Commonsense About Ahmadiyyat — Page 21
peoples to get out of the rut of Islam and plunge into European civilisation as quickly as possible. The apologist Sir Sayyid Ahmad. Khan, of Aligarh University fame in India, thought Islam and. European civilisations were the same good things and should be allied together. Jalal Uddin Afghani roamed round the Muslim world with his Pan-Islamic idea. The orthodox Muslim ulemas and mullas wished to fight jihad against the Europeans with daggers and swords facing machine guns. The great upheavals of jihad actually started against the British by the Mahdi in Sudan (1885), which did not free the Muslim world, not even the Sudan itself. . . About this time, the Christian leaders were also having tempestuous times from the secularists in Europe, who believed. God was dead, if He ever lived. As more and more scientific inventions came into popular use, changing the religion-based traditional society into a science-based industrial secular society, the Church leaders were fleeing from the intellectual onslaughts of the Darwinists, Marxists, atheists and agnostics. Seeing no future for Christianity in Europe, they fled to the overseas empires as Christian missionaries, making great success among the heathens, converting them to Christianity, including some. Muslims also. In these circumstances, Muslim ulemas squirmed and were discomfited, as the Christian missionaries asserted that the European military, political and scientific successes in the world were due to Christianity. See! Islam could do nothing like this, they seemed to say. In these controversies, the Punjab was the worst affected area where Muslims were at the lowest ebb, having suffered the ordeals of Sikh rule until the British conquered the Punjab in 1879 when they regained their freedom to practise and preach Islam again under the British. . We have already said before and repeat it again that the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first one and a half decades of the twentieth had been the acme of the golden age of the Europeans, headed by Britain. But these were the days of most humiliation and depression for the Muslim and Afro-Asia leaders. At this time there was only one man who saw the dire condition of the Muslim world, riddled with various misconcep21