By Shaykh Abu ‘l-Hasan ‘Ali al-Nadwi
We find extremely few persons who have revived and renovated other religions. The absence of such teachers for hundreds or rather thousands of years in other religions is striking enough. There has hardly been any renovator who could pull down the innovations and deviations which had found their way into other religions, restore the original purity, give a call to shed the accretions, decry the foreign elements, rites and customs, wage a war against the inroads of materialistic and pleasure-seeking ideas and enlighten the hearts of his co-religionists by his faith, true spiritualism and a personal example of ennobling sacrifice for his cause.
Christianity can particularly be cited as a case in point. It deviated from its path in the middle of its first century and deteriorated from a monotheistic faith to a polytheistic cult – such an early retrogression is not to be found elsewhere. It became an admixture of the Greek and Buddhist religious thoughts, and, what is noteworthy, this happened through the hands of its greatest mentor and teacher, St. Paul (10-65 A.D.). The transformation was really from one world to another, changing its shape and content to such an extent that only the name and a few rites of the former could survive in the new religion. Ernest De Bunsen describes the mutilation undergone by Christianity in these words: