests of the Arabs. From Iraq to
Morocco, there extends a whole chain of Arab nations united not merely
by their faith in Islam, but also by their Arabic language, history, and
culture. The centrality of the Koran in the Moslem religion and the
fact that it is written in Arabic have probably prevented the Arab
language from breaking up into mutually unintelligible dialects, which
might otherwise have occurred in the intervening thirteen centuries.
Differences and divisions between these Arab states exist, of course,
and they are considerable, but the partial disunity should not blind us
to the important elements of unity that have continued to exist. For
instance, neither Iraq nor Indonesia, both oil-producing states and both
Islamic in religion, joined in the oil embargo of the winter of
1973-74. It is no coincidence that all of the Arab states, and only the
Arab states, participated in the embargo.
We see, then, that the Arab conquests of the seventh century have
continued to play an important role in human history, down to the
present day. It is this unparalleled combination of secular and
religious influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the
most influential single figure in human history.
