Greatest Top 1oo People- The most Influenced in world History!
Michael H. Hart (born April 28, 1932 in New York City) is a American astrophysicist who has also written three books on history and controversial articles on a variety of subjects. Hart describes himself as a Jeffersonian liberal, Hart, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science who enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Korean war, received his undergraduate degree at Cornell University in mathematics and later earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics at Princeton University. He also holds graduates degrees in physics, astronomy, and computer science, as well as a law degree. He was a research scientist at NASA before leaving to be a professor of physics at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He has also taught both astronomy and history of science at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland.
His best known book is The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. His most recent book is Understanding Human History, which is a history of humanity beginning about 100,000 years ago and going through the 20th century. Unlike most other books on world history, Hart’s book explicitly discusses differences in average intelligence between various groups, explains when and why they arose, and discusses the effect that those differences have had on human history. this book which has sold more than 500,000 copies and been translated into 15 languages. His third book, A View from the Year 3000, published in 1999, is a history of the future which includes both technological advances and political developments.
The Greatest top 100 People List
01� Muhammad
02� Isaac Newton
03� Jesus Christ
04� Buddha
05� Confucius
06� St. Paul
07� Ts'ai Lun
08� Johann Gutenberg
09� Christopher Columbus
10� Albert Einstein
11� Louis Pasteur
12� Galileo Galilei
13� Aristotle
14� Euclid
15� Moses
16� Charles Darwin
17� Shih Huang Ti
18� Augustus Caesar
19� Nicolaus Copernicus
20� Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
21� Constantine the Great
22� James Watt
23� Michael Faraday
24� James Clerk Maxwell
25� Martin Luther
26� George Washington
27� Karl Marx
28� Orville and Wilbur Wright
29� Genghis Kahn
30� Adam Smith
31� Edward de Vere
32� John Dalton
33� Alexander the Great
34� Napoleon Bonaparte
35� Thomas Edison
36� Antony van Leeuwenhoek
37� William T.G. Morton
38� Guglielmo Marconi
39� Adolf Hitler
40� Plato
41� Oliver Cromwell
42� Alexander Graham Bell
43� Alexander Fleming
44� John Locke
45� Ludwig van Beethoven
46� Werner Heisenberg
47� Louis Daguerre
48� Simon Bolivar
49� Rene Descartes
50� Michelangelo
51� Pope Urban II
52� 'Umar ibn al-Khattab
53� Asoka
54� St. Augustine
55� William Harvey
56� Ernest Rutherford
57� John Calvin
58� Gregor Mendel
59� Max Planck
60� Joseph Lister
61� Nikolaus August Otto
62� Francisco Pizarro
63� Hernando Cortes
64� Thomas Jefferson
65� Queen Isabella I
66� Joseph Stalin
67� Julius Caesar
68� William the Conqueror
69� Sigmund Freud
70� Edward Jenner
71� Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen
72� Johann Sebastian Bach
73� Lao Tzu
74� Voltaire
75� Johannes Kepler
76� Enrico Fermi
77� Leonhard Euler
78� Jean-Jacques Rousseau
79� Nicoli Machiavelli
80� Thomas Malthus
81� John F. Kennedy
82� Gregory Pincus
83� Mani
84� Lenin
85� Sui Wen Ti
86� Vasco da Gama
87� Cyrus the Great
88� Peter the Great
89� Mao Zedong
90� Francis Bacon
91� Henry Ford
92� Mencius
93� Zoroaster
94� Queen Elizabeth I
95� Mikhail Gorbachev
96� Menes
97� Charlemagne
98� Homer
99� Justinian I
100� Mahavira
Why Muhammad as "Number ONE" in the List?
by Michael H. Hart
Muhammad as number ONE to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers 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.
Of humble origins, Muhammad founded and promulgated one of the world's great religions, and became an immensely effective political leader, diplomat, merchant, philosopher, orator, legislator, reformer, statesmen, husband, father and military leader the man whose legacy continues to shape people's life Today, thirteen centuries after his death, his influence is still powerful and pervasive.
The majority of the persons in this book had the advantage of being born and raised in centers of civilization, highly cultured or politically pivotal nations. Muhammad, however, was born in the year 570 A.D, in the city of Mecca, in southern Arabia, at that time a backward area of the world, far from the centers of trade, art, and learning. Orphaned at age six (Father past way before his birth and mother past away when he was six), he was reared in modest surroundings. Islamic tradition tells us that he was illiterate. His economic position improved when, at age twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow. Nevertheless, as he approached forty, there was little outward indication that he was a remarkable person (Arabs nick named him as Al-Amin meaning "The Trustworthy").
The majority of the persons in this book had the advantage of being born and raised in centers of civilization, highly cultured or politically pivotal nations. Muhammad, however, was born in the year 570 A.D, in the city of Mecca, in southern Arabia, at that time a backward area of the world, far from the centers of trade, art, and learning. Orphaned at age six (Father past way before his birth and mother past away when he was six), he was reared in modest surroundings. Islamic tradition tells us that he was illiterate. His economic position improved when, at age twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow. Nevertheless, as he approached forty, there was little outward indication that he was a remarkable person (Arabs nick named him as Al-Amin meaning "The Trustworthy").
Most Arabs at that time were pagans, who believed in many gods. There were, however, in Mecca, a small number of Jews and Christians; When he was forty years old, Muhammad became convinced that this one true God (Allah) was speaking to him, and had chosen him to spread the true faith.
For three years, Muhammad preached only to close friends and associates. Then, about 613, he began preaching in public. As he slowly gained converts, the Meccan authorities came to consider him a dangerous nuisance. In 622, fearing for his safety, Muhammad fled to Medina (a city some 200 miles north of Mecca), where he had been offered a position of considerable political power.
This flight, called the Hegira, was the turning point of the Prophet's life. In Mecca, he had few followers. In Medina, he had many more, and he soon acquired an influence that made him a virtual dictator. During the next few years, while Muhammad's following grew rapidly, a series of battles were fought between Medina and Mecca. This was ended in 630 with Muhammad's triumphant return to Mecca as conqueror. The remaining two and one-half years of his life witnessed the rapid conversion of the Arab tribes to the new religion. When Muhammad died, in 632, he was the effective ruler of all of southern Arabia.
The Bedouin tribesmen of Arabia had a reputation as fierce warriors. But their number was small; and plagued by disunity and internecine warfare, they had been no match for the larger armies of the kingdoms in the settled agricultural areas to the north. However, unified by Muhammad for the first time in history, and inspired by their fervent belief in the one true God, these small Arab armies now embarked upon one of the most astonishing series of conquests in human history. To the northeast of Arabia lay the large Neo-Persian Empire of the Sassanids; to the northwest lay the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople. Numerically, the Arabs were no match for their opponents. On the field of battle, though, the inspired Arabs rapidly conquered all of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. By 642, Egypt had been wrested from the Byzantine Empire, while the Persian armies had been crushed at the key battles of Qadisiya in 637, and Nehavend in 642.
But even these enormous conquests-which were made under the leadership of Muhammad's close friends and immediate successors, Abu Bakr and 'Umar ibn al-Khattab -did not mark the end of the Arab advance. By 711, the Arab armies had swept completely across North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean There they turned north and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, overwhelmed the Visigothic kingdom in Spain.
For a while, it must have seemed that the Moslems would overwhelm all of Christian Europe. However, in 732, at the famous Battle of Tours, a Moslem army, which had advanced into the center of France, was at last defeated by the Franks. Nevertheless, in a scant century of fighting, these Bedouin tribesmen, inspired by the word of the Prophet, had carved out an empire stretching from the borders of India to the Atlantic Ocean-the largest empire that the world had yet seen. And everywhere that the armies conquered, large-scale conversion to the new faith eventually followed.
Now, not all of these conquests proved permanent. The Persians, though they have remained faithful to the religion of the Prophet, have since regained their independence from the Arabs. And in Spain, more than seven centuries of warfare 5 finally resulted in the Christians reconquering the entire peninsula. However, Mesopotamia and Egypt, the two cradles of ancient civilization, have remained Arab, as has the entire coast of North Africa. The new religion, of course, continued to spread, in the intervening centuries, far beyond the borders of the original Moslem conquests. Currently it has tens of millions of adherents in Africa and Central Asia and even more in Pakistan and northern India, and in Indonesia. In Indonesia, the new faith has been a unifying factor. In the Indian subcontinent, however, the conflict between Moslems and Hindus is still a major obstacle to unity.
How, then, is one to assess the overall impact of Muhammad on human history? Like all religions, Islam exerts an enormous influence upon the lives of its followers. It is for this reason that the founders of the world's great religions all figure prominently in this book . Since there are roughly twice as many Christians as Moslems in the world, it may initially seem strange that Muhammad has been ranked higher than Jesus. There are two principal reasons for that decision. First, Muhammad played a far more important role in the development of Islam than Jesus did in the development of Christianity. Although Jesus was responsible for the main ethical and moral precepts of Christianity (insofar as these differed from Judaism), St. Paul was the main developer of Christian theology, its principal proselytizer, and the author of a large portion of the New Testament.
Muhammad, however, was responsible for both the theology of Islam and its main ethical and moral principles. In addition, he played the key role in proselytizing the new faith, and in establishing the religious practices of Islam. Moreover, he is the messenger of the Moslem holy scriptures, the Koran, a collection of certain of Muhammad's insights that he believed had been directly revealed to him by Allah. Most of these utterances were copied more or less faithfully during Muhammad's lifetime and were collected together in authoritative form not long after his death. No such detailed compilation of the teachings of Christ has survived. Since the Koran is at least as important to Moslems as the Bible is to Christians, the influence of Muhammed through the medium of the Koran has been enormous It is probable that the relative influence of Muhammad on Islam has been larger than the combined influence of Jesus Christ and St. Paul on Christianity. On the purely religious level, then, it seems likely that Muhammad has been as influential in human history.
Furthermore, Muhammad (unlike Jesus) was a secular as well as a religious leader. In fact, as the driving force behind the Arab conquests, he may well rank as the most influential political leader of all time.
Of many important historical events, one might say that they were inevitable and would have occurred even without the particular political leader who guided them. For example, the South American colonies would probably have won their independence from Spain even if Simon Bolivar had never lived. But this cannot be said of the Arab conquests. Nothing similar had occurred before Muhammad, and there is no reason to believe that the conquests would have been achieved without him. The only comparable conquests in human history are those of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, which were primarily due to the influence of Genghis Khan. These conquests, however, though more extensive than those of the Arabs, did not prove permanent, and today the only areas occupied by the Mongols are those that they held prior to the time of Genghis Khan.
It is far different with the conquests of the Arabs. From Iraq to Morocco, there extends a whole chain of Arab nations united not merely by their faith in Islam, but also by their Arabic language, history, and culture. The centrality of the Koran in the Moslem religion and the fact that it is written in Arabic have probably prevented the Arab language from breaking up into mutually unintelligible dialects, which might otherwise have occurred in the intervening thirteen centuries. Differences and divisions between these Arab states exist, of course, and they are considerable, but the partial disunity should not blind us to the important elements of unity that have continued to exist. For instance, neither Iran nor Indonesia, both oil-producing states and both Islamic in religion, joined in the oil embargo of the winter of 1973-74. It is no coincidence that all of the Arab states, and only the Arab states, participated in the embargo.
We see, then, that the Arab conquests of the seventh century have continued to play an important role in human history, down to the present day. It is this unparalleled combination of secular and religious influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in human history.
