A HAPPENING
In former times, when a man was discriminated against in society, he could not raise his voice, as he believed it was the result of his fate. That is, he believed himself fated from birth to have that type of treatment meted out to him. But during the rule of ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (the second Caliph of Islam) an incident took place which showed how the times had changed. Egypt had been conquered at that period by the Muslims, and ‘Amr Ibn al-’As had been appointed as its governor. One day a young Egyptian, a Copt, came before the Caliph with the complaint that the son of the Muslim governor had given him a whipping, all the while saying, “Take that! I am the son of a nobleman!” The only reason for this shameless conduct on his part was that the young Copt’s horse had beaten his own horse in a race. Now, the boy, knowing of the egalitarianism brought about by the Islamic revolution, had come to the Caliph to seek justice.
The Caliph immediately sent a special emissary to Egypt to bring Amr ibn al-’As and his son without delay to Medina, the capital. When they arrived, they were both brought before the Caliph. Then the latter sent for the young Copt and asked him if this was the man who had beaten him. When the Copt replied in the affirmative, the Caliph handed him a whip and asked him to flog this ‘son of a nobleman.’ The Copt did so and went on flogging him till he felt that justice had been done. Then the Caliph asked him also to flog ‘Amr ibn al-’As, the father of the young wrongdoer, as it had been his high status—as ‘Umar explained—which had encouraged the son to take his whip to him. But then the Copt said, “No, I have whipped the person who whipped me, and I wish no more than that.”
Then the Caliph, addressing the governor, said, “O ‘Amr, since when have you enslaved people who were born free?” (Mahadh al-Thawab by Ibn al-Mubarrad al-Hanbali, vol. 2, p. 473)
The revolution brought about by Prophet Muhammad and his companions caused the barriers of discrimination to be swept away, all over the world. It saw the birth of a new age of human equality, which ultimately developed into modern democracy.
The states of former times were founded upon polytheistic beliefs. The people worshipped the sun and the moon, and the rulers convinced the people that they were the offspring of these gods. People called the Suraj bansi (the sun’s offspring) and the Chandar bansi (the moon’s offspring) still survive in India. The rulers naturally wanted the people to continue to adhere to such superstitious beliefs, even to the point of believing that the sun and moon went into eclipse when the king died, for, so long as they firmly cherished such beliefs, the kings could rule over them untrammeled by any fear of an uprising.
In this way, the rulers of antiquity had become staunch patrons of polytheism and superstition. When the Prophet, with his authority as ruler, announced that eclipses of the sun and the moon were purely physical happenings, and were certainly not expressions of the greatness of particular human beings, this age-old reverence for natural objects and superstitious beliefs very soon disappeared. A new age commenced in which attribution of divine qualities to mere things existing in the world around us gave way to realistic, or in modern parlance, scientific thinking.
But this is not all that humanity had bestowed upon it by Prophet Muhammad. In addition to this, there was the divine book, which laid emphasis on the fact that all the things of the earth and the heavens had been subjugated, by God’s will, for the benefit of mankind (Quran 31:20). This was what induced people to think that rather than bow before them, imagining them to be superior to man, they should harness them to meet human requirements.
