THE WORD OF GOD

it needed a strong group to protect and preserve it. But there was no such group. The early Muslims were extremely weak as compared to their many enemies. Moreover, in the seventh century A.D., paper and the printing press had not yet come into existence. Yet the Quran has remained intact, in the original Arabic, till the present day. There are several reasons for its survival. One is that the absolute veracity of its statements have stood the test of time. Another is that strenuous efforts were immediately made to write down the divine revelations and commit them to memory. But the most compelling reason was that God Himself had ensured its safekeeping, ‘We will, most surely, safeguard it.’ We sent messengers before you to the previous peoples, but there was never a messenger who came to them but they mocked him: thus We cause this [habit of mocking] to enter into the hearts of the sinful. They will not believe in it, though they have before them the example of former peoples, and even if We opened to them a door from heaven, and they began ascending through it, they would still say, ‘Our eyes have been dazzled. We are bewitched.’ (15: 10-15) God’s prophets were scoffed at in every age. The reason for this was that people judged their worth as representatives of God by selfdevised, imaginary standards. The contemporary prophets did not appear to match up to the said standards, and so were dismissed as objects of ridicule. In order to discover a new reality, it is necessary for a man to think with an open mind and be prepared to form an opinion purely on the basis of facts. Those who reject the truth do so mostly because the truth appears to them strange in relation to their own familiar standards. Over a long period of time those familiar standards permeate their hearts to such an extent that it becomes impossible for them to think of accepting alternatives. Till the last moment they are unable to emerge from the sphere familiar to them and recognize the truth. The result of this attitude in communities was that the people belonging to them, in spite of being shown miracles, did not embrace the faith. Once they judged a prophet to be an ordinary man, basing their opinion on purely material factors, the person so judged could never be anything more than ordinary in their eyes. Even if he performed supernatural feats in front of them, their ideas were so rooted in the earlier traditions that he went on seeming unimportant, and so they would hold that his feats were just magic or some optical illusion and not a proof of his being a representative of God. o