Life of Ahmad — Page 410
LITERARY MIRACLE as 410 and none were to come forward to take up the challenge, would not this be a wonder and a marvel? Yet this was the case with the Promised Messiah as. He repeatedly challenged the divines of Arabia, Egypt, Syria and India, but none dared to take up the challenge. Some of them, instead of writing books themselves, affected to find fault with his books, but while doing so they committed such glaring blunders that they earned everlasting disgrace. He even offered large rewards, sometimes as much as ten thousand rupees, to those who would write books in Arabic as pure and chaste as his, and appointed a very fair and easy mode of adjudging these rewards, but none came forward to claim them, although we find that people daily undertake arduous and hazardous tasks for the sake of earning rewards of much smaller value. God took away their courage and they lost the fluency of their tongues and the charm of their pens. This miracle shall ever serve as a sign for seekers after truth and as a condemnation of Ahmad’s as enemies. He showed many miracles of the same kind on different occasions. The magnitude of this miracle is further enhanced by the fact that the Arabic works of Ahmad as were not merely literary gymnastics like the Maq a m a t-e- H ar i r i. They were all full of meaning and each one of them fulfilled a specific purpose in consonance with his true mission. He addressed the Arabic speaking world as a Reformer and brought home to the Sunnis,