Muhammad revealed that the day would come when sexual immorality
would become so normalised that it would be carried out in public:
"The Hour will not be established until people fornicate with each
other in the road just as donkeys fornicate" [143].
Today we live in a
world where we are bombarded with explicit sexual imagery in TV,
film, and advertising. With the advent of the internet, pornography is
readily available at any time and any place. In fact, people have been
arrested for having sex in public places.
What is amazing is that we've
already seen that Muhammad foretold that Islam is going to spread
far and wide, so this situation of public sexual immorality is the exact
opposite of what one would expect because Islam as a religion places
great emphasis on modesty.
For example, Islam teaches that both
men and women should lower their gaze from strangers in order to
safeguard from falling into temptation and sin. The reality of today,
where Islam is widespread and public sexual immorality is rampant,
is in fact paradoxical and therefore not the most rational prediction
to make if one is guessing.
We must also take into account that at the time of Muhammad, people
were generally modest; this was the case with both Muslims and non Muslims, including Jews and Christians.
With the conversion of the pagan
Roman empire to Christianity in the fourth century, the subsequent spread
of Christianity throughout Europe, and the Catholic Church enforcing
strict standards of public morality and decency, much of the Western
world had become conservative before Muhammad was born. During
the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church regulated all matters relating to
sex very carefully. Many influential members of the Church even saw sex
and other pleasurable experiences within the confines of marriage as evil
and a source of sin, unless marital relations were undertaken expressly
and consciously to conceive a child [144].
A big transformation also took
place in seventh century Arabia. In pre-Islamic Arabia, public indecency
was not uncommon, for example we know that the pagan Arabs used to
perform religious pilgrimages while in a completely naked state. This all
ended with the coming of Islam which forbade such practices. With both
the East and the West being largely conservative as a result of the spread
of Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam, this prediction of
widespread sexual immorality by Muhammad went completely against
the tide of morality that was sweeping the world during his time.
The current situation in the world is unprecedented, never in the history of
mankind has sexual immorality been on such a large scale. It is now the
norm, just as Muhammad predicted. An interesting side point is that Muhammad described the consequences of widespread sexual immorality:
"Never does sexual perversion become widespread and publicly known
in certain people without them being overtaken by disease that never
happened to their ancestors who came before them." [145] The increase
of sexual immorality has seen the emergence of previously unheard of
diseases such as AIDS, just as Muhammad warned.