News from the Internet
by Dr. Zahid Aziz
The Light & Islamic Review (US), January/February 1998 Issue (Vol. 75, No. 1, pp. 13–14)
1. Absurdity by Opponents of the Ahmadiyya Movement on Website:
An organization called the Idara Dawat-o-Irshad of Alexandria, Virginia, is a virulently anti-Ahmadiyya body and has a website devoted to spreading allegations against the Ahmadiyya Movement and its Founder in particular. Their URL is:
http://www.irshad.org/idara [link no longer available]
On their homepage there is a topic entitled Selected Writings of Muslim Scholars and Personalities, which leads to a page listing names of several Muslim writers who had branded Ahmadis as being enemies of Islam and expelled from the fold of the Islamic faith. In this (notorious, as we may call it) list is the name of Dr. Sir Muhammad Iqbal, two statements by whom are provided on the website.
The first of these was originally published in book form under the obnoxious title Islam and Ahmadism, in which Iqbal was responding to Pandit Nehru’s criticism of an earlier statement by Iqbal against the Ahmadiyya Movement. However, the Idara Dawat-o-Irshad has completely misunderstood why Iqbal wrote this booklet, and has put the following introductory comment above it:
“This Statement was produced in 1936 to clarify Dr. Iqbal’s position and request the non-Muslim Governor (Pandit) of India to declare the Qadianis a non-Muslim minority.”
This simply demonstrates their height of absolute ignorance of elementary historical facts. They seem to think that the title Pandit means governor, and that Nehru was in 1936 the “Governor of India”, and Iqbal was appealing to him to declare Ahmadis as non-Muslims! We even feel embarrassed in correcting this infantile nonsense by having to state the ordinary history known to everyone. Apart from the fact that there has never been a position of “Governor of India”, in 1936 India was under British rule and Pandit Nehru was the leader of a political party, who, far from being any kind of governor, was sometimes in prison in those days. Dr. Iqbal died in 1938, long before Nehru became Prime Minister of India in 1947.
In fact, it was to the British government of India that Iqbal had appealed, in not this but an earlier statement, to declare Ahmadis as non-Muslims. But as our opponents portray the Ahmadis as tools of British imperialism and they project their own leaders (such as Iqbal) as conducting a jihad against British rule, it would be impossible for them to admit that Iqbal was appealing to the British government to come to the rescue of the Muslim Ummah [Nation] and perform the great service for Islam of expelling Ahmadis from its fold. As our opponents are publishing such statements of Iqbal’s, we ask them this question: Do you consider that Iqbal was right to appeal to the British government of India to declare Ahmadis as non-Muslim, and if so, do you therefore believe that the British government had the authority to determine who is a Muslim and who is not?
The second statement of Iqbal on this website is a short letter written by him to Pandit Nehru, and here again the following heading has been added:
“Response of Dr. Sir Muhammad Iqbal to the Governor of India, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru”
As the letter is clearly dated right at the top as June 21, 1936, it is even more astonishing that the Idara Dawat-o-Irshad organization should describe Nehru as “Governor of India”.
We have noticed that in one sentence in this brief letter Iqbal writes as follows:
“I myself have little interest in theology, but had to dabble in it a bit in order to meet the Ahmadis on their own grounds.”
Why is Iqbal regarded as a great Muslim philosopher when he himself says that he had “little interest” in theology? And he only “dabbled in it a bit” in order to refute the beliefs of the Ahmadis. Iqbal and his followers should then be grateful to Ahmadis, because of whom he was forced to learn some theology, otherwise he would have been totally ignorant of it!
2. Qadiani Debater changes Belief during Debate:
Recently a Qadiani, debating on an Internet Newsgroup with our Fazeel Sahukhan, first expressed the original Qadiani belief that Jesus’ prophecy about the coming prophet who would have the name ‘Ahmad’, in verse 61:6 of the Holy Quran, applies (God forbid) not to the Holy Prophet Muhammad but to Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. This is in line with the belief of the Qadiani Khalifa Mirza Mahmud Ahmad about Hazrat Mirza that
“he was ‘the Ahmad’ spoken of in the prophecy of Jesus referred to in the Holy Quran in 61:6” (The Truth About the Split, p. 55),
and that this passage “speaks directly” about Hazrat Mirza but “only indirectly” refers to the Holy Prophet Muhammad (ibid., p. 57).
However, the Qadiani debater then learnt from somewhere that their Movement’s own official English translation of the Quran says the following under this verse:
“Thus the prophecy mentioned in the verse applies to the Holy Prophet, but as a corollary it may also apply to the Promised Messiah….”
This is the exact opposite of Mirza Mahmud Ahmad’s statement that the prophecy speaks directly about Hazrat Mirza and only indirectly about the Holy Prophet! When the Qadiani debater realized this complete turn-around in their Movement’s position, he immediately embraced the latter belief. In the true tradition of his Movement, he did not stop to think or question why their belief had reversed, but accepted the latest instructions as the new gospel.
The fact is that after Mirza Mahmud Ahmad concocted and announced his heretical belief, that the Holy Prophet Muhammad was not the ‘Ahmad’ of the prophecy, the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement demolished it so comprehensively that the Qadianis were forced to retract their heresy. But, of course, their leadership cannot afford to admit that, otherwise their members might start wondering which of their other beliefs are wrong vis-à-vis the Lahore Ahmadis.