Discovery of Islam

DISCOVERY OF ISLAM Muslims is that for latter day generations the basis for the Islamic ethos became the later history of Islam instead of the Quran and Sunnah. Muslims found their glorious history far more attractive than the Quran and Sunnah. For them they were just sets of words. Their history, on the contrary, gave them an immense sense of pride, as it was full of imperial grandeur and conquests. Although they continued to pay lip service to the Quran by reciting it, they were, in fact, lost in the glories of Islamic history. Gradually they came to associate themselves and Islam with this grand history: instead of the Quran and Sunnah, history became their chief source of inspiration. This change of the source of inspiration wrought immense harm. When the Quran and Sunnah are one’s intellectual sources it is modesty that is bred in the mind, whereas if one takes history as one’s intellectual source, pride is bound to be generated. If the Quran and Sunnah are taken to be the true sources of knowledge of God’s will, all mankind, in the words of a hadith, will be regarded by the believers as God’s family; the whole of humanity will become their concern: whereas, when the mind is shaped by history, Muslims see themselves as rulers, and others as subjects. If they derive Islam from the Quran and Sunnah, then all God’s creation— even a blade of grass—will appear to them as God’s signs. Whereas when history is the source of their Islam, the forts and palaces of their kings become signs of grandeur and glory to them. This is exactly what has happened with the latter-day Muslims. Almost all the activities of Muslims in present times bear testimony to this fact. The speeches of their leaders, the books of their writers, the poetry of