Sūratu’l-An‘ām [Cattle]: (6:124).Part5

اللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ حَيْثُ يَجْعَلُ رِسَالَتَهُ

God knows best upon whom (and where, when and in what language) to place His Message.(Al-An‘ām 6:124)

Additionally, I should point out that the emergence of the Message in the middle of a scorching desert had another advantage. That desert had consumed and terminated many Napoleons, Hitlers, Rommels, and the like. The first Muslim warriors, who had become used to the boiling heat and hardships of the desert, won each war they fought and became victorious. Those warriors crossed the passages by running while others crept across. For example, if the fighters of the Battle of Tabuk, which took place in the ninth year of the Madīnah period of the Messengership of the Prophet, had been from Turkey or Damascus, most probably, they could not have breathed in the hot air of the desert and would have been ruined.

Another point to mention concerning the spatial dimension of the Divine Messengership is that since the Arab Peninsula is a dry desert, the then grand states did not have their eyes on that area. Petroleum and other precious elements had not been known yet either. Greens were rare. Because of all these and similar other reasons, Makkah and Madīnah were not lands appealing for discovery or occupation, except trading, and remained safe from the exploitation of other states.

Actually, general governors, at times, were sent by the superpowers of the time to these blessed places. However, there could be neither gains nor losses for them in those regions. Therefore, the cultures of other areas were not able to blur the uncontaminated ideas of their people. Hence, Islam was able to keep its own creeds pure and uninfluenced by other civilizations and cultures, and it spread them easily and in their pristine purity. If, conversely, Makkah and Madīnah had been influenced by the foreign cultures and ideologies of the time, the conveying of Islam to other peoples would have encountered many difficulties. Indeed, the Islamic culture flowed through the civilized areas of the time and accumulated like a pure water source. Neither the Sassanid’s nor Rome’s pagan creeds could leak into the pure and crystal clear wellspring of Divine Messengership. As the Arabic expression says,

 “Buckets do not make it dirty,”

the buckets dipped into that pure water could not make turbid this Revelation-based wellspring, which comes from a blessed source, and is preserved under absolute quarantine and security.

To sum up, both having in it the projection of Sidrah on the earth (i.e., the Ka‘bah), and being important in terms of its geographical location among the old world continents, Makkah was unique to host and entertain the universal Divine Messengership. Even though the Divine Message spread through other areas and found different centers for strategic reasons in the succeeding periods, Makkah and Madīnah enjoyed the uniqueness of being the places where it first emerged and was established. Other cities such as Damascus and especially Baghdad and Istanbul were capitals of the Islamic civilization for long periods and centers for its proliferation for a long time. Istanbul, in particular, played the greatest role in inheriting the mission of Messengership and preserving the legacy of the Islamic Message.

Nonetheless, Makkah and Madīnah always kept their supremacy as blessed and beloved places, even during the years when Islam was represented by Istanbul.