The Call of Dawah in the Modern Age March-April

This act of facilitation has three main aspects to it, all of which are foreshadowed in passages of the Quran. For example believers are enjoined to pray: Lord, do not lay on us the burden you laid on those before us. (2:286) This prayer has been answered in the sense that dawah work may now be performed in an atmosphere conducive to the free expression of different opinions, whereas in the past, and certainly in the time of the Prophet, there were stringent curbs on freedom of speech. Those who proclaimed the Oneness of God were regularly subjected to such forms of persecution as stoning, burning, and the tearing of their bodies apart. The reason for this was that earlier governments were based on polytheism. That is, the kings of ancient times ruled in the capacity of representatives of their assumed gods. Whenever there was any move by enlightened persons to demonstrate that polytheism was baseless, the kings felt that the very bedrock of their royal power was being rocked. That was why they spared no effort to crush any movement launched in the name of monotheism. As a forerunner to the inception of this new age of enlightenment, the Quran had urged all right-thinking people to “fight against (religious persecution) so that religion is only for God.” (2:193) And, indeed the revolution brought about by the Prophet of Islam caused idolatry to be re-defined as a matter of unenlightened personal faith, thus depriving it of the status of an institution. The ensuing separation of idolatry from politics effectively terminated that era in which the upholders of polytheism could muzzle by nefarious means the public acceptance of tawhid, the Oneness of God. With superstition and personal cults vanishing under the influence of Islam, the very foundations of hereditary monarchy were shaken. As a result of freedom of opinion having become accepted