Many of us take for granted the abundance of books that are available in
the modern age. However, the majority of people in history have never
even held a book in their hands. One reason is the lack of education as
most people used to be illiterate so there was not a big demand for books.
Another reason is scarcity; books were difficult and expensive to produce
because each copy had to be written manually by hand.
This has been
the norm for most of human history, and seventh century Arabia was no
different. Muhammad was born into a society in which very few people
could read or write. It is estimated that the number of people who were
literate in his locality of Mecca did not exceed seventeen [148].
Muhammad himself could not read or write. There were even whole societies
that didn't have any books, they didn't write anything down because they
only had an oral language.
Against this backdrop, Muhammad made the prediction that writing will
one day become prevalent among mankind:
Ahead of the Hour, people will only greet those whom they know;
trade will become so widespread that a woman will help her husband in his trade; ties of kinship will be severed; people will bear false witness and conceal true testimony; and the pen will prevail.
[149]
This prediction by Muhammad is in fact loaded with accurate prophecies. The statement "people will only greet those whom they know" has been fulfilled by the advent of densely populated cities of the modern age where it is common for people not to speak to their
neighbours [150].
The statement "a woman will help her husband in
his trade" has been fulfilled by women entering the workforce in large
numbers, especially in Western societies [151].
The statement that "ties of kinship will be severed" has been fulfilled by the breakdown
of traditional family values. Such values, which have long been the
fabric of society, are now broken [152]. One symptom of this is the
increasing number of old people who are put into care homes by their
families. It has also been fulfilled by the breakdown of community
values; one symptom of which is the whole philosophy of liberalism
that has swept the majority of the 'modern' world, a philosophy that
is based on individualism and individual rights over the rights of a
community.
For the sake of this chapter, we will focus in detail on
the statement that "the pen will prevail". The Arabic word used by
Muhammad for pen is 'qalam' which also carries the wider meaning
of writing, or anything that is written down in general [153].
This perfectly describes our world today in which it is the norm for people
to read and write and there is an abundance of books, newspapers,
and magazines. This has only been made possible thanks to fifteenth
century technological advances such as printing that took place over
800 years after Muhammad's prophecy.
For the first time in history, written materials could be produced in vast quantities.
The increased efficiency of book production brought with it a decrease in prices
and a subsequent increase in book consumption as they were now
affordable to the masses. To put this into perspective, the fifteenth
century saw about the same number of manuscripts printed in Europe
as had been produced by hand during the entire preceding fourteen
centuries [154]. With the advent of the internet, writing is spreading
even more. Anybody with a computer or smart phone now has access
to millions of books with just the click of a finger. It's quite powerful
that Muhammad, who could neither read nor write, prophesied the
spread of reading and writing.
It's important to point out that book production, and knowledge in
general, has not always been on the increase as time goes on. From the
sixth century, the Catholic Church made a concerted effort to protect
and bolster its position of dominance and power. It closed institutes
of philosophy, banned books, and suppressed any scientific thought
that threatened its own biblical outlook of the world. The masses
were forbidden from owning the Bible and authors were even burnt
alive for writing books that opposed the Catholic Church's religious
doctrines. The ancient Greek chronicler John Malalas recorded: "During the consulship of Decius [529 CE], the Emperor issued a decree
and sent it to Athens ordering that no one should teach philosophy
nor interpret the laws" [155].
As a result, Europe entered into a 1,000
year period of intellectual slumber. Thus the "lights went out" on rational thinking and Europe entered the Dark Ages. Indeed, Europe's
creative energies and inventiveness are acknowledged much later,
only from the dawn of the "scientific revolution" in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
In addition to predicting that writing would become prevalent, Muhammad also foretold that another sign of the end of the world would
be that "ignorance will become widespread and there will be much
killing" [156]. Here Muhammad stated that there will be widespread
ignorance and evil acts such as killing.
The twentieth century is without question the bloodiest century in history, far worse in terms
of global devastation than any previous era. While fatality statistics
vary, the First and Second World Wars alone have seen estimates of
total deaths ranging from 50 million to more than 80 million. We have
also witnessed mass genocides that have sadly resulted in the deaths
of tens of millions. As time goes on, mankind continues to develop
weapons with greater potential for death and destruction. The twentieth
century saw the development of atomic weapons as well as their use
on civilian populations. There are now nuclear weapons capable of
destroying entire cities, with governments having stockpiled enough
nukes to destroy the entire earth multiple times over. This is despite
the fact that the masses can read and have access to more education
and learning than at any other time in history.
We have a strange
situation of knowledge being more readily available to mankind and
yet killing being rampant. Both these predictions by Muhammad are,
when taken together, quite paradoxical. If Muhammad were guessing
then he would have predicted an increase in writing and decrease in
ignorance due to mankind's enlightenment. But he actually predicted
two opposites, this paradoxical situation of writing being prevalent
and evil acts such as killing being widespread.
The historian Niall
Ferguson notes this paradox of our modern age:
Why? What made the twentieth century, and particularly the fifty
years from 1904 until 1953, so bloody? That this era was exceptionally violent may seem paradoxical. After all, the hundred
years after 1900 were a time of unparalleled progress. [157]