Mahzarnama (The Memorandum) — Page 15
Mahzarnama 15 Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at, on the basis of reason and justice, or if the purpose is to determine the status of any individual or sect in Islam, in view of its particular exegesis of the "Verse of Khaatamun Nabiyyeen ," then a yardstick must be devised which can measure the disbelief of everyone whose beliefs run counter to Islam. With such a scale there will be no room to classify the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at as non Muslim. In regard to the foregoing issues, the viewpoint of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at can be summarized as under: The Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at believes that the only acceptable and practical definition of a Muslim is one which may be definitively predicated upon the Holy Quran, one which is clearly established to have been narrated by the Holy Prophet sa and adherence to which definition is clearly established throughout the lifetime of the Holy Prophet sa and the period of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. Any attempt to define a Muslim which bypasses this paradigm will not be free of pitfalls and lacunae. In particular, all the definitions which were formulated in the era subsequent to the aforementioned period (when the continued fragmentation of Islam eventually resulted in seventy-three sects) deserve to be rejected because these are mutually contradictory and cannot be simultaneously reconciled. Accepting any one such definition of a Muslim is impracticable because such a "Muslim" will be found to be non-Muslim on the basis of the rest of the definitions. There is no way out of this quagmire. When Mr. Justice Muhammad Munir asked various Muslim divines to define a Muslim, during the 1953 Enquiry, no two divines could unfortunately agree on any single definition. Mr. Justice Muhammad Munir regretfully observed: "Keeping in view the several definitions given by ulama , need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as