Exemplary Conduct

EXEMPLARY CONDUCT full, the Prophet lay asleep, covered in a red sheet. Jabir ibn Samrah says that sometimes he would look at the moon and sometimes at the Prophet. Eventually, he concluded that the Prophet was the more beautiful of the two. Arrows rained down on the Prophet from the enemy ranks, but his followers formed a ring around him, letting the arrows strike their bodies. It was as though they were made of wood, not flesh and blood; indeed, the arrows hung from the bodies of some of them like the thorns of a cactus tree. Devotion and veneration of this nature can produce vanity in a man and engender a feeling of superiority, but this was not the case with the Prophet. He lived among others as an equal. No bitter criticism or provocation would make him lose his composure. Once, a desert-dweller approached him and pulled so hard at the sheet he was wearing that it left a mark on his neck. “Muhammad!” he said. “Give me two camel-loads of goods, for the money in your possession is not yours, nor was it your father’s.” “Everything belongs to God,” the Prophet said, “and I am His servant.” He then asked the desert-dweller, “hasn’t it made you afraid, the way you treated me?” He said not. The Prophet asked him why. “Because I know that you do not requite evil with evil,” the man answered. The Prophet smiled on hearing this and had one camel-load of barley and another of dates given to him. The Prophet lived in such awe of God that he was always a picture of humility and meekness. He spoke little, and even