Ahmadiyyat - The Renaissance of Islam — Page 355
THE RENAISSANCE OF ISLAM 355 ble him in beauty and beneficence. This was a multi-faceted prophecy. The promised son was born on 12 January 1889. In 1889 Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed that he was the Reformer of the century whose advent had been pre- dicted by the Holy Prophet of Islam, peace be on him. In March of that year he laid the foundation of the Ahmadiyya Movement. By then revelation descended upon him in a constant flow. He was informed that he was the Mahdi and the Promised Messiah whose advent in the latter days had been predicted. He was also told by the Divine that in his person were fulfilled the prophecies handed down in all the great faiths of the'Second Advent of a great teacher in every one of those faiths. These claims of his aroused bitter opposition towards him on, the part of the religious leaders of all the principal faiths. The greater was the opposition to him, the stronger and more frequent were the Divine assurances of support, success, victory and triumph. Here and there he found acceptance among the serious minded and the truly pious, who yearned after righteousness. Their number swelled progressively from scores to hundreds, to thousands and even to hundreds of thousands in his lifetime. He was bestowed great treasures of moral and spiritual wealth which carried with it firm assurances of success and triumph, but of material resources he possessed little. This was in accord with Divine practice. His success had to come through the moral and the spiritual and not through the material or the physical, though a modicum of these was, of course, needed and was constantly provided. He predicted that material resources would also be provided in great abundance, once the moral and spiritual foundations had been firmly laid and there was left no danger of their being engulfed by the material and the physical. He warned against any tendency towards assigning priority to them over the moral and the spiritual. A single instance might be mentioned as illustration of the paucity of his finan~ial resources. His own near collaterals were bitterly hostile towards him and he suffered every type