The seventy idolaters who were captured in the Battle of Badr were brought to Madinah. Suhail Ibn Amr was one of them. The Prophet was told that Suhail was a fiery speaker, and kept on making speeches against him. “Why not pluck his teeth out?” it was suggested. “If I break his teeth,” the Prophet replied, “then God will break mine, although I am a prophet.” The Prophet divided the prisoners up into various homes of the companions, and told all concerned to treat them well. Abu Aziz, who was one of the prisoners, says that the Ansari household in which he was kept would give him bread morning and evening, and themselves make do with dates. The chief of the Yamama tribe, Thumama Ibn Uthal was taken prisoner. For the duration of his captivity, he was provided with excellent food and milk, under the Prophet’s instructions, stones crash down the mountainside in symbolic confirmation of the correctness of this way. The Quran exhorts man to obey God’s commandments, and everything in the universe, by fully following the law of nature, proclaims that no other path is possible in this world. The Quran says that one should build for oneself without causing harm to others, and the sun, moon and all heavenly bodies, revolving in their orbits, show how proper this demand is. The Quran says that after this world another world is coming in which man will reap the consequences of his deeds: and the universe, with its ultimate meaningfulness, testifies that life cannot end with the present world; another world must come in which truth and falsehood are exposed for what they are.

The Islamic Centre, Delhi, was inaugurated in 1970. It has purely constructive aims. It seeks to present Islam to the world as the science of life; it wishes man to observe the religion of realism that the whole universe observes. In a nutshell, we want to make science journalism, and journalism science. □