An Invitation to Peace

An Invitation to Peace
of calling people towards the Oneness of God and doing good and
abstaining from evil for twenty-three years. In that short span, the
whole of Arabia had bowed before the purity of his call and the warring
tribes of the desert had become united in the brotherhood of Islam.
And yet he left the world without the pomp and glory of kings or the
wealth of rulers; he left as humbly as he had lived, a man who had said,
“I wish to eat to my fill one day and remain hungry another, that I
may implore You with humility when I am hungry and remember you,
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and thank You when I am full and praise You.”
“He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope's
pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing
army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue;
if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it
was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments and
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without its supports.”
“I doubt whether any man whose external conditions changed so
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much ever changed himself less to meet them.”
“The day of Mohammad’s greatest triumph over his enemies was
also the day of his grandest victory over himself. He freely forgave the
Koraysh [sic] all the years of sorrow and cruel scorn in which they had
afflicted him and gave an amnesty to the whole population of Mekka...
The army followed his example, and entered quietly and peacefully:
no house was robbed, no woman insulted... Through all the annals of
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conquest there is no triumphant entry comparable to this one.”
These two aspects of him – his sincerity and his success – are among
the greatest proofs of his bearing the apostleship of God.
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Related by at-Tirmidhi, v. 4, p. 575
72
Reverend Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, London, 1874, p. 92. Italics mine.
73
R. V. C. Bodley, The Messenger, London 1946, p.9 Continued page 41
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