Claims and Teachings - Ahmad The Promised Messiah and Mahdi — Page 21
21 opinion of those who have questioned its authenticity and truth- fulness. for by bringing it to fulfilment Almighty God has Him- self sealed its truth. If you reject such a tradition because some collector or compilers of tradition have pronounced it to be un- worthy of credit, you are guilty of rejecting an argument for the truth of Islam. In that case you are an enemy of Islam and not its friend. Almighty God says in Holy Quran :. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . God does not reveal His deep secrets except to such of His chosen apostles as He is pleased with. " Hence a true prophecy cannot be attributed to any but a true prophet of God. If a compiler has pronounced a tradition to be unauthentic or fabricated which has afterwards" been shown to be true by the fulfilment of the prophecy which it reveals, it is easy to see that the error must be attributed to the judgment of the compiler. What a folly to assert that Almighty God committed a mistake in showing the truth of that which was really false ! Along with this respect for traditions ifc is necessary to warn the reader against their abuse. The gigantic mass of tradition contains an immense amount of fictitious material. Tradition opened up for every section dissenting from the true faith a vast field for fabrication to support its own views. Each sect thus came to have its own traditions and their variance at last affected even the unity of custom in certain cases. Custom, for instance, did not teach more than a single way of saying prayers, yet tradition even in this case splitted the Muslims into many sects. An erroneous view of the authority of traditions has led astray many sections of Islam. In this lies the error of the Shias too. The same error led astray the Jews who placed too great a confidence in their traditions to the utter neglect of