Chashma’-e-Masihi

The Fountain of Christianity

Background

This book was prompted by a letter that the Promised Messiah(as) received from a Muslim of Bance Bareli. In the mind of this Muslim, a number of doubts arose about Islam after he had read a highly misleading and provocative Christian tract on Islam under the title of Yanabi‘ul Islam. The Christian missionary argued in this book that Islam had brought no new teachings, and the Holy Quran is based mostly on tales of the past, some true and some wrong, some of them plagiarized, and this act was attributed to the Holy Prophet(sa).

The Book

This charge against the Holy Quran and the Holy Prophet(sa) was enough to prompt the Promised Messiah(as) to write a convincing rebuttal with reasons and arguments. The Promised Messiah(as) says:

I am amazed, why you (Muslims) have been influenced by the writings of such people, who are past masters in hoodwinking the people. They are like the magicians of the days of Moses, who made their ropes crawl like snakes. But since Moses was the Prophet of God, his “rod” swallowed up all the snakes. In the same way, the Holy Quran is the rod of God and it was, day by day, gradually swallowing up all such rope-snakes. And that day is at hand, rather very near, when no vestige of such ropes or snakes will be left. If the author of Ya nabiul Islam has toiled hard to prove that the Holy Quran was based on legend and stories, he totally failed. The writer of this Christian tract in his own thoughts proved that the teachings of the Bible were based on the Jews’ book, The Old Testament, and some other books of Israel. And he contended that this plagiarism took place in such a clear way that pages after pages were literally copied. This scholar tried to establish the fact that the New Testament is a collection of plagiarized material. In fact, he showed up his ugly finesse when he maintained that the Sermon of the Mount by Jesus Christ was borrowed from the Old Testament and other books of Israel.1

The Promised Messiah(as) said that if some of the narrations in the Holy Quran were compared with some of the earlier scriptures and kept the continuity of the Divine revelation, that was nothing new. As the Holy Prophet(sa) was completely bereft of education, he could not even read Arabic, what to speak of Latin and Hebrew, how could he copy? Ahmad(as) said that the Holy Quran is a living miracle and even the narration of events of the past prophets in a way are prophecies for the future. And then the eloquence of the Holy Quran and high literary merit is a miracle for which no other precedent could be quoted or cited.

The Promised Messiah(as) then at length discussed threadbare, the Christian theory of Trinity, the divinity of Jesus and the theory of Redemption and Salvation and made an excellent comparison between the teachings of The Holy Quran and The Holy Bible.

At the end of the Book, he added a supplement under the title The Real Salvation. The Promised Messiah(as) said that the Christians’ belief of salvation (making man free from sin) has a limited connotation. Real salvation, the Promised Messiah(as) pointed out, is when man becomes a recipient of permanent Divine blessings and these can only be acquired through a living relationship and love of God. The basis of knowledge is that man becomes fully aware of the complete and total qualities of God. The Christian beliefs of Trinity, the divinity of the Jesus and the Redemption and Salvation, were totally against the conception of the true knowledge of God. The God of Christianity is made out of Jesus and is the product of the imagination of St. Paul who gave birth to this outlandish idea of Trinity.

Specimen of Writing

The purpose of religion is that man should obtain deliverance from his passions and should develop personal love for God Almighty through certain faith in His existence and His perfect attributes. Such love of God is the paradise which will appear in diverse shapes in the hereafter. To be unaware of the true God and to keep away from Him and not to have any love for Him is the hell which will appear in diverse shapes in the hereafter. Thus the true purpose is to have full faith in Him. Now the question is which religion and which book can fill this need. The Bible tells us that the door of converse with God is closed and that the ways of obtaining certainty are sealed. Whatever was to happen, happened in the past and there is nothing in the future … Of what use then is a religion which is dead? What benefit can we derive from a book that is dead? What grace can be bestowed by a god who is dead.2