Thunder (Al-Ra‘d)

Commentary

(a) The result of the rejection of God’s religion becomes apparent in the Hereafter, but if the addressees of a prophet reject his call, the consequences start manifesting themselves in the present world itself. However, there is not one fixed principle for this worldly outcome. This has appeared in different forms during the periods of different prophets. In the case of the Prophet Muhammad, by the special dispensation of the Almighty, the followers of the Prophet were made dominant over his opponents. In the last stage of the Makkah period, when the tribal chiefs of Makkah had rejected him, the call of Islam was gradually spreading within Madina and among the tribes outside Makkah. In other words, Islam’s missionary power was conquering the surroundings of Makkah and was advancing towards Makkah itself. In the case of the Prophet Muhammad the will of God appeared in the shape of missionary conquests. Here Dawah strategy is called divine strategy. This shows its importance. When the Quraysh expelled the Prophet Muhammad from Makkah, they thought that they had finished him. At that time he was a person whose means of livelihood had been destroyed; a person who was deprived of the support of his own tribe. After doing all this, the Quraysh were very happy. They thought that they had buried the problem of the Prophet once and for all. But they could not understand that the mission of Dawah is the greatest weapon of a missionary, and this is something which nobody can snatch from him. All other deprivations of the missionary only result in increasing the force of his missionary call; these do not reduce this force in any way. Accordingly, at the very moment when the Quraysh thought that they had deprived the Prophet of everything, his missionary call was spreading all round among the Arab tribes. People’s hearts were won over by him. This process was quietly but constantly going on. And the conquest of Makkah was, in fact, its culminating point. Those who had been considered only “tens of hundreds” by the people of Makkah and had been uprooted from their homes, in only a few years’ time became “ten thousand and returned to Makkah in such strength that the people of Makkah did not have the courage to prevent them from entering their city Those whose interests are adversely affected by the call for acknowledgement of truth try to suppress it by adopting various devices against it. But in the end, devices are in the hand of God. He has power over everybody. The initial manifestation of God’s superiority is taking place in the present world. The perfect manifestation of this will take place in the Hereafter, when even the blind will see it and even the deaf will hear it.