Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya Part V — Page 507
Reply to the doubts raised by rashĪd a H mad gangohĪ 507 1 َو اَّمِا َكَّنَيِرُن َضْعَب ْيِذَّلا ْمُهُدِعَن ْوَا َكَّنَيَّفَوَتَن۠ And then, for this sole purpose, I also read collections of Arabic poetry and reviewed the verses written prior to and after the advent of Islam with great attention, and spent a great deal of time reading them, but I did not find even one instance among them wherein God is the f a ‘il of the verb توفّی [ tawaff i ], which is used for a proper noun as the maf ‘ u l bihi —that is, some individual has been made the object by specifying him—and it has any other meaning besides ‘causing to die’. I then queried many Arab scholars and experts as well, and verbally learned from them, too, that the idiom prevalent in the Arab world to this very day is that when a person says with regard to another person, نا ل توفّی هللا ف it is taken to mean categorically and definitively that God caused that person to die. And when an Arab receives a letter from another Arab wherein it is written, for instance, توفّی الل ّٰ زیدًا , it is under- stood from this that ‘God has caused Zaid to die. ’ After all this research, which has reached the level of true certainty, it is confirmed—and attained the level of an established and incontro- vertible fact—that when the word توفّی [ tawaff i ] is used in this way with regard to an individual, it means that he has died and nothing else. And since the word توفّی [ tawaff i ] has been used in this fashion twice in the Holy Quran with reference to Hadrat ‘ I s a , it is therefore established categorically and to the degree of certainty that Hadrat ‘ I s a , may peace be upon him, has indeed died, and his raf ‘a is no more than a spiritual exaltation, and that his death did not occur through murder or cruci- fixion, as God Himself has said, but rather he died of his own natural death. It is also established on the basis of Lis a nul-‘Arab and other lexicons that the true meaning of the word توفّی [ tawaff i ] is ‘to cause someone to 1. And if We make you witness a part of what We promised them or cause you to die ( S u rah Y u nus, 10:47). [Publisher]