The Call of Dawah in the Modern Age March-April

Tradition has it that the famous Arab poet, Labid, gave up composing poetry after hearing recitations from the Quran. When asked why he no longer composed poetry, he exclaimed, “What! After the Quran?” This suggests that the Quran had made an intellectual conquest of the people of its time. Today, we are once again in need of an Islamic literature which is capable of capturing people’s minds. To produce works which will make the right kind of impact in a world which is now flooded with both religious and secular literature from a great variety of sources may now appear wellnigh impossible. But this is not the insuperable problem which it appears to be, for God has His ways of turning the impossible into the possible. In order to support the dayees of truth, God has brought about a new revolution in human history, the scientific revolution. This has given man access to new possibilities of advancing arguments in support of unseen realities. We can even go so far as to say that it has become possible for us today to present to our hearers miraculous arguments which were earlier only acceptable when put forward by prophets of God. It is a great truth that the universe is a superb miracle wrought by God. In its entirety, it presents an indisputable argument in support of its Creator’s existence and His stupendous attributes. However, in ancient times, the nature of this miracle remained unapprehended or was little understood, and that is why God gave His prophets the power to perform miracles. (It is worth noting that the Quran uses the common work ‘Ayah’—signs—to denote both the prophets’ miracles and the signs of nature in the universe.) However, the Prophet Muhammad’s contemporaries, despite their demands, were never shown miracles of the kind demonstrated by the earlier prophets. Instead, the Prophet would draw the attention of his congregation to the Quran’s pronouncements on the