Springing from a land and a people like previously negligible...

Springing from a land and a people like previously negligible, Islam spread within a century over half the earth, shattering great empires, overthrowing long-established religions, remoulding the souls of races, and building up a whole new world, the world of Islam. The closer we examine this development the more extraordinary does it appear. The other great religions won their way slowly, by painful struggle and finally triumphed with the aid of powerful monarchs converted to the new faith.

Christianity had its Constantine, Buddhism its Asoka, and Zoroastrianism its Cyrus, each lending to his chosen cult the mighty force of secular authority, not so Islam. Arising in a desert land sparsely inhabited by a nomad race previously undistinguished in human annals. Islam sallied forth on its great adventure with the slenderest human backing and against the heaviest material odds.

Yet Islam triumphed with seemingly miraculous ease, and a couple of generations saw the Fiery Crescent borne victorious from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas and from the desert of Central Asia to the deserts of Central Africa.” A. M. L. Stoddard Quoted in “Islam-The Religion of All Prophets”, Begum Bawani Waqf, Karachi Pakistan p.56. “Islam is a religion that is essentially rationalistic in the widest sense of this term considered etymologically and historically.

The definition of rationalism as a system that bases religious beliefs on principles furnished by reason applies to it exactly. The teachings of the Prophet, the Qur’an have invariably kept their place as the fundamental starting point, and the dogma of the unity of God has always been proclaimed therein with grandeur, majesty, and invariable purity and with a note of sure conviction, which it is hard to find surpassed outside the pale of Islam.

This fidelity to the fundamental dogma of the religion, the elemental simplicity of the formula in which it is enunciated, and the proof that it gains from the fervid conviction of the missionaries who propagate it, are so many causes to explain the success of Muhammadan missionary efforts.

A creed so precise, so stripped of all theological complexities and consequently so accessible to the ordinary understanding might be expected to possess and does indeed possess a marvellous power of winning its way into the consciences of men.” Edward Montet “La Propagande Chretienne et ses Adversairs Musulmans”, Paris 1890, Quoted by T W Arnold in “The Preaching of Islam”, London 1913, pp. 413-414.