He wanted to know who was it that had the courage to address him at all!

He wanted to know who was it that had the courage to address him at all! And ever if he had something to communicate he should have given due consideration to established protocol. He upbraided his governor in Yemen desiring him to chastise the writer for having addressed the Emperor of Iran! The neighbouring countries regarded this region (Arabia) too worthless to maintain any contact with it.

Even today no communications exist with neighbours and if one was to come out of Mecca and Medina, one would come across no habitation or water for a radius of several hundred kilometers, and although it borders onto the Red Sea, this sea is to no avail as it affords no source of irrigation. It was too backward culturally and economically and even politically to have been able to influence any of its neighbours.

In view of these conditions, what was it in the Islamic movement that enabled it to spread so rapidly and extensively in less than a quarter of a century and overcome all the neighbouring lands? The causative factor may be considered from two angles, firstly about its effects on the people of Arabia itself and the deep transformation which resulted among them. What was it that made them undergo such a radical change?

How did the movement give them the competence and the ability to promote the mission of Islam? How could they so suddenly change from a tribal society into an organised central government, so that within two or three decades it came to be regarded as the model of a powerful state in the world? Whichever history one read one would witness mention of 'Umar bin-Khattab as a powerful and intelligent ruler.

Secondly, what attraction did the movement of Islam possess that it spread so rapidly over all the neighbouring lands? In a previous discussion it was stated by one of the participants that possibly the reason for such rapid progress was that heralded freedom and its breaking of social bonds and any movement which declared these goals, would have spread just as rapidly as Islam.

I postponed my reply to that question until now and I had purposely delved into the details of early history to show that had 70 or 80 years before the movement of the Prophet of Islam, the Mazdaki faith made its appearance in Iran al lowing a good deal of freedom and even license, but it failed to make any headway.