Arba'in — Page 193
Number Four 193 Ali Shah should compete with me in writing a commentary of any chapter of the Holy Quran in eloquent and fluent Arabic. If he excels and prevails, then I will have no issue in accepting his eminence. Thus having laid forth this matter, I published an invitation to him employing absolutely pure intentions, but the deceptive manner which he has adopted in response to my invi- tation, has made it clear that he possesses no aptness of the Holy Quran nor any proficiency of knowledge. In other words, he [P i r Sahib] plainly adopted the way of evasion, and behaved deceit- fully like ordinary run-of-the-mill tricksters by issuing the follow- ing announcement that: First, I should settle with him my beliefs concerning Hadith and the Quran. Then, if Maulaw i Muhammad Husain Batalavi and two other friends of his, state that the beliefs of P i r Mehr Ali Shah are correct, then I should forthwith imme- diately take bai‘at [a pledge of allegiance] at his hand. Only after my taking allegiance will he then consider giving me permission to write the commentary in Arabic! On reading this reply of his, I felt like weeping for his sorry state and lost all hope that I had had regarding him desiring to find the truth. The reason for writing this Announcement now is not that we hold any remaining hope for his character. Instead, I am writing this because, notwithstanding that two months have elapsed since this incident, his associates have not ceased 1 ٭ from obnoxiously 1. ٭ In his book ‘As a’ -e-M u s a , Munsh i Il a h i Bakhsh, Accountant, has also mentioned all that he cared to say regarding P i r Sahib’s false victory. But what matters is if a person, while remaining just and decent, should ac- tually prove a point. It is obvious that if, according to Munsh i Sahib, P i r Mehr Ali Shah has some measure of knowledge of the Holy Quran and command over the Arabic language, as he has laid claim to possessing,