Karen Armstrong: The Prophet Muhammad's Compassion

every recitation of the Quran begins with it with an invocation to the compassion and mercy of God and the Quran is really nothing but a cry for compassion the bedrock message of the Quran is that it's wrong to build up a private fortune but good to share your wealth equally and to look out for the vulnerable and the poor people in in society that's that that is the chief duty of every single Muslim and the Prophet once said peace be upon him not one of you can be a believer unless he desires for his neighbor what he desires for himself this is what's often called the golden rule it's been enunciated in every single one of the major world traditions sometimes it's comes in this form never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself or in the positive form always treat all others as you would wish to be treated and all the faiths have said that this is the test of true spirituality and it is this that brings us into the presence of what we call God so compassion is key to the religious life and the religions all insist that we cannot confine our compassion to our own group to our own congenial group of people we must have young I said one of the Chinese sages concern for everybody o people says the Quran we have formed you into tribes and nations so that you may get to know one another not so that we may exploit or terrorize or or colonize or convert even but so that we may get to know one another and this is the key task of our time to build by means of compassion and respect a global community we're all peoples whoever they are are treated with absolute equity and respect and it seems to me that unless now we implement the golden rule globally we are not going to have a viable world this is the task of our generation and we all have a duty to look into our traditions to find that compassionate core and make it speak to the world we all have to become avatars of compassion as the Prophet was peace be upon him we have to be messengers of compassion in our time and we have to do this globally evil to people with whom we feel enmity who dislike us or who would are at war with us somehow we have to learn as the Prophet build peace be upon him to speak to people who are hostile to us in a way that is non-threatening non aggressive but who try to see where their pain is coming from I think if we just look to the Prophet we have a model of how we should behave always in Mecca when his people were being persecuted and abused he would keep his calm he wouldn't allow himself to respond aggressively even when he was physically abused and threatened in any way this is a time of fitna for Muslims we often talk of the first and second fitna after the prophets death where there were civil wars and it was a time of great trial and trouble and this is similarly a time of trial and trouble but wisdoms in the past have always used these periods of difficulty as a spiritual opportunity they've racked their brains and thought the how to bring the compassionate and the Alice deep spiritual essence of the Koran to a violent and troubled world and that's our duty in this world to make the compassionate voice of Islam speak loud and clear and make it a dynamic force in our time if we all every single one of us did that we could drown the voices of extremism and do our best to work for a peaceful just and sustainable [Music] the [Music]

Channel: CelebrateMercy

Views: 101,091

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Keywords: Armstrong, CM5, Content, Final

Id: lahXSUkuaIA

Length: 4min 50sec (290 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 14 2012