THE FIVE PILLARS OF ISLAM

The Five Pillars of Islam ~ 94 ~ uncompromising on the question of right and wrong. He saw in him a man selflessly devoted to the discharge of his duties, and one who would never stoop to idolatrous beliefs. Most important, God had found in this desert Arab a genuine seeker after the truth. It could only be such as he who would appreciate to the full the divine revelations with which he would be entrusted, and who would be fully alive to the resultant obligation. It was precisely because this most perfect of men had shown himself to be so consistently virtuous over the first forty years of his life that God chose him as His final Prophet for all mankind. During the ensuing twenty-three years of his prophethood, Mohammad proved that God’s trust in him had not been misplaced, for he carried out his prophetic duties with the highest imaginable degree of integrity. There could have been no conceivably superior fulfillment of the responsibilities entailed by prophethood. It is thanks to the Prophet that God’s Book, as communicated to him by God’s Angels, has been handed down to us in pure and pristine form, thus making it possible for us to find in His Scriptures a