The Promised Messiah and Mahdi — Page 255
THE PROMISED MESSIAH AND MAHDI. He exalted all the Prophets. This was their contention that required to be refuted. How has the Quran refuted it? The point of contention was that the Jews claimed to have hanged Jesus on the cross and had crucified him. They insisted that as Jesus died on the cross he could never have been exalted by Allah. He was, therefore, not like all the. Prophets, an exalted person. They claimed that he was neither a true believer nor did he attain salvation. It was necessary that the Holy. . Quran should act as the arbiter and give a ruling on this issue. The. Quran, therefore, gave this ruling and declared that Jesus also, like all the other Prophets, was exalted by Allah. It was of the utmost importance that the ruling in this matter in these verses, where else has He then settled this issue? Could we, God forbid, possibly attribute such a confusion and misjudgment to Allah in this matter that while the Jews persisted in their claim that Jesus was not a godly person at all, He delivered an irrelevant ruling that Jesus was sitting in the second heaven in his physical body? It is universally known that corporal ascension to heaven is not a precondition for a person's salvation. Only spiritual exaltation is the essential criterion. . In order to settle this dispute, it was necessary to stress that. Jesus was, God forbid, not an accursed person. He had, on the contrary, attained spiritual exaltation. Moreover, the word 'Tawaffi' (cause to die) in the Quran, placed before 'Rafa' (raised) clearly indicates the exaltation that every believer attains after his death. To interpret the word 'Tawaffi' as bodily ascent to heaven is stretching the meaning too far and tantamount to a manifest interpolation and an extremely grave misrepresentation of the Holy Quran, following the manner of the Jews. The Word 'Tawaffi' is used in the Quran as well as in the authentic Traditions to mean only extraction of the soul from a living body (i. e. cause to die). Nowhere has it been used to mean that a person has been taken up alive bodily into heaven. (Tadhkiratush Shahadatain, p. 13-15) * 4. The traditions mention clearly that during the night of the. M'raaj (spiritual ascension) the Holy Prophet had seen Jesus among the souls of the dead. The Holy Prophet then advanced forward and 255