Commonsense About Ahmadiyyat — Page 26
to Islam, and not the warring jihad for which conditions in our age did not exist. The aim of life in Islam is to live righteously which could be brought about effectively by following the Shariah laws of Islam meticulously. . It was and still is different to the non-Ahmadi Muslims as well as non-Western peoples who have been converted to the idea that the highest achievements of life have been reached by the. European nations who were powerful, rich, comfortable, because they were 'developed' and 'advanced', individually and nationally in a competitive world. So the 'backward' Muslim countries should become 'civilised, developed and advanced', that is, become British, German or French, etc. They believed that the stagnant Islam was by itself a hindrance to this ideal. Their only handicap, they thought before the two world wars, was their subjugation to European imperialists. Once they had freed themselves, they would go ahead, developing and advancing, under the name of Islamic socialism, or Islamic capitalism, or Islamic. Western civilisation. When all countries of the world were equally developed, advanced and civilised, powerful, rich and comfortable, they would love one another and world peace would come. . In contrast, the Promised Messiah knew better. The trouble of the Muslim world was deeper than they knew, which mere independence alone could not cure; return to Islam could. Because all Muslim peoples were under one or the other foreign domination, there was a semblance of unity among them, which was deceptive. God had revealed to the Promised Messiah in 1905 about the developed and advanced and civilised nations, the greatest of them being the British Empire, which was to last untroubled for eight more years, then 'a world calamity with rivers of blood would overtake it' (Great War?), and it would wobble on and then vanish. (Incidentally, Sir Winston Churchill, the famous British statesman, believed in 1928 that the British. Empire would last for a thousand years. ) The Western civilisation would go on unsteadily for a while then scientifically destroy itself by its own hands. After this, another kind of developing and advancing would ensue under Ahmadiyyah Islam … … 26