Flowers for the Women Wearing Veils - Volume I — Page 490
! ! 490 Ahmadi Women and the Training of Children Hazrat Mirza Bashir - ud - D in Mahmud Ahmad, Khalifat - ul - Masih II ra January 25 , 1946 In my opinion, the responsibility of teaching children [the characteristic of ] hard work lies with their t eachers and their parents, yet they have not instilled in them the habit of striving and working hard. We are competing against such nations whose youth d o not marry well in to their forties , and they spend their lives working in laboratories. Consumed i n their work, they meet their end at their desks and leave t heir nations with extremely useful inventions. We face such people who when they ran out of cannonballs, gunpowder, or other weapons they import ed discarded rifles from America in order to fight their enemies. The British asserted, ‘ Let the Germans come. W e will fight them at sea. If we are un able to fight them at sea , we will fight them upon the shores. If we are un able to fight them up on the shores, we will fight the m in the streets of our cities. Wh en we are unable to fight them in the streets, we will fight them at the doors of our homes. If we are still unable t o fight them, we will board ships to America, however we will never end the war with them. ’ [ Adapted f rom Sir Winston Churchill’s speech “We Shall F ight on the B eaches” 1940 ]. These are the sort of people we are facing and to challenge the m, we are given such young men who claim they will bear hunger, they will go in to the jungles, the mountains, and the deserts, who claim they are willing to leave their homeland to go abroad, who claim they are ready to sacrifice everything close to their heart, however , once they are assigned with a task, they say, “I cannot manage o n forty rupees and hence I have come running back. ” Another say s, “I could not adjust to the new place ; hence I was forced to leave my work. ” At the same time , he writes that the [Ahmadiyya] m ovement should not take offence at his action and keep him listed among the w aq i f [lifelong devotees of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community]. He returns