"The advent of this great teacher, whose life from the moment of his Ministry is a verifiable record," says the renowned historian Syed Ameer Ali in The Spirit of Islam, "was not a mere accident, an unconnected episode in the history of the world. The same causes, the same crying evils, the same earnest demand for an 'assured trust' in an all-pervading Power, which led to the appearance on the shores of Galilee, in the reign of Augustus Caesar, of a Prophet, operated with greater force in the sixth and the seventh century."

The end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh centuries stood for an epoch of disintegration -- national, social, moral, spiritual, and religious; its phenomena were such as have always involved a fresh form of positive faith, to recall all wandering forces to the inevitable track of spiritual evolution "towards the integration of personal worship."

They all pointed to the necessity of a more organic revelation of Divine government. The holy flames kindled by Zoroaster, Moses, and Jesus had unfortunately been distorted and quenched in the blood of man. Under the overpowering influence of the sickly imaginations, the sublime and glorious moral teachings of Gautama had been almost hid from view.

Mrs. Rhyse Davies very rightly points out: "Theories grew and flourished, each new step, each new hypothesis demanded another, until the whole sky was filled with forgeries of the brain and the nobler and the simpler lessons of the founders of the religions were smothered beneath the glittering masses of metaphysical subtleties."

The holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) with his amazing soberness and incomparable self-control, with which he entertained his all-absorbing visions, rose to the occasion with all the sincerity, conviction and determination under the sun. The challenge was dreadful, the task stupendous. "Many a less sincere man. many a real hero," says Major Arthur Glyn Leonard in Islam: Her Moral and Spiritual Value, "would have shrunk from and succumbed before an ordeal so terrific, a contest so supremely titanic. But Mohammed was made of a sterner stuff, of the spirit gods are made of. Failure was a word that he did not recognise. With God at his back, success was an absolute certainty -- a foregone conclusion."

It was indeed a unique success. Even a devout Christian like Rev. Bosworth-Smith unhesitatingly admits in Mohammed and Mohamedanism: "Islam is the most complete, the most sudden and the most extraordinary revolution that has ever come over any nation on Earth."

Thomas Carlyle analyses this success beautifully in On Heroic, Hero Worship and The Hero in History: The Hero As Prophet: "A poor shepherd people roaming unnoticed in the deserts since the creation of the world. A Hero Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe. See, the unnoticed becomes world noticeable, the small has grown world great, within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Granada on this, and Delhi on that; glancing with valour and splendour and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section of the world."

There must be something so fascinating, so arresting in the personality of this great Arabian who without any standing army, without any palace, without any huge resources to fall back upon, without the slenderest human backing and against the heaviest material odds could so effectively revolutionize the social, political. moral, and spiritual outlook of the wild hordes, the barbarous savages of Arabia, creating a new orientation, developing a new phase of action, a new angle of vision, giving a new direction to human thought, a new interpretation of human life and destiny.

There must be something chivalrous about this giant among men that alone among the great teachers of mankind he conferred the first legal status of honour and responsibility upon women making them Sui Juris, ensuring their economic independence and providing them opportunities in all spheres of human activity, guaranteeing their rights in the properties of the deceased parents, of the dead husband and children -- rights and privileges which could not be conceived of before the enactment of Married Women's Property Act in England by the middle of the nineteenth century, rights which are being conceded to them by the civilizes nations of Europe and America even in the 21st century.

There was something so constructive and creative in the amazing genius of this great man of vision and imagination that he reconciled the divergent claims and conflicting interests of all classes and conditions of people, combining various aspects of human life, the individual with the social, the national with the international, the material with the spiritual, the herewith with the here-after, laying down principles for all stages and conditions of human society, principles aiming at the perpetual growth of the human race.

There was something so rational, so dynamic, so material, nay, so original, in his magnificent conception of God and his relation with man and the system of universes that he could with his simple humility, with his democratic conception of the Divine Great, with his unarraying appeal to reason and the ethical faculty of mankind, lay the foundation of the modern world, establishing both in theory and practice liberty, equality and fraternity at least twelve hundred years before the French Revolution.

There was something not only original but unprecedented in his concept of the Ethics of War which had never been conceived of before, principles of warfare which furnished the real guidance for conduct of warfare for succeeding generations for centuries in three continents of the world -- Asia, Africa and Europe.

No wonder, it is not the Muslims alone who claim that the holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was the greatest and most influential among the salt of the earth in the annals of civilization. Even the non-Muslim saints and seers unhesitatingly admit that there was none greater than the Prophet of Arabia.

John William Draper, who claims that Renaissance owes its birth to Islam, acknowledges in unambiguous terms in History of the Intellectual Development of Europe: "Four years after the death of Justinian, in AD 569, was born at Mecca in Arabia, the man (Muhammad) who, of all men, has excercised the greatest influence upon the human race."

Alfred De Lamartine sums up the great virtues and the excellent qualities of the Last and the Greatest Prophet in Histoire de la Turquie when he claims: "If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astounding results are the three criteria of human genius, who could dare to compare any great man in history with Mohammed ... Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without image; the founder of twenty terrestial empires and of one spiritual empire, that is Mohammed. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask: Is there any man greater than he?"

The renowned astronomer and historian Michael H. Hart analyses the unparalleled greatness and incomparable achievements of the Last Prophet of Allah and declares very courageously in his sensational publication entitled The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History: "My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels ... It is this unparalleled combination of secular and religious influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in history."

Syed Ashraf Ali is former DG of Islamic foundation Bangladesh.