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 ﷺ 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 p
Ref: M. Azami, Studies in Early Hadith Literature, p. 1.
Muhammad ﷺ 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 ﷺ 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.
Ref: Musnad Ahmad, 1:407.
This prediction by Muhammad ﷺ 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
Ref: See research “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” published in 2000 by professor Robert Putnam.
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
Ref: See research “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” published in 2000 by professor Robert Putnam.
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.
Ref: See research “The family and community life of older people: social networks and social support in three urban areas” published in 2001 by professor Chris Phillipson.
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 section, we will focus in detail on the statement that “the pen will prevail”. The Arabic word used by Muhammad ﷺ for pen is ‘qalam’ which also carries the wider meaning of writing, or anything that is written down in general
Ref: See entry for the Arabic word ‘qalam’ in the “Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic” by Hans Wehr.
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
Ref: See Table 1 in Buringh and Van Zanden, Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries.
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 ﷺ, 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”
Ref: John Malalas’s Chronicle 18.47.
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 ﷺ also foretold that another sign of the end of the world would be that “ignorance will become widespread and there will be much killing”
Ref: Sunan Ibn Majah, Hadith 4050.
Here Muhammad ﷺ 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 ﷺ are, when taken together, quite paradoxical. If Muhammad ﷺ 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.
Ref: Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred, see Introduction.
Copied From Book: Forbidden Prophecy
