A Note on the Translation Of all the damned dwellers of Dante's Inferno , a particularly unfortunate group comes in for a lot of stick. Its maimed members keep going forward, back and sideways at one and the same time thereby tearing themselves ap art. Bilingual people, I have often thought, are no less an unhappy lot. Condemned to lead a liminal life, ceaselessly shuttling between one orde ordinum /culture/language and another, we have often inflicted upon ourselves the same sado -masochist sufferi ngs of Dante's damned. Above all else perhaps we are pained and outraged that each culture is busy erecting its own segregation walls, impervious to all the revolutions underway in technology, information and telecommunication. Fortress Europe today is far more Eurocentric and xenophobic than it was fifty years ago. And the gloating, globalized, globalizing United States leaves the rest of the world speechless, increasingly looking back in anger at the happy days of American isolationism. At least we were spared the self -righteous rhetoric of ever burgeoning hordes of neolibs, neocons and crusading Zionized Christians. Indeed, with the level of western brutality to other cultures reaching an all- time high, many of us in Iraq, in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, would like to be slaughtered in silence, thank you very much. We ache for the good old days when we were massacred with barely the crack of a knuckle - the civilized English way! Faced with rampant Islamophobia and systematic Arab bashing, whi ch have come to replace anti- Semitism in most western capitals, the Arab and Islamic world is also cultivating its own claustrophobia. Every now and then we let out the odd defensive backlash, born of a chronic siege mentality. Fiery speeches and sweeping mass demonstrations flash on world TV screens every time a certain nonentity says something somewhere against what we hold dear. The same ominously angry, hairy, sub- The author said in his introduction, The study itself falls into four parts: Chapter One: An Introduction, Chapter Two: Aspects of Mercy for Human Beings in the Character of the Prophet Muhammad pbuh Before the Divine Call, Chapter Three: Introducing the Prophet Muhammad pbuh , Chapter Four: Aspects of Mercy for Human Beings in the Character of the Prophet Muhammad pbuh After the Divine Call.