Water from Stones: Conflict-Resolution through Gentleness

you act foolishly, you will awaken this ‘devil’, and then it will go about doing everything that it can against you. No matter whose hidden ‘devil’ you awaken through your foolishness—he could be someone from your community or from another; he could even be your own brother or other close relative—you will have to face the same sort of bitter consequences. 7 Learn from History I n the past, God appointed the Jews as possessors of divine scriptures. The Jews’ past provides important lessons for the Muslims’ future. It is for this reason that the initial chapters of the Quran contain many verses about the history of the Jews. In the corpus of Hadith5, it is narrated that Muslims will also face all the sorts of degeneration that the Jews faced: “You will surely follow in the ways of those before you, span by span and cubit by cubit, so much so that if they were to enter an iguana’s hole, you would follow after them.” (Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim) All the communities that are given divine scriptures always face the same situation. The principles for their success as well as of their failure are also one and the same. In this sense, the history of the Jews is the history of every The corpus of reports of the deeds and sayings of, or attributed to, the Prophet Muhammad.