The Creation Plan of God
Discovery of Islam
~ 31 ~
credibility of being the Muslim
Ummah
would
become doubtful. Strangely, indeed,
da’wah
found
no place in the literature of the centuries after the
Prophet. Neither has it been mentioned anywhere
in the Muslim agenda of today. The classical
commentaries of the Qur’an
(Tafsir)
also fail to give
any prominence to
da‘wah
as a concept. In books of
hadith
too, we find chapters on all subjects except
da’wah
. The same is true of
fiqh
(Islamic
jurisprudence) in whose texts we do not find a
chapter on
da‘wah
.
According to the Qur’an, the exercise of patience
(
sabr
) is a deed which makes man eligible for the
highest reward (8:46); the patient man will be
rewarded “beyond measure” (39:10). But the
interpretation that gained popularity in later times
was that the injunction of
sabr
, patience, had been
abrogated and replaced by
jihad
(in the sense of
qital
, fighting). Thus, one who studies these books,
gathers the impression, that consciously or
unconsciously, patience might have been important
in the past, but that nowadays it has lost its
relevance. Now
jihad
(in the sense of
qital
) and
not
sabr
is of the foremost importance.
