THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Article 18 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations reads as follows: 

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

The charter, of which the above article is an extract, is not in actual fact an achievement of the United Nations, but is rather a legacy from that Islamic revolution which was brought into existence a thousand years before the United Nations came into being.

Islam, for the first time in human history, uprooted the system based on polytheism, which was responsible for the mentality of discrimination between man and man. This unreal division had been at the root of much of the social injustice, which had prevailed, in ancient times.

While, on the one hand, Islam changed the human mind, on the other, it brought about a practical revolution on such a vast scale that it ushered in a whole new era of human freedom and human respect. Across the centuries, this revolution went from strength to strength, ultimately bringing Europe under its benign influence. There it culminated in the modern freedom and democracy, which nowadays people tend to imagine, has existed for all time. But this democratic revolution of modem Europe is but the secular version of the Islamic revolution which was given its first impetus in seventh century Arabia by God’s final Prophet.

Seen in this historical perspective, Islam, from the scientific as well as the socio-economic point of view, is the true creator of the modern age.