Why Did They Become Muslims

Prophet ‘sall-Allâhu ’alaihi wa sallam’ explained the entire Qur’ân alkerîm
to his Sahâba. He communited the murâd-i-ilâhî (what Allâhu
ta’âlâ meant) to them. The Sahâba taught these meanings to the
Tâbi’în, who in their turn wrote them in their books. There are
thousands of books of tafsîr (explanations of the Qur’ân al-kerîm)
written. Numbers of tafsîrs in Persian and in Turkish and thousands of
religious books were written. One of the tafsîrs in Persian is Mawâhibi-aliyya,
which was written in the city of Hirât by Huseyn Wâ’iz Kâshifî
‘rahima-hullâhu ta’âlâ’ [d. 910 (1505 C.E.), in Hirât], three and a half
centuries before the birth of this lady. The Ottoman Sultâns and
scholars stated that his tafsîr was very valuable, and translated it into
Turkish, giving it the title Mawâkib. The person condemned in Madras
was a heretic, an insidious enemy of Islam whose real purpose was to
defile the Islamic religion. He was condemned because he attempted
to give wrong, heretical meanings to the Qur’ân al-kerîm. Those who
condemned him were great Islamic scholars who had written religious
books in the Persian and Hindi languages.
Now let us turn our attention to the reflections of another foreign
lady on this subject. The following excerpts have been paraphrased
from Twenty-Six Years on the Bosphorus, written by a British lady,
named Ms. Dorina L. Neave, who lived in Istanbul between 1881 and
1907 [1325 A.H.].
After praising Muslims for their politeness and giving a few
examples of the open-mindedness that they show to the votaries of
other religions, Ms. Neave also dwells on some culpabilities and
criticizes them. Please read what she says:
“There is a religious rite observed in the name of Muharram [1] here.
I have been staying for years in Istanbul, and I have never gone to see
that religious rite. The people who went to see them tell us that those
Muslim rites are extremely severe and dreadfully wild. People who
perform those rites come forward with the upper parts of their bodies
naked, shout the names of Hasan and Huseyn, (the names of the
Prophet’s two blessed grandsons,) and hit their naked bodies
vehemently with the heavy chains they hold in their hands, which
makes them bloody all over.”
Ms. Neave writes as follows about a rite of Rufâ’îs which her
acquaintances attended: “As my friends told me, dervishes, [or
Rufâ’îs,] naked down to their bellies and yelling, make a line, saying
the (expression called) Shahâdat aloud and rocking their bodies
backwards and forwards. Then, accelerating their movements
gradually, shouting wild cries and yells in a sort of ecstacy or a fit of
epilepsy, they spring in the air until they lose consciousness.
[1] The first Islamic month.
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