Why Did They Become Muslims

people that I met during the journeys I was making with the
missionaries. Instead of mentioning their fictitious theory of ‘God,
the Son of God, and the Holy Ghost’, for instance, I would
inculcate the facts such as that when man died his soul would not
die, that human beings were created by a great creator, that this
great creator would punish men both in this world and in the next
on account of their sins, and that this great creator, being
extremely compassionate, would forgive men their sins in case
they repented for their wrongdoings.
As days went by, my belief in the unity of Allah developed into
an absolute conviction. In order to penetrate into the inner nature
of truth, I tried to dive deeper and deeper into the subject. It was
sometime during these efforts that I began to study the Islamic
religion. This religion magnatized me so strongly that I dedicated
my entire day to studying it. I happened to domicile myself in a
forlorn Indian village, called Ichra, which was rather far from the
urban areas and whose name almost no one knew. The
inhabitants of this village belonged to a very poor and destitute
caste. Only for the sake of Allâhu ta’âlâ, I was trying to teach
them the existence of a single and compassionate creator and the
right way they ought to follow in this worldly life. I was also
striving to inculcate into them such notions as religious
brotherhood and cleanliness. So strange to say, all these notions I
was doing my best to teach them existed in Islam, not in
Christianity, and I was preaching them not as a Christian
missionary, but like a Muslim religious man.
I am not going to enlarge on the details of the great efforts I
made, the degree of self-sacrifice I achieved, or the severe
difficulties I faced in that lonely and desolate village, among those
unenlightened people. My only concern was to guide them to
spiritual and physical cleanliness and to teach them the existence
of a great creator.
Whenever I was on my own, I would study the life of
Muhammad ‘alaihis-salâm’. Very few books had been written in
English to reflect the facts about his life, yet no effort had been
spared on the part of Christians to criticise and vilify that great
Prophet and to incriminate him with lying. However, I was now
able to study Islam fairly, without being influenced by those
books that had been written under inimical motives. During the
course of my studies, I came to the full realization that it was a
definite fact that Islam was a true religion in which the concept of
– 57 –