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To understand the merit of Al Qur'an properly, it is necessary to study the life of its author, and the circumstances in which he found himself placed.
Mahomed was born at Mecca in Arabia, which geographically belongs to the same group of countries in Western Asia as Persia, Syria and Palestine. Close upon six hundred years had elapsed since the advent of the New Testament religion, and Christianity bad fallen into decline. Judaism had already been undermined; Jerusalem had been sacked, and the Jews had dispersed, many of whom had fled to Arabia. Idolatry, that is, worship of symbolical gods, mammonism, and sensuality had come to take the place of the purer form of religion established by the New Testament. Sale makes the following observations about the state of Christianity at the time of Mahomed's appearance :---
"If we look into the ecclesiastical historians even from the third century, we shall find the Christian world to have then had a very different aspect from what some authors have represented; and so far from being endued with active graces, zoal, and devotion, and established within itself with purity of doctrine, union, and firm profession of the faith, that on the contrary, what by the ambition of the clergy, and what by drawing the abstrusest niceties into controversy, and dividing and sub-dividing about them into endless schisms and contentions, they had so destroyed that peace, love, and charity from among them, which the Gospel was given to promote; and instead thereof continually provoked each other to that malice, rancour, and every evil work, that they had lost the whole sub. stance of their religion, while they thus eagerly contended for their own imaginations concerning it; and in a manner quite drove Christianity out of the world by those very controversies in which they disputed with each other about it. In these dark ages it was that most of those superstitions and corruptions we now justly abhor in the church of Rome were not only broached, but established : which gave great advantages to the propagation of Mahomed
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