Arba'in — Page 159
Number Four 159 face death[and go before God]! Had they shown some sense of shame and integrity, they would have hated what Mehr Ali Shah Golarhvi did in my opposition. Did I invite him to have a debate on religious tenets with him and then do his bai‘at ? When I have already declared repeatedly that God has sent me as the Promised Messiah and has informed me which particular hadith is authentic and which hadith is not, and He has bestowed on me the correct understanding of the Holy Quran, then why should I engage with these people in a debate on religious tenets, when I have the same firm faith in wa hi [revelations] that I have received as I have in the Torah, the Gospel and the Holy Quran? Do they expect me to discard my faith which is based on knowledge by the certainty of experience, and that I should accept their conjectures and collection of false narrations? They, too, cannot leave their opposition because they have already published books full of falsehood against me. Presently, to revert from their opinions is worse than death for them. In such a dire situation, what is the use of getting into a debate with them? When I had already published the announcement that in the future, I would not enter into any debate on religious tenets with any maulaw i ; justice and good faith demanded that they should not even make a mention of these debates on religious ten- ets before me. Could I have broken my promise? If Mehr Ali Shah’s heart was not rotten, then why did he request me for such a debate that I had already resolutely declared to have abandoned? Making such a request, he tried to deceive people by giving the impression that he was accepting my invitation. Look at the astonishing deception