“Sesungguhnya pada diri Rasulullah ada suri teladan yang baik bagimu yang mengharap rahmat Allah dan kedatangan hari kiamat dan banyak menyebut Allah.” [Al Ahzab:21]
Itulah firman Allah yang menyatakan kemuliaan Nabi Muhammad. Bahkan non Muslim seperti Sir George Bernard Shaw dalam buku ‘The Genuine Islam,’ Vol. 1, No. 8, 1936 menyatakan bahwa jika ada agama yang akan menguasai Inggris atau Eropa dalam abad mendatang mungkin itu adalah Islam. Muhammad adalah orang yang mengagumkan dan pantas disebut Penyelamat Manusia (the Savior of Humanity). Begitu katanya.
Mahatma Gandhi, dalam pernyataan yang diterbitkan di ‘Young India,’1924 menyatakan bahwa bukanlah pedang yang menyebarkan Islam. Tapi kepedulian, keberanian, dan keimanan Nabi kepada Tuhan yang menyebabkan itu. Ketika saya menutup buku jilid kedua dari Kisah Nabi Muhammad, saya menyesal karena tidak ada lagi yang dapat dibaca.
Dan memang Muhammad yang kala itu pengikutnya hanya istri dan keponakannya, Ali, tidaklah mungkin bisa menyebarkan Islam dengan pedang. Karena kepribadiannya dan kebenaran Islamlah maka orang-orang berbondong memeluk Islam. Jika pun ada perang, maka itu tak lebih dari membela diri sebagaimana diketahui bahwa 3 perang besar pertama seperti perang Badar, Uhud, dan Khandaq terjadi di kota tempat tinggal ummat Islam di Madinah. Begitu pula perang Mu’tah terjadi di tanah Arab ketika tentara Romawi yang beragama Kristen menyerang untuk menghancurkan Islam.
Michael H Hart dalam buku ‘The 100, A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons In History,’ New York, 1978 menempatkan Nabi Muhammad dalam urutan pertama 100 orang paling berpengaruh di dunia mengalahkan Isaac Newton, Paulus, dan Yesus.
Menurut Michael H Hart, kebanyakan dari orang-orang besar yang ada dalam bukunya menjadi besar karena kebetulan lahir di negara-negara maju yang jadi pusat peradaban dunia. Bahkan tanpa ada mereka pun tetap saja negara-negara tersebut akan maju dan akan ada banyak orang yang akan menggantikannya untuk memimpin kemajuan tersebut.
Sebagai contoh Napoleon Bonaparte yang memimpin Perancis untuk menguasai Eropa itu terjadi karena Perancis adalah memang negara Eropa yang besar dan kuat. Napoleon tidak bisa melakukan itu jika Perancis adalah negara yang kecil dan lemah. Dan pada akhirnya, Napoleon pun gagal dan meninggal dalam pengasingan.
Amerika Latin pun tetap akan merdeka dari penjajahan Spanyol meski Simon Bolivar tidak ada. Akan banyak pejuang lain yang bisa menggantikan posisinya.
Yesus pun meski merupakan penyebar agama Kristen yang pertama, namun dia ditangkap dan disalib oleh tentara Romawi. Jumlah pengikutnya saat Yesus meninggal tidak banyak. Paulus lah yang berhasil mengembangkan agama Kristen sehingga diterima bangsa Eropa.
Sebaliknya, Nabi Muhammad lahir di kawasan yang terbelakang. Mekkah kota kelahiran Nabi adalah kota kecil di pinggiran yang jauh dari pusat perdagangan, seni, dan ilmu pengetahuan. Saat itu yang jadi negara besar dalah Romawi dan Persia. Ada pun bangsa Arab adalah bangsa jajahan yang terbelakang dengan jumlah penduduk yang hingga sekarang pun tidak banyak serta terpecah menjadi berbagai suku yang saling perang satu sama lain.
Pada saat Nabi lahir, kebanyakan bangsa Arab menyembah berhala. Selama 3 tahun pertama Nabi Muhammad menyeru Islam pada keluarga dan teman dekatnya. Baru pada tahun 613 Nabi menyiarkan Islam secara terbuka sehingga Islam mulai menyebar. Penguasa Mekkah yang kafir pun menganggap Nabi Muhammad sebagai bahaya dan ingin membunuhnya sehingga Nabi Muhammad hijrah ke Madinah. Setelah 3 kali serangan kaum kafir Mekkah dalam perang Badar, Uhud, dan Khandaq gagal, Nabi Muhammad dan pengikutnya menaklukkan kota Mekkah tahun 630. Pada saat meninggal tahun 632 Nabi Muhammad yang bertahun-tahun pada masa awal kenabiannya ditentang penduduk kafir Quraisy dalam tempo 23 tahun sanggup menyatukan bangsa Arab di dalam Islam.
Bangsa Arab bukan hanya sanggup menahan serangan tentara Romawi dan Persia, bahkan sanggup menaklukkannya. Hingga saat ini ibukota Romawi, Constantinople, di bawah kepemimpinan negara Islam dan berganti nama jadi Istambul (Turki). Begitu pula Baghdad yang sebelumnya jadi ibukota Persia ada di negara Islam Iraq.
Yang harus diingat adalah bahwa peperangan yang dilakukan oleh Nabi Muhammad bukanlah peperangan yang penuh darah seperti yang dilakukan tentara Salib yang membantai semua ummat Islam yang mereka taklukkan seperti dalam film ”Kingdom of Heaven.” Peperangan yang dilakukan oleh Nabi Muhammad seperti pada perang Badar, Uhud, Khandaq, dan Tabuk terjadi karena mereka membela diri dari serangan kaum kafir. Peperangan terhadap kerajaan Romawi dan Persia justru membebaskan daerah jajahan kerajaan tersebut sehingga mereka lepas dari penindasan kerajaan Romawi dan Persia. Pada saat penaklukan kota Mekkah misalnya boleh dikata tidak ada peperangan yang penuh darah. Tapi penyerahan yang penuh kedamaian.
Dalam 100 tahun sejak kematian Nabi Muhammad, Kerajaan Islam menyebar dari India, Pakistan, Iran, Timur Tengah, Afrika Utara, Albania, Yugoslavia, hingga Spanyol. Ini adalah satu imperium terbesar yang pernah ada dalam sejarah. Meski Spanyol kembali dikuasai Katolik setelah 7 abad, namun Islam tetap berkuasa di negara-negara Afrika Utara, Timur Tengah, Iran, dan Pakistan.
Islam bukan hanya maju secara politik dan militer. Dalam ilmu pengetahuan pun tiba-tiba bangsa Arab yang dulunya terbelakang di bawah ilmuwan Yunani atau Persia tiba-tiba jadi pemimpin. Banyak penemuan Islam / ilmuwan Arab/Islam yang diakui dunia hingga sekarang.
Sebagai contoh, sistem angka yang dipakai dunia sekarang adalah sistem angka Arab (Arabic Numeral) menggantikan sistem angka Romawi (Roman Numeral) yang kaku. Dengan angka Arab anda dapat menulis 93.567.794.214.698 dengan mudah. Angka tersebut tidak bisa ditulis dengan sistem angka Romawi.
Dalam ensiklopedi Microsoft Encarta disebut bahwa dalam dunia Islam yang menyebar ke Barat hingga Spanyol banyak dihasilkan penemuan Ilmiah seperti angka Arab:
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The Islamic world, which in medieval times extended as far west as Spain, also produced many scientific breakthroughs. The Arab mathematician Muhammad al-Khwārizmī introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe many centuries after they had been devised in southern Asia.
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Astronom Arab (baca Astronom Muslim) juga banyak yang menemukan dan menamakan bintang seperti Aldebaran, Altair, dan Deneb. Al Haytham (Alhacen) yang mengantarkan ilmu Optic juga menemukan metode Ilmiah yang menekankan kepada observasi, eksperimen, dan pencatatan yang akurat.
Singkatnya, Nabi Muhammad bukan hanya sekedar pemimpin agama atau Nabi. Namun beliau juga adalah pemimpin militer, pemimpin negara, dan juga peletak fondasi berkembangnya ilmu pengetahuan Islam (Islam Golden Age) di kalangan ummat Islam.
Tak heran jika seorang Non Muslim seperti Michael H Hart pun mengakui Nabi Muhammad sebagai orang nomor satu di dunia mengalahkan Yesus dan manusia-manusia lain di dunia.
Jika Non Muslim saja bersikap seperti itu, maka ummat Islam yang dalam syahadahnya mengakui Muhammad sebagai utusan Allah juga harus mengakui bahwa Nabi Muhammad adalah manusia paling sempurna yang maksum (terpelihara dari kesalahan). Oleh karena itu ummat Islam harus mempelajari siroh/sejarah Nabi dan mengikuti sunnah Nabi.
Berikut komentar tokoh Non Muslim terhadap Nabi Muhammad dan Islam:
Sir George Bernard Shaw in ‘The Genuine Islam,’ Vol. 1, No. 8, 1936.
“If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.”
“I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied him – the wonderful man and in my opinion for from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the Savior of Humanity.”
“I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today.”
Michael Hart in ‘The 100, A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons In History,’ New York, 1978.
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 secular and religious level. …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. …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.
Mahatma Gandhi, statement published in ‘Young India,’1924.
I wanted to know the best of the life of one who holds today an undisputed sway over the hearts of millions of mankind…. I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle. When I closed the second volume (of the Prophet’s biography), I was sorry there was not more for me to read of that great life.
MUHAMMAD
570-632
From the 100, a Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History
by Michael H. Hart
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 area 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, who believed in many gods. There were, however, in Mecca, a small number of Jews and Christians; it was from them no doubt 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, 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 a virtual dictator. During the next few years, while Muhammad s following grew rapidly, a series of battles were fought between Medina and Mecca. This was ended in 630 with Muhammad’s triumphant return to Mecca as conqueror. 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, 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 across 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 5 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 Muhammad 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 there 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), St. Paul 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 certain of Muhammad’s insights that he believed had been directly revealed to him by Allah. 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 Muhammed 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.
Furthermore, 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 occurred even without the particular political leader who guided them. For example, the South American colonies would probably have won their independence from Spain even if 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 those 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.
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