Arba'in — Page 132
132 raised a point with me that the verse 1 ْوَلَلَّوَقَت اَنْيَلَع was unique to the Holy Prophet, may peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, and was not applicable in the case of any other claimant of revelation; so why should we think that if someone were to forge a lie against God that he, too, shall also be destroyed? I replied that this Word of Allah is by way of presenting an argument, and just like the other arguments in support of the truthfulness of prophethood, this is another such argument as well. The truthfulness of the statement of Almighty God is validated only when a false claim- ant perishes. Otherwise, this statement cannot serve as a conclu- sive argument against a denier, nor can it serve as an argument for him. Rather, he can assert: The reason that the Holy Prophet, may peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, did not die for twenty-three years is not because he was truthful, but it was because forging a lie against God is not so great a sin that God must destroy the liar in this very world; for, if it had been a sin, and the ongoing practice of Allah had established that a fabricator of lies against God is punished in this very world, then there should have been some precedents to prove it, and you accept that there is not a single such example known; on the contrary, there are many examples available of peo- ple who forged lies against God for twenty-three years— nay, longer —but they did not perish. 1. And if he had falsely attributed even a trivial statement to Us ( S u rah al- Ha qqah, 69:45). [Publisher]