Ahmadiyyat - The Renaissance of Islam — Page 66
66 AHMADIYY AT little formal schooling so that when he put forth his claim as Reformer, Mahdi and Promised Messiah, some of the oppos- ing Muslim divines pointed to his lack of scholarship and his inadequate mastery of Arabic as proof that he had not the capacity to penetrate to the true meaning of the Holy Quran and that, therefore, he could not have been chosen by the Divine as an instrument for establishing the superiority of Islam over all other religions. He has referred to this objection of the divines at page 6 of his Arabic book, Sirrul Khilafah, in the following words: These divines state that one of the qualifications of a Reformer who calls people to Islam is that he should be an eminent scholar and they allege that I have no knowledge of Arabic and possess no literary qualification and that they consider me an ignoramus. What they say is true; and so I supplicated the Divine that if He so pleased, He might bestow upon me adequate knowledge of Ara- bic. He granted my prayer and by His grace I acquired mastery in this language and was bestowed the capacity to express myself in it at a high level. Under Divine direction I wrote two books in Arabic and challenged my opponents to produce their match, but they ran away and went into hiding. The two books referred to here were Karamatus Sadiqeen and Nurul Haq. Thereafter he wrote several books in Arabic and composed a number of Odes in that language, all of which are held in high esteem by recognized masters of the Arabic language. He also compiled a book which he desig- nated Minanur Rahman, in which he set forth his thesis that Arabic was the mother of all languages, that it originated in revelation, and that is why the most perfect Divine guidance, the Holy Quran, was revealed in this language. Among other things that he set forth in suppott of his thesis was that Arabic comprises more than two and a half million roots as com- pared, for instance, with Sanskrit, which has no more than four hundred roots. On 13 April 1900, which was the day of the Festival of Sacrifice, Ahmad was divinely directed to deliver the sermon himself in Arabic. He carried out the direction in a perfor-