Al-Risala (English), Sep-Oct 2000

although quite free to do so, be held above those who do not hesitate to stoop to insolence? Besides man, nothing in the universe is going to be sent to heaven or hell. If man’s fate is different, it is because, having been given the exceptional capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, between truth and untruth, he is a responsible creature. This moral endowment is, in essence, the key to man’s lot in the Hereafter. In the final judgement, those who have put their freedom to the right and proper use will be rewarded. Those who have not will be punished. □ The Master Key A n article in an Arabic magazine headlined Al-Miftahul Azim (Master Key), citing dawah power as the greatest of all Islamic strengths, says that if in the past, Islam achieved its universal victories through dawah, today, it can turn its defeats into victories by the same method. Dawah is very much under discussion these days among Muslim writers and speakers. Its exponents, however, spend more time unraveling the plots and conspiracies hatched against them by non-Muslim nations than in practicing what they preach. That is to say that, on the one hand, they exhort Muslims to assume the role of dayees while, on the other hand, they assure them with great vehemence that as far as the Muslims are concerned, all the nations of the world have turned into rapacious wolves and, as such, must be fought against and annihilated. Both these utterances are made in the same breath, without any awareness of their contradictory nature, the one