LAST WORD

Last Word They will be people from the Muslim Ummah from the last phase of human history. With God’s special support, this second team will play an important dawah role. To fulfill this role, Muslims must first attain a higher realization of God by contemplating of His creation. Then, equipped with new and powerful means of functioning, they need to dedicate themselves to performing dawah work globally by taking the preserved message of God for humanity to the world. That is why believers in later times have been described as bearers of high levels of faith. Certain traditions illustrate this. According to Anas bin Malik, a Companion of the Prophet, the Prophet said, ‘The example of my ummah is like rains; nobody knows which phase, earlier or later, will be better.’ (At-Tirmizi, Hadith No. 2869) In this Hadith, the simile of the rain denotes a whole historical process. The revolution brought about in the seventh century by the Prophet and his Companions was, in one sense, the beginning of a process. The historical process that set in in the wake of this revolution was to yield the final result in the future. “Future” here probably means the same historical phenomenon referred to in another tradition as Ikhwan-e-Rasool (Brothers of the Prophet). Abu Maalik al-Ashari says that the Prophet of Islam