“When thy Lord said to the angels, verily I am about to place one in my stead on Earth, they said, wilt Thou place there one who will do ill therein and shed blood, when we celebrate Thy praise and extol Thy holiness? God said, verily I know what you know not. And it is He who hath made you His representatives on the earth, and hath raised some of you above others by various grades, that He may try you by His gifts.” Al-Qur’an.

Human beings have a great spiritual thirst and seek way of quenching it. Studies show, even the people who lived in pre-historical times practiced some particular set of beliefs in their individual and collective life. Indeed, they had to fill the vacuum which they felt in their spirit, by worshipping and praying to a strong and perfect god. Moreover, when natural disasters struck, they found themselves weak and unable to survive; therefore, they had to search for a strong god and they came to this understanding that the disasters were sent by a powerful creator and some construed disasters as the rage of God. Sometimes, they had to make sacrifices. Even though, there have been many religions along with various gods, however, a feeling for worship was natural.

It is aptly said by the Buddha, “Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.” Naturally, human beings develop a strong appetite for religion and moral values. In other words, our soul feels hunger the same as our body, and religion seems the only satiating source and one will be pacified through prayers.

John Foster Dulles states very nicely, “Economic and military power can be developed under the spur of laws and appropriations. But moral power does not derive from any act of Congress. It depends on the relations of a people to their God. It is the churches to which we must look to develop the resources for the great moral offensive that is required to make human rights secure, and to win a just and lasting peace.”

Broadly speaking religious life may be divided into three periods. These may be described as the periods of “Faith”, “Thought”, and “Discovery.”In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command. This attitude may be of great consequence in the social and political history of a people, but is not of much consequence in so far as the individual’s inner growth and expansion are concerned. Perfect submission to discipline is followed by a rational understanding of the discipline and the ultimate source of its authority. In this period religious life seeks its foundation in a kind of metaphysics– a logically consistent view of the world with God as a part of that view. In the third period metaphysics is displaced by psychology, and religious life develops the ambition to come into direct contact with the Ultimate Reality. It is here that religion becomes a matter of personal assimilation of life and power; and the individual achieves a free personality, not by releasing himself from the fetters of the law, but by discovering the ultimate source of the law within the depths of his own consciousness.

Undoubtedly, when one imagines a society empty of moral values, our mind will jump centuries back to the ancient times or Arab Peninsula before Islam.

Let us just think of a society where morality was absent, in the later years of the Roman Republic, the center of public spectacle was the gladiator. In the words of historians, gladiator games, which pitched warriors against wild animals, convicted criminals or slaves, provided the organizers with great opportunities for self-promotion while providing cheap and exhilarating entertainment to the public.

Gladiator contests were common as a means of building support for election campaigns and for pleasing clients. The trainers and organizers of the games were entrepreneurs, and the contests, many of which were fought until death, were big business that concerned many livelihoods.

In addition, before the emergence of Islam, Arab Peninsula was deep in barbarity, cruelty and bloodshed. People lived under the yoke of oppression with their feet in chains of slavery. The tribal tension was at its acne and the language of the tribesmen was the spur and sword. The caliphs oppressed and tortured their slaves in the worst possible way for a minor mistake and the lords exploited the poor. The poorer you were, the more you would suffer. In other words, being poor was a great fault which led to the bitter fate of slavery and torments. To make a long story short, if you imagine a society without religion, moral values are dead and so are the souls of people living there.

The Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) came to humanize our societies and imbue people with moral standards and religious values. He took a stand against the cruelties imposed on deprived individuals who lacked property and social status. At a time when Arab society shrouded in the darkness of violence and aggression, the Prophet protested with all his might. As a divine messenger, he had to carry out his sacred mission of breaking the chains of slavery from slaves and of abolishing tyranny from the human society. When freedom and human rights were missing among the Arab aristocrats, he proposed changes boldly.

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) challenged the social status of Arab lords who were selfish and exploiter of the poor. He questioned the humanity of the masters who felt no mercy for their hardworking slaves.

Challenging of the status quo of his time, Prophet (PBUH) came with lofty religious ideology. He cherished justice and morality. The Prophet’s holy mission was to establish a religious society which treated humans with dignity, and offered them social rights and human freedom.