Why Muhammad?

God‘s reasoning is unfathomable. Nevertheless, not only orientalistsbut Muslims are well-advised to ponder on occasion questions linked tothe Night of Destiny (laylut al qadr): Why, of all people, was Muhammad,a person who lived in Arabia, of all places, and in the seventh centuryC.E., chosen to deliver God‘s final message in Arabic, a heretoforeobscure language in the larger world of that time? In our quest foranswers to such questions, human reasoning may provide the followinganswers:1) Seventh-century Arabia could not be reached by the power projectionof the region’s two dominant hegemonical states. The Christian(east) Roman empire of Heraclius I and the Iranian empire of theSasanian Shah Chosraw II Parwez were completely absorbed in an ongoingstruggle that would ultimately turn out to be fatal for both of them.The dualist Persian religions of Mithraism and Manichaeism had beenconsolidated into the official state religion of Zoroastrianism. Bothempires would not have tolerated a new religion that, like Islam, couldhave shaken their very foundations. Only in the far distant and obscureland of Arabia could a new ideological state-community arise and consolidateitself before either of the two neighboring superpowers had achance to intervene.2) Arabia enjoyed a central geostrategic position with regard to theknown world at that time, being at a similar distance from Morocco andChina as well as England and Japan. Muslim expansion was greatlyfacilitated by the fact that in geographical terms, Islam was never marginal.3) At that point in time, the languages of commerce and intellectualdiscourse-Latin, Greek, Persian, and Hebrewhad become solinked and interwoven as media for the transportation and interpretationof previous divine relations that they were now unsuitable for the newIslamic message. In order to bring about a theological revolution, particularlyin the Christianized world, the Qur’anic message required avirginal language. We see how true this assessment is when we consulta translation of the Qur’an made by Christian orientalists. Wheneverthey encounter terms like al kulimut, al amr, or al ruh (al quddus) they ...