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a simple prayer: "There is only one God, and Mohammed is his only messenger." Sufis don't use the whole sentence, they simply use half of the sentence: "There is only one God." Then comes the full stop.
Asked why they don't use the full sentence that Mohammed is the only messenger, they say, "Because the second part is not true. There have been many messengers, there are many messengers, there will be many messengers. Whoever realizes the truth becomes a messenger. It is nobody's prerogative, it is everybody's birthright. So we cannot use the other part."
The story is very beautiful. Sarmad was brought to the Jama Masjid in Delhi and asked, finally, "Are you going to use the full sentence in your prayer or not?"
He said, "How can I? -- because I myself am a messenger." They cut off his head.
Before cutting off his head they told him, "We give you a chance to think again."
He said, "Don't bother -- just cut off my head. But I say to you that even my head cut from my body will continue to say the same thing -- that there is only one God." And the story is that his head was cut off and it rolled down the many steps of Jama Masjid shouting loudly, "There is only one God!"
Sarmad was such a simple and such a beautiful man. There was no crime that he had committed, but this is how it has always been.
The fundamentalist Christians in America became tremendously afraid of me -- and I can understand their fear. I was the first man who had taken away thousands of Christians from the Christian fold.
Christians had been doing that all through the centuries: taking millions of people from other religions and converting them to Christianity. And it has been thought to be a great service to God. I was the first challenge to them -- nobody had done this before.
And the challenge became more significant because Christians have been able only to convert orphans, beggars, the poorest of the poor. And these people that they have converted to Christianity have nothing to do with religion. They have been given food, they have been given houses, they have been given schools for their children, they have been given hospitals
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