The Personality of the Prophet of Islam

And the fish swallowed him while he was blaming himself. Had he not been one of those who acknowledge the glory of God, he would certainly have remained inside the fish till the Day of Resurrection. (The Quran, 37:142-144) This goes to show how great is the responsibility of dawah. Those who fail to discharge this duty properly, are destined according to the law of God, to find themselves “in the whale’s belly.” And they will never be saved from this great ordeal until they repent and return to perform dawah work. Otherwise they will remain in that plight until Doomsday. If we ponder on this, we find that this example applies in all respects to the Muslim Ummah. Such are their problems that the Muslim Ummah has been engulfed in the belly of the whale for more than a hundred years. Countless attempts and innumerable sacrifices in terms of wealth and precious lives have not succeeded in leading them out of this quandary. When looked at in the light of this sunnah of the Prophet, the only reason we can find for their being in this plight is that the Ummah has abandoned dawah work for a very long period of time. The Muslims have reached a stage where they have no idea of how dawah is to be performed. They engage themselves in community work while calling it dawah. There is only one way for them to come out of the “belly of the whale” and that is to sincerely admit how mistaken has been their total negligence of the duty of dawah. This would be an act of repentance on their part. The whole ummah must engage themselves in performing dawah work anew throughout the nations of the world and, if they are to fulfill all its conditions, they shall have to bring their task to completion. The Quran repeatedly mentions events concerning Prophet Moses. Without doubt there are many lessons in his life for the believers. Here I would like to mention one lesson which I have personally experienced. I have been working for Islamic dawah since 1948. But in the early days I was not able to speak out (or make an extempore speech) to an audience. Therefore, I used to write my speeches and then read them out. If I had no written speech in front of me, my heart trembled and I began to shake, unable to express myself. This was the situation for about fifteen years. It had become an accepted fact that I did not speak impromptu at gatherings, but only read out papers. It was only in 1962 that I reached the stage of being able to speak extempore in public. In 1962 the Jama‘at-i-Islami had organized a monthly public meeting at Anjan Shaheed, a town in Azamgarh, U.P. I too was to address this gathering. However, contrary to my habit, I did not put my speech down in writing. When my turn came to deliver a speech, I stood up and recalled the prayer made by Moses and its answer from God. I uttered these words in a frenzied, emotional state. “The Quran is not a book of history. It is a living guidance. The incidents and events mentioned in it are as relevant for us as they were for the personalities of the past referred to, in the Quran.” Then after recounting the story of Moses, I said: “If a servant of God finds himself helpless in making a speech and he calls to God for help in the words of Moses: ‘My Lord, I fear they will reject me, and my breast is straitened and my tongue is not