Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam — Page 103
103 have become the recipients of Divine revelation. I believe that more than half of the Ahmadis have been the recipients of revelation in some form or other, and have had their faith confirmed and strengthened thereby. It must be remembered that by revelation I do not mean the commonly but wrongly accepted connotation of it, under which any brilliant idea which suddenly flashes across a man’s mind is called revelation. Some people have in their ignorance gone so far as to imagine that God never speaks in words, and that the thoughts and ideas of a Prophet are described as revelation. Islam emphatically repudiates this idea and teaches that revelation is conveyed in words and that God speaks to man as surely as one man speaks to another. A sound similar to that produced by the speech of man is pro- duced in revelation and the recipient of revelation hears that sound as he hears the speech of fellow men in his daily life. The difference is that revelation is far more majestic and glorious than the speech of man and carries in itself such bliss and such a sense of happiness, that the recipient of revelation feels exalted and uplifted as if some great power had absorbed him. The words of the revelation are conveyed to his ears and he hears them, or they are conveyed to his tongue and he recites them, or they are presented before him in writing and he commits them to memory. All this while the sense of exaltation persists whereby he perceives that his experi- ence is a glorious reality and is the direct action of a Superior Power. There are two other kinds of revelation besides that just described which are conveyed not in words but