24 Preface يا أَيُّهَا الَّذينَ آمَنُوا استَجيبوا لِلَّهِ وَلِلرَّسولِ إِذا دَعاكُم لِما يُحييكُم ۖ وَاعلَموا أَنَّ اللَّهَ يَحولُ بَينَ المَرءِ وَقَلبِهِ وَأَنَّهُ إِلَيهِ تُحشَرونَYusuf AliO ye who believe! give your response to God and His Messenger, when He calleth you to that which will give you life;1 and know that God cometh in between a man2 and his heart, and that it is He to Whom ye shall (all) be gathered.There are two points to note. (1) Note that after God and His Messenger are mentioned, the pronoun and verb in the next clause are singular: everything that God’s Messenger put forward as an injunction came bv inspiration from God: the Messenger made his will coincide completely with God’s will. (2) We are asked actively to give our response in deed and life to the call of duty and conscience, for that call leads to real life, the life eternal, even though it may apparently mean in this world the loss of things that make life dear or the loss of life itself. If we refer this Jihad, i.e., fighting in and for the Cause, both literally and metaphorically, the meaning becomes quite clear.If the human heart is refractory and refuses to obey the call of God, that is not the end of the matter. God has to be reckoned with. The refusal may be because there was some pet human scheme which the heart of man was not willing to give up for God’s Cause. Will that scheme come to fruition by refusing to serve the higher Cause? By no means. Man proposes, but God disposes. If the scheme or motive was perfectly secret from men, it was not secret from God. The heart is the innermost seat of man’s affections and desires; but God intervenes between man and his heart. (R).