To love Muhammad is one thing, but to imitate him - to try to be 'like' him - is another. He was the last messenger and the last prophet, so how can … - Gai Eaton

One of the things that Christians and occidentals in general seldom understand is this mighty effort, this jihad, waged to prevent any element of earthly life from escaping and taking on a separate existence of its own, or flying off, as though gripped by centrifugal force, into the empty space which we call the secular or profane realm. The Muslim who sits quietly in the mosque facing the qiblah and invoking his Lord has not left the world to go its own way; he is not only a contemplative, he is also a warrior, and the world is his prisoner of war. From the corner of his eye he watches to see that it does not evade him.

It is clear that if we are to fulfill our true function, we must first identify and then become our true selves; the man alienated from his own centre is alienated from all things, not only a stranger to himself but also a stranger in the universe. Yet he cannot find the centre nor can he ‘become himself’ without help. For the Muslim, the Prophet not only shows us the way to the centre but, in a certain sense, is himself the way, since it is by taking him as our model, or by entering into the mound of his personality, that we are best able to travel to our destination. Action which springs from our own true centre - ‘without external cause’, as the dictionary has it - is the only truly ‘spontaneous action, and it is therefore in imitating him that we achieve spontaneity.

The evidence is all around us. There are a thousand ways in which our existence may be terminated between one moment and the next; a simple drug will transform the most intelligent among us into an idiot, or the bravest among us into a coward; and we know from our reading if not from experience that techniques of torture, more widely practised today than at any time in the past, can destroy every vestige of human dignity in a very short time. Such human dignity as we may have - and the Viceregent of God is indeed a figure of great dignity - is a robe loaned to us, just as a woman’s beauty is loaned to her, just as our skills, whether hereditary or acquired, are on loan, as are our strengths and our virtues. We can claim nothing as being truly ours except for our weaknesses and our vices, together with the ill we do in the world; for the Quran assures us that all good comes from God, all ill from man. We do not even control the breath of life within us, and: ‘No soul knoweth what it will earn tomorrow nor doth any soul know in what land it will die. Truly Allah is the Knower, the Aware!’ (Q.31.34).