You Have Been Granted Your Request, Moses

You Have Been Granted Your Request, Moses this occasion. I had not been informed in advance that I had to address the gathering. Then quite without warning a group of people took me on to the stage and asked me to speak. There was no avoiding this. It was perhaps the first occasion when in the matter of making speeches that I experienced total helplessness. Earlier I had addressed gatherings repeatedly, but all these addresses had been in the form of reading out papers. Had I known in advance about this programme, I would have written an article to be read out on that occasion. But this time I faced a situation in which I had to speak compulsorily without any prior preparation and I had to speak extempore. At that time, all of a sudden I started getting ideas about what to say. I just remembered God and, in a frenzied manner, I started speaking. I began my speech with these words: There are many stories of prophets recorded in the Quran but these are not just historical stories. They have a lesson for our present life. One of these incidents, or stories is that God commanded Moses to go to the court of the tyrant king of Egypt and call upon him to accept monotheism. The Prophet Moses said to God, “My breast is constricted and my tongue is not fluent.” (The Quran, 26:13) Then by the grace of God Almighty, he prayed, “My Lord, open up my heart and make my task easy for me, loosen the knot in my tongue, so that they may understand what I have to say.” (The Quran, 20:25-28) I said that when Moses called upon the All-hearing (As-Sami) and All- seeing (Al-Basir), his call went straight