The Miracle of Ahmad — Page 48
Hazrat Mirza ghulam AHmAD 48 he has straight away rejected the very idea of the appearance of a Mahdi. May I ask him among whose army the Messiah would descend if there were to be no Mahdi at all? The assortment of the books listed above is mentioned only to establish that the Messiah would descend to support the cause of the Mahdi. But, why would he ever appear if there were to be no Mahdi at all? The Khalifah had to appear from among the Quraish, but this does not seem to be the case anymore. I state justly that the traditions in the above-mentioned books are bipartite. One, which Maulaw i Muhammad Husain has ruled out as inauthentic, pertains to the Mahdi. As for the second part, that pertains to the advent of the Messiah from Heaven. I will prove it inauthentic. When one of the two interdependent parts is rendered inauthentic, the other one necessarily becomes liable to revocation. ‘ I s a [ Jesus] cannot be the Khalifah as he is not from the Quraish; as for the Mahdi, the Maulaw i has himself done away with him. So why then should ‘ I s a be burdened with returning to the world? For about 2,000 years now he has become accustomed to remaining idle and has become disposed to inaction. It would now be improper to bother him needlessly. What is more, these a ha d i th contradict each other so greatly that if you were to try and find a hadith to oppose another, you could find it at once with no delay. Hence, to abandon the deci - sive statements of the Holy Quran thereby, and to ruin one’s faith by following such contradictory traditions, can only be the work of a fool, not of a wise person. If a ha d i th held any weight despite being inconsistent with the Holy Quran, the traditions regarding S al a t should have been given prime importance and should have had an unbroken chain