Malfuzat - Volume IV — Page 160
160 Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in veils of ostentation and hypocrisy. The more one becomes informed of their actual state of affairs, the more filth and impurity is revealed. If one leaves the mosque and investigates their domestic life, these people will appear to be com - pletely barren of Islam. There is an anecdote in Mathnawi that a warehouse filled with a thousand mounds of grain was emptied of all its stock; if the mice had not eaten it, then where had it gone? Similarly, when fifty years of Prayer lead to no blessings, if it is not ostentation and hypocrisy that have turned them vain and useless, then one asks: where did they go? The signs of the righteous servants of God cannot be seen in these people of whom I speak. When a physician treats an ailing person, if the prescription that is given does not prove beneficial and effective, after a few days, the prescription is changed and the patient is diagnosed again. However, the diseased people that I speak of have been given a prescrip - tion that has always proved beneficial and swiftly efficacious. This demonstrates that these people have erred in the use of this prescription and have not followed the directions of the medicine. We cannot say that the pillars of Islam are flawed and that Prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and zakat, are not an effective cure, because this very same remedy has cured those diseased people of the past who had been adjuged incurable. Self-Invented Invocations I know that those people who have forsaken these pillars and crafted their own self-invented beliefs have only doomed themselves. For the Holy Quran had already stated: 1 ْ ُم َُكُ ْن ْـ ُي ِ َد ْ ُم َُكُ ْل ُ ِت ْ ُل َْمَ ُك َ ا َ ِم َْوْ ْي َْلْ ا This day have I perfected your religion for you. The religion had been perfected and by the completion of God’s favour, the cho - sen religion of God was Islam. So, to now forsake the path of the good deeds of the Prophet, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, and to invent one’s own practices; to abandon the Holy Quran and recite other invocations and poetic verses; to invent all sorts of litanies and formulas, is not for the pleasure of the soul, but for the pleasure of the self. People have failed to differentiate between the pleasure of the self and the pleasure of the soul, and have deemed both to be one and the same, even though they are two different things. If the pleasure of 1 al-Ma’idah , 5:4 p. 427