He continued: “And I have granted you, for the sake of your community, that I will never destroy them all at once by a sweeping famine, nor will I unleash against them an enemy from outside themselves who would lay waste to their stronghold—even were the peoples of the whole earth to join forces against them—until some of them destroy others.”

He related this at the very outset, when his Companions were extremely few in number, before the conquest of Mecca, and events unfolded exactly as he had foretold: the dominion of his community spread across the East and the West, yet it did not extend toward the South and the North to the same degree. Such was the moderation of his community that his call reached those regions lying at the very center of the inhabited world—the third, fourth, and fifth climatic zones.

His earlier statement in this regard has already been cited.