The
spread of Islam: return to true and natural roles
The real obligation that Muslims have to people
of other faiths is to invite them to Islam and the worship of One God free from
all human associations. This is the obligation of Da’wah.
Da’wah literally means inviting and welcoming. There
can of course be no hint of arrogance and aggression in giving someone an
invitation, any concern or force for the Qur’an has
specifically laid down, ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion’ even as it
goes on to insist that ‘Truth has been made distinct from falsehood’. Da’wah must then be practiced with due attention to the Qur’anic advice, ‘Call to the way of your Lord and
Sustainer with wisdom and with fair counseling’. (top)
The task of da’wah is a
delicate one. The best da’wah is through your
personal example, to mirror in your daily life and habits the natural values of
truth, goodness, beauty and justice, and shun all the negatives values and
habits condemned by Islam.
Your neighborhood and communities also need to
reflect the values of Islam. Many Muslims communities now are not a good advertisements for Islam. Your communities need
to be clean, caring and compassionate, peaceful and safe, hard-working and
disciplined, open and welcoming. It is important that people who come to Islam
should find a secure haven and a welcoming home in Muslim communities where
they can feel naturally at ease.
You need to have a good understanding of the
worldviews of people and communities you come in contact with. You need to
understand their life-styles, their needs and their problems. You need to see
the dominant trends in there communities. Then only will you be able not only
to offer Islamic alternatives to specific problems but also the kind of
direction a community needs, to put it back on course, onto the straight way.
It is a question of focus and priorities.
By way of example, many people in the West
perhaps do not need to be convinced of the pressures that Christian dogma
places on reason. The job of putting Christian myths in their place has been
done by Christian scholars themselves. To nominal or lapsed Christians in a
post-Christian age, you need not spend enormous resources to convince them that
Christianity is inadequate as a worldview or that the Bible is not the word of God.
Many have already reached this conclusion on their own.
A greater priority in the West and those
societies which live
under its influence is to make people realize the terrible
consequences of secularism and materialism
that is a result of the rejection of religion: the arrogance and limited
vision of secular man, the constantly changing and chaotic state of his laws
and values, the plundering in alcohol, disfigured by drugs, flushed out by
abortions, wiped out by genocidal economic greed, and so on and on.
In today’s world, da’wah
should aim at putting back meaning and purpose in people’s lives, burnishing
their consciences to that the natural values can again shine forth, reviving
their powers of reason so that they can once more acknowledge their Creator and
Sustainer and their proper place in the scheme of things.
Islam as we mentioned in chapter one, is both a
message and a method for achieving those purposes. It should be remembered that
the mission of the noble Prophet, peace be on him, was from the outset a
universal mission, for the Qur’an describes him as ‘a
mercy or a blessing for all peoples’. Islam is thus the birthright of every
human being. No human being may be excluded from the call of Islam. (top)
The spread of Islam: return to true and natural roles
A brief look at the spread of Islam since the
time of the Prophet will be helpful in showing how Islam dealt with the
particular problems of various societies while at the same time bringing them
back to their role as human beings and into the universal community of
believers.
Muhammad, peace be upon
him, started by inviting his own family to Islam. His wife, Khadijah,
was the first to accept because she knew him o be truthful and trustworthy. He
then invited the members of his clan, then the people of Makkah
and all Arabis – Arabs and non-Arabs, rich and poor,
nobles and slaves, men and women, Jews and Christians and wandering nomads. He
sent personal letters to the known potentates of his time inviting them to
believe in One God – to the Christian Byzantine Emperor, the Zoroastrian
Persian Emperor, the Christian ruler of
The successors of the Prophet carried on his
mission and in a very short space of time on one history’s most rapid and
enduring triumphs, the message of Islam spread beyond the
Islam spread when the Muslims were both
politically and militarily strong as in the seventh century and also when they
were politically weak as in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the
Mongol/Tartar invasions. In this latter case, the invaders ended up by adopting
the religion of the conquered. This is unusual and attests to the natural
appeal and strength of Islam.
Islam spread because of its simple and
intellectually satisfying creed. In the Byzantine controlled lands, Islam
offered freedom from imperialist and racist oppression and the cult of
priesthoods; in India, the fact of intrinsic human worth, nobility and equality
attracted a society steeped in caste division, in Indonesia and Africa, Islam displaced
a complex mythology which often pictured the world as alien, frightful, and
full of spirits which had to be appeased and a social order which tolerated
infanticide and never saw the nakedness of the body or the need to clean it.
In our own day, Islam has an appeal to many in
the so-called ‘developed’ world who have become disenchanted with a mysterious
and amorphous Christianity on the one hand and the insatiable demands of
materialism on the other. Many also come to Islam to find liberation from
racism and oppression.
Islam, approached on its own terms and not through
the distorting images of the lives of lapsed or disoriented Muslim or of
intense and hostile propaganda, will always be a potent summons to the free,
rational and natural good state of man regardless of habitat and time. (top)