47 Preface وَكَذٰلِكَ أَنزَلنا إِلَيكَ الكِتابَ ۚ فَالَّذينَ آتَيناهُمُ الكِتابَ يُؤمِنونَ بِهِ ۖ وَمِن هٰؤُلاءِ مَن يُؤمِنُ بِهِ ۚ وَما يَجحَدُ بِآياتِنا إِلَّا الكافِرونَYusuf AliAnd thus1 (it is) that We have sent down the Book to thee. So the People of the Book believe therein,2 as also do some of these3 (pagan Arabs): and none but Unbelievers reject our signs.It is in this spirit that all true Revelation comes from God. God is One, and His Message cannot come in one place or at one time to contradict His Message in another place or at another time in spirit, though there may be local variations according to the needs or understanding of men at any given time or place -The sincere Jews and Christians found in the Holy Prophet a fulfillment of their own religion. For the names of some Jews who recognised and embraced Islam, see n. 3227 to 26:197. Among the Christians, too, the Faith slowly won ground. Embassies were sent by the Holy Prophet in the 6th and 7th years of the Hijrat to all the principal countries around Arabia, viz., the capital of the Byzantine Empire (Constantinople), the capital of the Persian Empire (Mada'in), the Sasanian capital known to the West by the Greek name of Ctesiphon, (about thirty miles south of modem Baghdad), Syria, Abyssinia, and Egypt. All these (except Persia) were Christian countries. In the same connection, an embassy was also sent to Yamamah in Arabia itself (east of the Hijaz) where the Banū Ḥanīfah tribe was Christian, like the Harith tribe of Najrān who voluntarily sent an embassy to Madman. All these countries except Abyssinia eventually became Muslim, and Abyssinia itself has a considerable Muslim population now and sent some Muslim converts to Medīna in the time of the Prophet himself. As a generalisation, it is true that the Jewish and the Christian peoples as they existed in the seventh century of the Christian era have been mainly absorbed by Islam, as well as the lands in which they predominated. Remnants of them built up new nuclei. The Roman Catholic Church conquered new lands among the northern (Germanic) Pagans and the Byzantine Church among the eastern (Slavonic) Pagans, and the Protestantism of the 16th century gave a fresh stimulus to the main ideas for which Islam stands, viz., the abolition of priestcraft, the right of private judgment, the simplification of ritual, and the insistence upon the simple, practical, everyday duties of life.The Pagan Arabs also gradually came in until they were all absorbed in Islam.