Kabul Witnesses a Sign — Page 4
ence, began to drive back ·the slender Muslim force, the Holy Prophet. prayed to God for succour and in obedience to Divine c. ommand. threw a handful of pebbles towards the enemy. That was·, as it were, a sign for the celestial powers to come into action. No sooner had the Prophet thrown that handful of pebbles th11-n a strong wind 'blew from behind the backs of the Muslims and with it arose a storm of sand and pebbles ·which striking against the faces of the. Meccans half blinded them and rendered harm- less and innocuous the arro\YS aimed at the Ivl uslims which began now to fall short of their destination in the middle of. the field of battle. In this way God inflicted a defeat on the Meccans atrd vouchsafed a decisive victory to the Muslims. It is to ·this memorable event that the verse of the Quran refers in which God says to the Prophet: "When you threw the pebbles you did not throw them. It was, in fact, God who had thrown them; because no sooner had you thrown them than the elements seemed to make common cause with the Muslim army to destroy the enemy. '' The revelation of this Quranic verse-to the Promised Messiah signified that an event similar to that of Badr was to take place, when in conformity with Divine decree a small and weak army was to fight a big and very powerful force and in spite of the paucity of its means and resou·rces was to win a victory over their more powerful opponents. This revelation evidently shows that of the two armies re- ferred to therein the larger and more powerful one would have rendered itself deserving of divine punishment on account of its open hostility to the Ahmadis, just as the Quresh of Mecca had made themselves deserving of divine punishment by opposing and persecuting the Holy Prophet and his companions, and though the small army that would fight and defeat this great and powerful force would apparently be of as little ~ignificance and consequence as a few pebbles are, and would hardly be fit to be called an army, it would be serving a divine purpose and would therefore be brought into being by the prayer of God's Messiah. Now it is quite obvious that 1n the world there is no government which, as the government of a country, had subject- ed the Ahmadis to most cruel persecution, mercilessly murdering and stoning to death their members, and against which the Promised Messiah bad invoked divine wrath and punish• m;ent~ as he did against the Kabul G~vernment on the otcasion of"'the sto·ning fo··death of the Shahzada Abdl1l "Latif. ·Let us