(16:125) Invitation [ da‘wah ] must be accompanied by...

(16:125) Invitation [ da‘wah ] must be accompanied by wisdom, proof and logic in order to be attractive, and in this stage, repulsion is never discussed. Yet, people are not equal in that they can properly understand signs of wisdom, logical proofs and philosophical evidence. Nevertheless, if we examine ourselves, we will see that from the day we became cognizant of ourselves, we heard that there is a religion called Islam and there is a school of thought known as Shi‘ism and we accepted them.

Yet, are we really trying to find out their rational proof? The truth is that most of people have accepted Islam and Shi‘ism only under the influence of social factors, upbringing of their parents, instructions of their teachers, and the like, and they have never been in pursuit of finding out their proof. Rather, sometimes they have read or heard something in the pulpit, or school and lecture. But it is very rare that at the beginning they had the motive to conduct research and act upon it.

People are influenced more by feelings and emotions, and they move pursuant to some motivations and material and apparent things. They pay less attention to proof and evidence. Regarding human beings in general, the main stimulant is profit and loss as well as hope and fear the same thing which is known in the Islamic terminology as khawf [fear] and raja' [hope]. That is, man has to fear something or gain something in order to move.

Either there must be a talk about money, position and popularity or about starvation, unemployment, lashes, and prison in order to be persuaded to act. A famous maxim says that man lives by means of fear and hope. The usual case is that if someone studies, it is either because he wants to have a job with a high salary and as such, to be rich, or he does not want to lag behind his friends and relatives and not to endure the despises and contempt of his father, mother and others.

Since human beings in general are like that, just as stated in a noble verse, the issue of admonition [ maw‘izah ] is raised alongside and after wisdom [ hikmah ] “Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good advice.” That is, in addition to proof [ burhan ] and argument [ istidlal ], the prophets ( ‘a ) say, “If you do this, you will receive these rewards and if you don’t, you will incur these losses.