The Holy Quran with Five Volume Commentary (Vol 4) — Page 636
pledge they would not be able to avert the terrible fate that was in store for them. The Banu Quraizah dishonoured their pledge and left Muslims in the lurch when the latter were hemmed in on all sides and the very fate of Islam was hanging in the balance. After the confederates dispersed, the Holy Prophet marched against them and they received condign and the deserved punishment. As a result of the Battle of the Ditch and of the subsequent banishment of the Banu Quraizah, large booty fell into the hands of Muslims. They were promised more conquest and wealth. From a persecuted and economically very poor minority they had grown into a rich, powerful and prosperous community. But material wealth brings in its train, worldly-mindedness, a desire for ease and comfort and a disinclination towards service and sacrifice. This is a state of affairs which a Reformer has specially to guard against. As love of ease and comfort generally makes appearance first in the domestic circle and as the members of the Holy Prophet's household were to serve as a model in social behaviour, it was in the fitness of things that they should have been required to set an example in self-denial. It is to this life of self- abnegation on the part of the Holy Prophet's wives that reference has been made in the Surah. The Holy Prophet's wives were asked to make a choice between a life of comfort and ease, and the austere Companionship of the Holy Prophet; and they lost no time in making their choice. They preferred the Prophet's company. They were further told to set an example in piety, righteous and pious conduct, as befitted the wives of the greatest of God's Prophets, and in preserving the dignity and decorum of their exalted position by keeping to their houses and by teaching to Muslims the precepts and commandments of their religion. The Surah, then, proceeds to make a reference to Zainab's marriage with Zaid, the Holy Prophet's freed slave. The failure of Zainab's marriage with Zaid and her subsequent marriage with the Holy Prophet, served a double purpose. The Prophet by giving in marriage Zainab, his own cousin and a full-blooded Arab lady, intensely proud of her ancestry and exalted social position, to a freed slave, had sought to level to the ground all those invidious class distinctions and divisions from which Arabian society had suffered. According to Islam all men are free and all are equal in the sight of God. The Prophet carried into actual practice this noble ideal of Islam by giving the hand of his own cousin to a freed slave. Next, the Surah goes on to remove a possible misgiving to which the abolition of the custom of adoption might have given rise, viz. that in the absence of real sons the Holy Prophet will die issueless and thus his Movement will wither and die out for want of an heir. It says that it was God's own plan that the Prophet should have no male issue; but this did not mean 2550