Malfuzat – Volume III — Page 277
277 justified to state that John was Elijah. Now, although my view in relation to these books is: تُکَذِّبُوْا َ تُصَدِّقُوْا و َ ل َ فَل (you should neither accept their truth, nor reject them) , it is still necessary to note that the Holy Quran states: 1 َ تَعْلَمُوْن اَهْلَ الذِّكْرِ اِنْ كُنْتُمْ لَا فَسْئَلُوْۤا So ask the people of the Reminder, if you know not. Moreover, this account of Elijah has not been rejected or refuted anywhere in the Holy Quran, and both the Jewish and Christian people consider it to be true. If this controversy was not true, the Christians ought to have spoken out and denied this affair altogether, especially when denying the account in question outright delivers the Christians from the predicament with which they are faced in the case that they accept the account to be true. However, as they have not denied the account and accept that it is true, there is no reason for us to reject this narration without reason. The fact of the matter is that there was an authentic prophecy among the Jews that Elijah would come before the appearance of the Messiah as. The Verdict of the Messiah as And so this is why the Jews fell into difficulty when the Messiah finally appeared. They asked the Messiah about Elijah, and the Messiah said that Elijah had come in the person of John. This also proves that if this prophecy had been false, then first and foremost, it was the responsibility of the Messiah that instead of saying that John is the Elijah who was to come, he ought to have responded by saying that no Elijah would come. If the Messiah had not considered this prophecy to be true, he would not have stated that Elijah had appeared in the form of John. This is not an insignificant issue of no consequence. The fact that the Messiah accept- ed the allegation of the Jews and responded to it is a brilliant argument that even he himself accepted this prophecy to be certain and true. The question raised by the Jews, in any case, was valid and Jesus as accepted it, whereafter he responded by saying that the Elijah who was to come has appeared in John—accept this if you please. Now if there is no such thing as metaphors and if they did not consti- tute a large part of the prophecies given by God Almighty, then just as the Jews rejected the interpretation of the Messiah as , one would have to reject the verdict of the Messiah as as well. For as I have stated earlier, the Muslims cannot deny the 1 an-Nahl, 16:44 p. 253