We welcome a new year today. At least, according to the Islamic calendar. It's strangely dislocating for people, I find, when faced with the idea that the date might be regarded as something arbitrary or changeable. There's also a tendency to interpret the earlier century as indicating some kind of regression to medievalism. The fact that Islam is something 'new' in a sense is overlooked.
So it's been 1429 years since the hijrah, the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and his followers to Al Madinah. Most western biographers of the Prophet treat this period as some kind of fall from grace - again based, I believe, on an inability to accept a different paradigm of how the divine might manifest itself in our world. For Muslims this period of what appears to be worldly success (a sort of miracle in its way, I suppose) is a validation of the Messenger and the Message. It works in the world in a way that transforms that world. And invites us continually to remake ourselves in that image, given the mercy of time.
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