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Chapter
2:
Religious Dedication
Links
present on this page:
Love
for the Holy Quran
|| Divine
Visions ||
Anti-Islamic
Christian Literature
|| Comparative
Study of Religion
|| The
Arya Samaj ||
The
Brahmo Samaj
||
Love for
the Holy Quran
As he himself says, at the age
of forty, a new era thus dawned upon Ahmad, and he began to
receive Divine revelations. His father’s death brought
about a radical change in his life, and his religious
tendencies began to assume a more definite form. There was
no longer any pressure put upon him to give himself up to
worldly pursuits, and the whole of his time was from then
onwards devoted to the study of the Holy Quran and other
Islamic literature. He was undoubtedly leading a deeply
religious life, but it had taken a quite different course
from that which religious devotion normally followed in
those days. Many schools of the Muslim Sufis require their
votaries to undergo various forms of devotional exercises,
of which no indication is found in the practice of the Holy
Prophet. Ahmad belonged to none of these schools and he
never practised such innovations. In fact, from his early
life, he hated all ascetic practices which were opposed to
the word and the spirit of the Holy Quran. His only
devotional exercise was the study of the Holy Quran in
solitude. For days and months, he would continue studying
the Holy Book, and so great was his love for it that those
who saw him were convinced that he was never tired of
reading it. His son, Mirza Sultan Ahmad, who was then a
young man of about twenty-five years, bears witness to this
in the following words:
"He had a copy of the Holy Quran which
he was continually reading and marking.
[Note
1 (Starts): This
copy of the Holy Quran is now in the possession of the
author, and on it, in Ahmad’s own handwriting, are
numbered the Divine commandments and prohibitions in the
Holy Quran. Note
1 (Ends)]
I can say without exaggeration
that he might have read it ten thousand times."
Divine
Visions
On one occasion, he saw a vision in which
an old man appeared to him saying that, according to the law
of prophethood, fasting was a necessary preparation for
receiving Divine light. On the basis of this vision, he kept
fasts for a period of eight or nine months, reducing his
food during that time to two or three morsels. Nevertheless,
he did it privately so as to keep the fact concealed from
his nearest relatives, and made special arrangements for the
disposal of the food which he received regularly. This long
fasting, however, had no injurious effect upon his health.
On the other hand, he saw many wonderful visions relating to
the future, some of which were later on published in the
Barahin Ahmadiyya, his first great work. The
fulfilment, years afterwards, of the prophecies contained in
them showed that they were actual revelations from God and
not the hallucinations of a diseased brain.
Anti-Islamic
Christian Literature
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was, however, no mere visionary. From his
early life, he was a student not only of Islam but also of
comparative religion. He himself says:
"I have been studying
Christian literature from the early age of sixteen or
seventeen, and have been pondering over Christian
objections. I collected all those objections which the
Christians advance against our Holy Prophet
[Note
2 (Starts): This
collection was accidentally burned later in the life-time
of Ahmad. Note
2 (Ends)] . . .
Their number is about three thousand. God is a witness
and none greater than He can be produced as a witness
that, as I have just said, I have been studying Christian
literature from the time when I was sixteen or seventeen
years old, but not for a moment have those objections
made any impression on me, or created any doubt in my
mind, and this is simply due to the grace of God."
Christianity necessarily attracted his
attention first, as that was the only foe of Islam in his
early days. We have seen that, during his stay at Sialkot,
he had discussions with Christian missionaries about the
comparative merits of Islam and Christianity. Returning to
Qadian after four years, he actively refuted the
anti-Islamic propaganda of Christianity, whose centre was
Batala. In fact, Christian propaganda against Islam was most
active, and at the same time, most scurrilous, during the
latter half of the nineteenth century. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad,
being a devoted student of religion, closely studied that
literature, and his heart ached at the way in which the
holiest of men was being maligned and abused. By producing
this abusive literature, the aim of Christianity was to
engender, in Muslim hearts, hatred for the Holy Founder of
Islam. In fact, with its numerous bands of missionaries
insinuating themselves into every nook and corner of the
Muslim world, and with heaps of abusive literature
distributed freely among the Muslims, Christianity was
challenging the very existence of Islam, and Ahmad, whose
heart was full of the deepest conviction of Islamic truth,
took up the challenge in real earnest. He started to write
against the aggressiveness of Christianity, and articles
from his pen began to appear in Muslim periodicals. The
publication of such articles in the Manshur
Muhammadi, which was issued from Bangalore in Southern
India, shows the keenness with which he was controverting
the Christian propaganda.
Comparative
Study of Religion
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was not,
however, a mere controversialist. He was a student of
religion, and, as early as 1873, while his father was still
alive and he was engaged in law-suits relating to the family
estates, he had determined to make a comparative study of
religion and to place the result of his researches before
the public. He had already decided to write a book, and the
following memorandum in his own handwriting show his deep
consciousness of the superiority and the perfection of the
Islamic teachings which it had become his life’s aim to
establish and for which he wanted freedom from worldly
entanglements:
"In this book, it will be
necessary to state that the law of Mustafa [the
Islamic Law] is perfect and more comprehensive than
all other laws. To prove this, a law shall be taken for
example from the Torah in the first place, then from the
Gospels, and after that from the Holy Quran, so that when
the reader compares the three laws, it will be evident to
him which of the three laws is the best and the
excellent."
This note is signed thus: "Ghulam
Ahmad, 17th Oct. 1873, Friday,
Qadian."
The Arya
Samaj
He was preparing himself for
this great work by studying not only the Islamic literature,
the Holy Quran, Hadith and commentaries, but also the
literature of other religions, in his spare time. His
father’s death, in 1876, had opened the way for him to
realise the great dream of his life - to establish the
superiority of Islam over all other religions. While he was
thus fighting single-handed against the vast forces of
Christianity, another foe of Islam had appeared in the
field, in the form of the Arya Samaj. The founder of this
new off-shoot of Hinduism was born in distant Kathiawar,
Gujerat, in the Bombay Presidency, in the year 1824. At an
early age he fled from his home, and after visiting various
centres of Hindu learning and formally starting his mission
in 1875, at Bombay, he gave final shape to it two years
later, at Lahore, the capital of the Punjab, and the Arya
Samaj of today rests on the principles enunciated there.
Originally, this movement was directed against the
idol-worship of Hinduism, but, as Western education was
opening the Hindu mind for the acceptance of Christianity
and Islam, the Arya Samaj, from its inception, came into
conflict with these two religions.
The Punjab proved to be a fertile land
for the Arya Samaj, and, by the end of the year 1878,
branches of the organisation were established all over the
Punjab, one being established at Qadian itself. It was
through this local branch that Ahmad was drawn into a
controversy with the Arya Samaj. The local discussion soon
assumed importance and found its way into the columns of
both Hindu and Muslim papers of Lahore and Amritsar. The
Hindu Bandhu of Lahore, which was edited by Pandit
Shiv Narain Agni Hotri, who later became the founder of
another Hindu sect, called the Dev Samaj, opened its columns
to articles for and against the Arya Samaj.
The following note from a Hindu
editor’s pen shows how powerfully Ahmad was carrying
the fight against the Arya Samaj:
"Our readers will remember
that the final paper of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad sahib which we
published in our issue for February, 1879, could not be
produced in its entirety in the said number, and was
therefore completed in the two following numbers. In that
article, the Mirza sahib also made an announcement in
which he addressed Swami Dayanand, the founder of the
Arya Samaj, as well as some of his followers (whose names
were given in the said number for February, 1879, on p.
39) We very gladly gave room to that article in our
periodical and we entertained the hope that, if the
arguments given by the Mirza sahib, which were very
clear and based on logical principles, were
appreciated by the above mentioned gentlemen,
[Note
3 (Starts):
Italics are mine. Note
3 (Ends)]
they would, according to
their declared principle that one should always be ready
to accept the truth and to give up untruth, publicly and
openly declare their faith in the falsity of the
transmigration of souls, and thus establish an example of
their willingness to accept the truth."
The Brahmo
Samaj
It has elsewhere been shown
that Ahmad had studied the Bible. His controversies with the
Arya Samajists show that he had also studied the Vedas, from
such translations as were available, and he repeatedly
called upon his opponents to judge the merits of the Holy
Quran as compared with other sacred books. Not only was he a
student of comparative religion, but he also claimed to have
the religious experience which makes men attain communion
with God. Therefore it was that he had to devote much of his
attention to the Brahmo Samaj, an earlier Hindu reform
movement, started by Ram Mohan Roy in 1828. It is a
well-established fact that the founder of the Brahmo Samaj
was mainly influenced by the Muslim Sufi ideals. It was thus
a very liberal movement, based on the principle that all
religions are true. Yet, strangely enough, it denied the
possibility of revelation, and it was this aspect of the
Brahmo Samaj which attracted the attention of Ahmad. Pandit
Shiv Narain Agni Hotri, the great Brahmo leader at Lahore,
himself carried on this controversy, but, after some time,
he deserted the Brahmo Samaj and laid the foundation of a
new sect, called the Dev Samaj.
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