Nurul-Haqq (Part II)

The Light of Truth (Part II)

Background

The Promised Messiah(as) gradually acquired a strong resemblance to Jesus under whose name he was destined to guide the whole world. At the time of the advent of Jesus, the attention of the world was arrested by the appearance of a Star: “Wise men came from the East to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For, we have seen his star in the east, and have come to worship him.” In the Promised Messiah(as)’s days, the attention of men was drawn towards him by means of visions and revelations and diverse natural phenomena.

The Book

In the book, the Promised Messiah(as) made a particular mention of a prayer that he made in the first part of the book, in which he asked for a Divine sign in his support. He argued that the Holy Prophet(sa) had spoken of a sign which would appear to support and confirm his advent as the Promised Messiah.

A.R. Dard(ra), in his book, Life of Ahmad quotes on, p. 418:

Darqutni, a most eminent and recognized scholar, records a saying of the Holy Prophet(sa):

For our Mahdi, there shall be two signs which have never happened for anyone else since the creation of heavens and the earth. At his advent, there shall occur an eclipse of the moon in the first of its appointed nights and an eclipse of the sun on the middle one of its appointed dates, and both will occur in the month of Ramadan.

The prophecy does not mean that the occurrence of the eclipse would in itself be unique and unprecedented, scientists have formulated certain laws and cycles of the recurrence of eclipses. These cycles are known to be determined principally by the motion of the moon and the revolution of the earth round the sun and the moon round the earth. It is said that successive eclipses occur very nearly in the same order. This period of recurrence has been known from remote antiquity and is called the Saros. There are various other laws which govern the phenomena. But the prophecy made thirteen hundred years beforehand, indicated that the two signs for the advent of the true Mahdi would be that the sun and the moon would be eclipsed in the manner predicted. Eclipses did, no doubt, occur before, but never as a sign of the advent of a heavenly reformer, because there had never been in the history of the world a claimant of any kind at the time of the phenomena described. It is also confirmed by the Holy Quran (75:9-10) which refers to the same prophecy...

Now, as indicated in the hadith, the eclipse of the moon actually occurred on Thursday evening, 7:00 to 9:30 p.m. (Calcutta time), the 13th day of Ramadan, 1311 A.H. (March 20, 1894) and that of the sun occurred on Friday morning, 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. (Calcutta time), the 28th day of the same Ramadan (April 6, 1894). It was recorded and reported in the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, the Pioneer of Allahabad and all vernacular papers. The eclipse of the moon generally occurs on the 13th, 14th or 15th day of the lunar month, and according to the prophecy, it occurred on the first date. The eclipse of the sun generally takes place on the 27th, 28th or 29th and it occurred on the 28th which was the middle date as predicted. Hence, the Promised Messiah(as) rightly claimed that the prophecy was fulfilled and that it was a strong evidence of the truth of his claim. People marvelled at the manner in which the Promised Messiah(as)’s claim was supported by heavenly signs. Seekers after truth poured into Qadian, visitors came from distant places. The Promised Messiah(as)’s correspondence swelled. The Promised Messiah(as) wrote the following on the title page of this book with caption “Warning”: ‘This book along with the first part had been prepared to counter the arguments advanced by Padre ‘Imad-ud-Din and Maulavi Muhammad Hussain Batalvi along with a prize of Rs. 5,000 with the condition that both of them were welcome to write a book as convincingly as one produced by me.” Both of them are given one month’s period, i.e., by the end of June 1894 after which it should be assumed that they had run away from the challenge. The Promised Messiah(as) further enlarged the scope of the challenge by inviting all the Padres to join and also extended the grace period to three months.

The Promised Messiah(as) further offered a reward of Rs.1,000 each to any person who could produce a single hadith wherein it had been asserted that the advent of any other prophet had been heralded and supported by solar and lunar eclipses jointly taking place in the same month. He offered another prize of Rs.1,000 to any one, who could prove with the help of Arabic grammar, poetry or prose wherein the moon of the first night has been called as Qamar.1

Specimen of Writing

The correct interpretation and the true and correct meaning [of the hadith] is that ‘the moon would be eclipsed on the first night in the month of Ramadan’ means that it will be eclipsed on the first of the three nights in which it is full, as you well-know the expression ayyam-e-bid [white days] … Also, the meaning of his words that ‘the sun would be eclipsed on the middle [day]’ is that the solar eclipse would occur in a manner that it would split in the middle the days on which an eclipse takes place … I have not said this on my own; rather, it is a revelation from the Lord of the worlds.2