Ahmadiyya Movement — Page 57
57 in the same manner as they used to be revealed at the hands of the prophets of old. These signs number hundreds of thousands, but I shall cite here a few by way of illustration which do not stand in need of any external evidence. The first instance I take is his literary miracle which not only testified to the truth of his claim while he was alive, but would ever remain a strong proof of the truth of his claim. Despite the facts that he was a resident of an obscure village in the Punjab, and had never attended any school or seminary, having received some very elementary instruction from private tutors, and lived at a very long distance from Arabia, in a country where Persian was in greater vogue than Arabic, and was born at a time when the Punjab was dominated by the Sikhs, who were the bitter enemies of all learning, he made an announcement that God had bestowed upon him an extraordinary knowledge of, and com- mand over, the Arabic language which could not be matched even by those whose mother tongue was Arabic. In pursuance of this announcement he wrote and published several books in Arabic and called upon his opponents, including the people of Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, if they doubted his claim, to write books in Arabic, which should, in point of literary style, purity of diction, beauty of composition and the excellence and preg- nancy of meaning, match those written by himself, but none has so far dared to take up the challenge. The books written by him are still extant, and we still claim that they cannot be matched, and that God’s hand would be raised against any person who presumes to make an attempt to match them. Then there are his prophecies which he published concerning the success of his mission and his eventual victory, and which are being fulfilled in a manner passing the understanding of man. At the time when he published his claim he was almost unknown. He belonged, no doubt, to a respectable family, but, as I have stated above, the greater portion of the ancestral estate had been lost by the time his father’s death occurred. Qadian, the place to