According to the Islamic belief, there had been about 1,24,000 Messengers of Allah sent to all nations of the world to preach and practise the true religion of Islam i.e. of peaceful submission to One Creator and Master of the worlds, of worshipping Him alone and following His commands in toto. We know the first of them as Adam and the last in the series as Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be to them). The latter was sent for the entire humanity with the final version of Islamic Shari’ah consisting of the Qur’ān and Hadīth.
Allah specifically says regarding His final revelation “Verily We are the revealers of this reminder and We are its protectors (till dooms day).”
All the Messengers were human even though inspired by God as guides for humanity.
The Qur’ān has mentioned 25 Prophets, all of them from the nearby geographical location of the revelation of Qur’ān as the message has to be propagated with local examples of history. This still leaves hundreds of thousands of prophets who must have arisen at different places throughout the history of human civilizations but remain unnamed and untraced.
Even the recent book by Michael H. Hart, giving rankings of most influential personalities in history might not have been based on 100% data availability looking at the above fact.
Ultimately, it is the principles to which these divine personalities committed themselves during their lives that we remember them as guidelines for unity of humanity, rather than for their belonging to a particular nation or race.
Unfortunately, today we find people calling themselves followers of divine personalities, polarising themselves mostly to the two extremes – one of totally rejecting any existence of any such personalities and considering the stories connected to them totally fictitious and untenable and there is nothing like any need to draw any ethical conclusions from such bullshit, and the other of celebrating birth and death anniversaries scrupulously even though there is no record of any of all these personalities.
Consequently, we find people from top to bottom ignoring the principles our celebrated personalities stand for while offering floral tributes on every possible occasion. A classic example is that of all CMs and PM ready to greet Gandhiji’s statues everywhere but drawing blank when it comes to the question of prohibition, saying it causes loss of revenue.
I want to caution my Muslim brothers to note and dispel ignorance of their own religion among their own cadre as well before thinking of disseminating Islamic thinking on liberty, unity, fraternity, equality and justice.
Every Islamic worker should note that he stands for welfare of humanity here as well as in the hereafter. Character of an individual bears more importance than numbers in the following of Islam.