The Call of Dawah in the Modern Age March-April

wrongdoers is to call them to tread the path of God. (Quran, 5:67) It is for the successful fulfillment of this duty that believers will be distinguished in the Hereafter by being given the position of God’s witnesses. The Quran describes them as those who will stand in the most elevated places. (Quran, 7:46) This is the greatest honour which may be conferred on the callers of truth in the life of the Hereafter. However, calling people to surrender to God is no easy task. It amounts to a re-enactment of the history of the Prophet and his companions, who were unremitting in their efforts to bring to ordinary men and women a clear perception of the great hidden realities of the Almighty. It is to achieve on the human level what had formerly been achieved on the prophetic level. But first the dawah worker must himself understand the true nature of the message he brings to mankind, otherwise his activities will be irrelevant to God’s cause and may even prove counter-productive. Then, in bringing others within the fold of Islam, he must also appreciate in what sense and in how many ways there has been a change in conditions as far as the propagation of religious ideas is concerned. For our predecessors, the invitation to the truth meant putting an end to idolatry—replacing polytheism with monotheism. Nowadays, the invitation to God means putting an end to atheism. With the end of idolatry, a new phase was launched in world history and, for a thousand years, human thinking went on developing along rational lines to the point where, in the sixteenth century, the emergence of the Western sciences came to mark the beginning of yet another new era. In the present century, science, having made such rapid and tremendous strides, may be said to have reached its zenith. It is ironic that