﴿ وَلَوْ فَتَحْنَا عَلَيْهِم بَابًۭا مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ فَظَلُّوا۟ فِيهِ يَعْرُجُونَ ﴾

“Yet even had We opened to them a gateway to heaven and they had ascended, on and on, up to it,”

God’s prophets were scoffed at in every age. The reason for this was that people judged their worth as representatives of God by self-devised, imaginary standards. The contemporary prophets did not appear to match up to the said standards, and so were dismissed as objects of ridicule. In order to discover a new reality, it is necessary for a man to think with an open mind and be prepared to form an opinion purely on the basis of facts. Those who reject the truth do so mostly because the truth appears to them strange in relation to their own familiar standards. Over a long period of time those familiar standards permeate their hearts to such an extent that it becomes impossible for them to think of accepting alternatives. Till the last moment they are unable to emerge from the sphere familiar to them and recognize the truth. The result of this attitude in communities was that the people belonging to them, in spite of being shown miracles, did not embrace the faith. Once they judged a prophet to be an ordinary man, basing their opinion on purely material factors, the person so judged could never be anything more than ordinary in their eyes. Even if he performed supernatural feats in front of them, their ideas were so rooted in the earlier traditions that he went on seeming unimportant, and so they would hold that his feats were just magic or some optical illusion and not a proof of his being a representative of God.