A Present to Kings — Page 32
32) study of it, can not help being captivated by its charms, therefore all the religions make a common cause against it. But nothing that Islam ever suffered from these external enemies has equalled the harm it has suffered in this age from internal foes. True it is that the poet has said"Of stranger's hands I ne'er complain,. For friends were they who cansed my pain. ". External enemies have during the last thirteen centuries been unceasingly trying to injure Islam but still without success. . But within the last century or two members of the community themselves have made a total havoc with the vitals of the faith. . On the one hand the Ulemas (doctors) undertook to represent the golden principles of Islam in such dark and terrible an aspect as served to scare away the men who had all but accepted the faith. They introduced Jewish legends into, and mixed up human ideas with, the pure teachings of the Iloly Quran, and proceeded to make such curious commentaries as obscured beneath them the original beauty of the Holy Book. Just as a brilliant diamond can not show its lustre unless it is cut and cleaned of worthless matter, even so they shrouded the Holy. Qaran in the folds of such self-fangled commentaries as were calculated to lead an ignorant man to altogether deny the excellence of the Book, because he does not know that the picture presented to him is not that of the Holy Quran, but that its aspect has been altogether changed by its being painted over with the legends and tales of an alien people. Again, the harm which has come to Islam from the Ulemas of former days has been far surpassed by what it has suffered from the common actions of its present-day doctors, mystics, aristocrats and the masses. . In other words, the wrong course of their lives has caused the. Mussalmans to prove worse foes of Islam than even its enemies. . Islam, by reason of its many excellences, attracts to itself every one who studies it with a mind free from prejudice. . And in spite of the recondite interpretation and strange legends which have been introduced into its commentaries, its essential truth is discerned by many a person, but then the