Nubuwwat & Khilafat Prophethood & its Successorship — Page 57
Nubuwwat and Khilafat in the Ahmadiyyah Muslim Jama'at 57 • When they were reminded by those who had taken the pledge of khil a fat that: a. a ha d i th give the title of Nab i to the Promised Messiah as , and b. Promised Messiah as has been repeatedly addressed by the word Nab i in his revelations, and c. khil a fat is a topic which comes within the subject of nubuwwat , and as declared by Hadrat Khalifatul Masih I ra , whatever applies to the original directive would apply to its subordinate matters; they started rejecting the nubuwwat of the Promised Messiah as. In the beginning, they did not dare to do so openly. Rather they continued to use the term Nab i in mentioning the Promised Messiah as. For example on March 22, 1914 Paigh a m-e- S ul h writes: We belong to the followers of a Nab i. Then on April 12, 1914, addressing Maulav i Sher ‘Al i , it writes: You are making an ordinary statement in contradiction to the clear statement of a Mursal [the one sent by God] and Ma’m u r. However, gradually, under the pretext of zill i [reflective] and bur u z i [spiritual re-appearance], they started rejecting the nubu- wwat of the Promised Messiah as. On April 12, Paigh a m-e- S ul h gave the following rationale for this rejection: Al-Fa d l says that: “According to Curzon Gazette Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was not a Nab i ; therefore his son should be his successor. This is its mistake. Mirz a Sahib was a Nab i and his successorship should be settled in the same manner as it was settled for previous A ñ biy a’. ” We wanted to write about this issue in detail, but will confine ourselves to a short note for the sake of brevity. The surprise is that al-Fa d l in its earlier issue had accepted that Mirz a Sahib is a zilli Nabi but now it regards him to be a Prophet like earlier Prophets. Were all earlier A ñ biy a’ of the