A Present to His Royal Highness - The Prince of Wales — Page 80
80 were recorded they would fill volumes, but a few may be related by way of illustration and as testimonies to his truth. FIRST MIRACLE. Literary. Honoured Prince! this is a literary age and therefore one of the literary miracles of this prophet shall be first related. Your Royal Highness has already read that he had received very elementary education and that he had neither studied at any school nor read with any learned tutor. His father had engaged ordinary teachers for him with whom he read elementary books of lessons. But when he claimed to be a prophet, his enemies taunted him with his ignorance and said that God could never have made such a one the Mahdi and the Messiah. God then granted him a vast knowledge of, and mastery over, the Arabic language, which contains the whole of Islamic literature, and in one day he was taught the roots of forty thousand words. Now, he had never journeyed to Arabia, nor lived with the men of that country, nor had he ever before written in Arabic, nor could he have acquired proficiency in the use of that language by following the methods of learning Arabic which were current in India; and it so happened that he began to write Arabic works full of sublime thoughts in the most beautiful and elegant style, and challenged his opponents, among whom were the greatest divines of the country, to write books of equal excellence. But none dared to accept his challenge and several of his opponents said that he had hired the services of learned