The Man Islam Builds

Thus, dawah becomes an extensive course of action through which one’s personality develops day by day, until one reaches the highest level of intellectual and spiritual development. Iman (faith) and dawah are two basic levels of Islam. If iman is a superior ideology, dawah is a superior course of action. Iman purifies one’s mind and soul, while dawah imbues one’s personality with a sublime probity. One who adopts Islam as a universal mission, in both the ideological and practical sense, is morally activated to the maximum possible extent and this course, slowly but surely, leads him to reach the highest pinnacle of humanity. Stating the relationship between man and true religion the Quran says: So you set your face towards the true faith uprightly, the upright nature with which God has endowed man, and let there be no alteration in God’s Creation. That is the right religion, although most men may not know it. (30:30) This means that every human being is created by God to be capable—as a matter of his natural constitution—of accepting the religion of truth. The Unity of God is a truth, arrived at intuitively, and is plain to every man of common sense, unless he perverts himself by the different prejudices which he receives from his environment. Islam is thus the natural religion that a child left to itself would develop. A western writer, Lady Cobbold, has rightly described it: Islam is the religion of common sense. When this potential is realized, it results in the emergence of a new man. What kind of character is possessed by this new man is made clear by the following hadith: