Fulfilment of a Grand Prophecy - Hazrat Ahmad’s Challenge to John Alexander Dowie — Page 84
88. Fulfillment of a Grand Prophecy he accepts the challenge within this period and fulfills all its conditions as published by me previously, and makes an announcement to that effect in his paper, the world will soon see the end the world will soon see the end of this contest. I am about 70 years of age, while. Dr. Dowie is about 55, and, therefore, compared with me, he is a young man still. But since the matter is not to be settled by age, I do not care for this great disparity in years. The whole matter rests in the hand of Him who is the Lord of the heaven and earth and judge over all judges, and He will decide it in favor of the true claimant. " "But if Dr. Dowie cannot even now gather courage to appear in the contest against me, let both continents bear witness that I shall be entitled to claim the same victory as in the case of his death in my lifetime if he accepts the challenge. The pretensions of Dr. Dowie will thus be falsified and proved to be an imposture. Though he may try as hard as he can to fly from the death which awaits him, yet his flight from such a contest will be nothing less than death to him, and calamity will certainly overtake his Zion, for he must take the consequences of either the acceptance of the challenge or its refusal. " "I close these brief remarks with the following prayer: O powerful and perfect God, who hast ever been revealing and wilt ever continue to reveal. Thyself to Thy prophets, do Thou give Thy judgment and show to Thy people the imposture and falsehood of Dowie and Pigott, for Thy weak creatures, having taken to human worship and trusted in weak mortals like themselves, have fallen away from Thy path and are wandering in errors far from Thee. ”. Dowie at first paid no public attention directly to the challenge from the Far East. But on the 26th of September 1903, he said, in his Zion City publication: "People sometimes say to me, 'Why do you not reply to this, that and the other thing?' Reply! Do you think that I shall reply to the gnats and flies?. If I put my foot on them I would crush out their lives. I give them a chance to fly away and live. ”. Only once did he show in any way that he knew of the existence of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. . He referred to him as the "foolish Mahomet an. Messiah," and on Dec. 12, 1903, he wrote: "If I am not God's prophet, there is none on. God's earth that is. " In the following January he wrote, "My part is to bring out the people from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, and settle them in this and other. Zion-cities until the time shall come when the. Mahometans are swept away. May God grant us that time. ". Whereupon Mirza tersely challenged him to "pray to God that of us two whoever is the liar may perish first. ". Dowie died with his friends fallen away from him and his fortune dwindled. He suffered from paralysis and insanity. He died a miserable death, with Zion City torn and frayed by internal dissensions. . Mirza comes forward frankly and states that he has won his challenge, or "prediction. " And he asks every seeker after truth to accept the truth as he announced it. He regards the misfortunes, which befell his traducer in America, as evidences of divine vengeance commingled with divine judgment. As a follower says, however: "It is not to exult over a fallen enemy that we refer to certain circumstances in Dowie's life. . Such a thing is furthest from our ideas. It is only in the cause and for the furtherance of truth that we publish these facts. The holy religion of Islam, no doubt, teaches us not to mention the faults of the dead, but this does not mean that facts should be concealed when their disclosure is in the interests of society and a service to humanity, truth and. God. ”. All these conclusions the follower arrives at with a certainty which rings with self-conviction, or at least with pride in the accuracy of his prediction. He goes on to say: "In bringing disaster upon Dowie's head, and ultimately in his untimely death brought about with