You are aware that looking after a patient of leprosy is a...

You are aware that looking after a patient of leprosy is a very difficult and unpleasant task and when this hospital was established in Mashhad, very few doctors were willing to serve there, and similarly, no one was willing to care for the patients. Advertisements for the employment of nurses were taken out in the newspapers; in all of Iran, not a single person gave a positive answer to this invitation.

A small group of so-called ascetic Christian women from France came and took charge of nursing the lepers. This man, who had seen the humanitarianism and loving care of those nurses towards lepers, who had been abandoned by even their own parents, had been strongly affected by these nurses. He related that the Christian nurses wore long, loose clothes, and apart from their face and hands, no part of their body was visible.

Each of them had a long rosary which had perhaps a thousand beads and whenever they would find free time from work, they would busy themselves in their recitations on the rosary. Then the man asked with a troubled mind and in a disturbed tone whether it was true that non-Muslims would not enter Heaven? Of course, right now we are not concerned with the motives of those Christian ladies.

Was it truly for God, in God’s way, and out of pure humanitarianism that they did what they did, or was another motive in play? Certainly, we don’t want to be pessimistic, just as we are not overly optimistic; our point is that these incidents and events have introduced our people to a serious question. Several years ago, I was invited to an association to give a speech.

In that association, in accordance with their tradition, the participants were requested to write down any questions they had so that they could be answered at the appropriate time. Those questions had been recorded in a notebook, and that notebook had been given to me so I could choose the topic of my speech from amongst those topics (noted in the book). I noticed that the question that had been repeated more than any other was whether God will send all non-Muslims to Hell.

Will Pasteur, Edison, and Kokh be amongst those who will be punished in the Hereafter? It was from that time that I realized the importance of this issue inasmuch as it had attracted people’s thoughts.Now, in this part of the book, we will discuss this issue. But before we begin, we need to clarify two points in order for the topic at hand to become completely clear. 1.