Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya (Part II)

Arguments in Support of the Holy Quran and the Prophethood of the Holy Prophet(sa) (Part II)

The Book

The second part of the book deals with the erroneous beliefs of the Aryah Samaj, the need for revelation and the superiority of the Holy Quran over other scriptures. The Promised Messiah(as) laid stress on the necessity of basing all arguments in favour of a particular faith upon the authorised scriptures of that faith. He invited the Aryah Samajists and the Christians to defend their faith by basing their arguments upon their scriptures Vedas and the Bible respectively.

For the first time, Hazrat Ahmad(as) introduced an element of decency, politeness and respect for the feelings of others and also their scriptures in his writing, which was universally absent in the writings of the Christians and the Aryah Samajists. He proposed to the leaders of all religions to show due respect to the religious feelings of the followers of any particular faith because he maintained that one could not win an argument by heaping abuses and vile attacks on the faiths of others. One could only win an argument by forcefully depicting the graces and beauties of one’s own religion by quoting from one’s own holy scripture.

Specimen of Writing

Reason is a lamp which God has furnished to man, the light of which draws man towards truth and saves him from a variety of doubts and suspicions and sets aside different types of baseless ideas and improper conjectures. Reason is very useful, very necessary and is a great bounty. Yet despite all this, it suffers from the shortcoming that it alone cannot lead to full certainty in the matter of understanding the reality of things. The stage of perfect certainty is when man should believe that the reality of things exists as it in fact does exist. Reason alone cannot lead to this high degree of certainty. At the onset it proves the need of the existence of something, but does not prove that in fact it exists. This degree of certainty is, when a person’s knowledge should proceed from the stage of ‘should be’ to the stage of ‘is’, and is acquired only when reason is joined by a companion which, confirming its conjecture, converts it into fact, that is today, regarding a matter concerning which reason says it ‘should be’ that companion informs that in fact it ‘is’. Reason only establishes the need of a thing; it cannot establish its existence, and these are two distinct and separate matters. Thus reason needs a companion which should supplement the defective ‘should be’ of reason with the affirmative ‘is’ and which should give information of facts as they truly exist. So, God Who is most Compassionate and Generous Desires to lead man to the stage of utmost certainty. God has fulfilled this need and has appointed several companions for reason and has thereby opened the way of perfect certainty to it, so that the soul of man, whose total good fortune and salvation depends upon perfect certainty, should not be deprived of its desired good fortune.1

It is not correct to say that language is the invention of man. Research has established that the inventor and the creator of human languages is God Almighty, Who created man out of His perfect power and Bestowed upon him a tongue that he may be able to speak. Had language been the invention of man, it would not have been necessary to teach a baby to talk. It would have invented its own speech as it grew in maturity But it is patent that if a child is not taught speech, it would not be able to speak. Whether it is nurtured in a Greek forest or in the British Isles or at the equator, he has to be instructed in the art of speaking, and in the absence of such instruction he would not be able to speak.2