The Revolution of the Prophet

achieved by a few of God’s servants fitting their wheel in with God’s. But, on the other hand, our sacrifices of modern times have all gone amiss because we have not followed God’s scheme. Instead, we have trodden the path of our desires, seeking to achieve by futile and irrelevant protests, which can only come from the wise use of the opportunities that God has afforded us. The generations following Adam, the first man on earth, all worshipped one God. Humanity, as the Quran says, “was one community.”47 The situation continued for a few centuries, but worship of worldly phenomena, or polytheism, became prevalent. People found it difficult to focus on an invisible God, so they focused it elsewhere, on visible objects, reducing belief in God to the lowly and unimportant status of an abstract creed. At this time, the sun, moon and stars became objects of worship, and the mountains and oceans became considered gods. Divinity was even ascribed to those mortals who stood out among their fellows. So it was that, after about 1000 years on earth, people saw the end of the conceptual dominance of monotheism, and their intellect became clouded with polytheistic thought.48 After other initial monotheistic religions declined, God started sending prophets to the world. These prophets, however, never achieved enough popularity to eradicate polytheism and reassert the dominance of monotheism. At that time, prophets came to every part of the inhabited world— according to one hadith, there were 124,000 of them—but each was scorned and laughed at.