Truth Prevails — Page 151
( 151 ) received a wealth of benefits of the inner kind; and having received his name, and through the link of this name, I am a Rasul and a Nabi – but always without any new Sharia. I have never denied that I am a Nabi of this kind. In fact, this is the meaning and the sense, Allah has called me a Prophet and an Apostle. Even now I do not deny that I am a Prophet and an Apostle in this sense. ” ( Ek Ghalati Ka Izala , 1901) Mr. Faruqi writes: “Can such a person who does not understand his own prophethood, call others kafirs (infidels) if they dont accept him as a prophet? Further, what kind of a prophet is he who does not own to his own prophethood?” (Truth Triumphs, page 54) This question we have already discussed in some detail in the earlier portions of this book. It is true that the Promised Messiah did accept an alteration in his original conception in regard to Nabuwwat. In his Ilhams , very early in the course of his career as a gentleman, with reputation for virtue, and a serious scholar of Islam, he found this word being used in regard to himself. But from a deeply engrained sense of humility, and notions generally in vogue in the Muslim society of those days, he had a conception of Nabuwwat which he was reluctant to apply to himself, and therefore he interpreted it under a general tendency not to think too much about himself, which predisposed him to take this word in a figurative sense, whenever he found it applied to himself. But, as he has himself described, he found himself forced to modify his old ideas on the question of Nabuwwat – forced by the Wahyi coming to himself like powerful showers of rain. By and by, then this change in his old conception of Nabuwwat was solidly confirmed when he was told that the Messiah of the Mohammadi Dispensation (i. e. , himself) was superior to the Messiah of the Dispensation of Moses ( Kishti Nuh , 1902). The Lahore Section, therefore, should either altogether deny that he, was a Mamur ; or accept the simple explanation that he changed his conception in regard to Nabuwwat , which he has freely discussed in various places in the course of his writings and oral discourses. Therefore, as long as he interpreted the word Nabi figuratively to mean a Mohaddath , those who denied him, he never looked upon them as Kafirs. Under insistent divine pointers, when he gave up the old concept, on page 179 of Haqiqatul Wahyi , he defined kufr as being of two kinds, denial of the Promised Messiah, in other words, denial of his own claim, he held to be kufr of the second kind, essentially milder than a kufr resulting from denial of the Holy Prophet Mohammad, which turns a man into a non-Muslim, without a mitigating circumstance, on the exterior or the outer surface.