He's speaking of within 100 years of Muhammad's death, the Muslim empire has spread from what would eventually be southern Spain all the way to northern India. These Arabs, the man Muhammad, and that one century, is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black, unnoticeable sand, but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven high from Delhi to Granada. I said the great man was always as lightning out of heaven. The rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame. And Thomas Carlyle is known as one of the proponents of the great man view of history, that history is nothing but the story of a series of great men who changed the direction in which humanity travels. So what we're gonna do in this video is think about whether it really is all about a great man or were there other things that were in the context of the time and space in which these things occur. This is what the world looked like in the year 600.