Malfuzat – Volume X — Page 175
26 February 1908 175 Prophet s as giving life to the dead, but they have not been men- tioned in the authentic books of Hadith. Imam Bukhari, may Allah shower His mercy upon him, collected close to 100,000 Ahadith [sayings of the Holy Prophet s as ] at the cost of great hardships, but he retained only 40,000 1 of them, discarding the rest. Muslims have been very scrupulous in this regard. The Incident of Creating Birds Similarly, there is the issue of creating birds by Jesus. I do not deny miracles, rather I believe in them. The miracle of creation of birds by Jesus as is very much akin to the incident of the staff of Moses as. Despite the fact that it became a snake at the time of the confrontation with the enemies, yet at other times it had remained the same staff that it ever was and had not gone and mingled with some colony of snakes afterwards. Similarly, the birds of Jesus were, in the end, just of clay. In fact, the staff of Moses is far superior than the birds of Jesus as because it had to face the challenge and showed its supremacy in that challenge whereas those birds did not compete with anything nor was their supremacy ever proven. In short, one part of my claims has to do with proving the death of Jesus as which I have established in every way by writ- ing scores of books—presenting logical reasoning, reproducing records, quoting the statements of Imams. 1. This appears to be an error in transcribing. S a hih al-Bukh a r i contains approx- imately seven thousand two hundred and seventy-five Ahadith and if repeti- tions are excluded, there remain four thousand Ahadith. (Compiler)