Invitation to Ahmadiyyat — Page 162
162 brought about the triumph of Islam, and in the presence of which no religion could stand up against Islam, was that he changed peo - ple’s notion of religious debate. Before the Promised Messiah as , the way religious debates were held by and large was that each group would try to prove the Founder of the other group to be a liar. The Jews would say that Jesus was false, the Christians would say the same of the Holy Prophet s as , the Zoroastrians would reject the Founders of all these three religions, and the followers of the three religions would in turn label the Prophets of the Zoroastrians as impostors, and then all the four together would label the Founders of other religions as untrue. Each group was thus at war with the other. Every sane person, seeing in every religion proofs for its truthfulness and yet finding every religion labelling the founder of every other religion as false, was left in a quandary. Such disputes resulted in increased bias and antagonism. The Hindus would read about the lives of their Rishis and marvel at their great moral and spiritual qualities, and yet they heard fol - lowers of other religions say that these Rishis were liars and pre - tenders. Naturally, they were offended by this and thought that these people had been blinded by bias. Followers of other reli - gions were equally horrified and angered to hear others denigrate their spiritual leaders. In short, an unsolvable dilemma had arisen that no one was able to solve. Those who examined the question without prejudice wondered how God could have chosen just one people and abandoned all the rest, but no one dared to openly raise this question, for it would destroy the very foundations of their religion. Hindus solved this problem, in their own estimation, by saying that all religions originated from God and are like the many paths