The Holy War — Page 13
Proceedings—Debate 22 May 1893 13 rejecting the views of those gentlemen who hold the belief regarding the aforementioned holy one that he is God or the Son of God: اَم ُحْيِسَمْلا ُنْبا َمَيْرَم اَّلِا ٌلْوُسَر١ۚ ْدَق ْتَلَخ ْنِم ِهِلْبَق ُلُسُّرلا١ؕ َو ٗهُّمُا ٌةَقْيِّدِص١ؕ اَناَك ِنٰلُكْاَي َماَعَّطلا١ؕ 1 Part 6, R. 14— ْرُظْنُا َفْيَك ُنِّيَبُن ُمُهَل ِتٰيٰاْلا َّمُث ْرُظْنا ىّٰنَا َنْوُكَفْؤُي ۰۰ Meaning that essentially the Messiah, son of Mary, was no more than just a Messenger and before him too, indeed, only Messengers have been coming. And the statement that before him too, indeed, only Messengers have been coming is an extremely fine argument by way of inductive reason- ing (4) because, of all the forms of reasoning, inductive reasoning occu- pies the lofty station that if its conclusive and decisive status were to be disregarded or ignored, the entire spiritual and worldly design would collapse. If we diligently observe, we will discover that the evidence of a large part of the world and of the events in times past, occurred through the means of this very inductive method. For example, we currently say that man eats with his mouth, sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, smells with his nose, and speaks with his tongue. If someone presents some holy book in which it is written that these occurrences did not happen in the past; rather, in earlier ages, man used to eat with his eyes and speak through his ears, and that he used to see through the nose and similarly change other things. Or, for example, it should be said that in some bygone age man did not possess two eyes but rather had twenty, ten of which were on the front of his face and ten on the back. So now the audience can ponder that even if we accept for the sake of argument that the one who penned these strange lines was some holy and righteous man, yet how can we move away from this cate- gorical conclusion that has originated through inductive reasoning? In my opinion, not only one, but even if one million more such holy men were to try to sever the categorical and decisive conclusions deduced 1. S u rah al-M a ’idah, 5:76 [Publisher]