Muhammad: Seal of the Prophets — Page 110
MUHAMMAD : SEAL OF THE PROPHETS 110 Banu Haneefah of Yamamah treated him harshly. Musailamah Kazzab, who later claimed prophethood, was the chief of Banu Haneefah. This was a strange spectacle. The Messenger of God, whose message within a very few years thereafter found acceptance over wide areas of the earth, was seen making his solitary way to the tents of the chiefs of tribe after tribe and presenting God’s messag e to each one of them, and entreating them to accept it as it portended great good for them; but every ingress was closed upon him and the response from every tent was ‘Begone, we have no concern with you’. But he was not discouraged and from one tent he p receded to another where he met with the same response. In the meantime the revelation that was vouchsafed to him presented a wider and wider horizon to him and to his followers. They were invited to lift their eyes from the citizens to tribes and from the tribes to the nation, and from the nation to the intern ational situation. The two mightiest powers of the time were the Persians and the Byzantines. The dominions of both were close to Arabia. The Persian Empire was to the northeast of Arabia, and the Byzantine to the northwest. As their borders met in the nor th of Arabia, they had been at odds with each other at the time of which we are writing. For some time, the Persians had been pressing the Byzantines hard and had deprived them of a large part of their territory in what is today known as the Middle East. Byzantium suffered another setback about the time of which we are writing. When news of this reached Mecca, Quraish, who favoured Persia and were not too well disposed towards