The Reality of Khilafah — Page 99
Chapter Two—About the Mahdi 99 eternal grace. Jesus died and God knows that he is dead. Your Imam Mu h ammad, whose arrival you await, also passed away. I have received a revelation from my Lord that I am the Promised Messiah and the Promised Ahmad. Do you wonder at this and think not of God’s eternal practice? Do you deny and fear not? Truth has so clearly become manifest, yet you are averse to it. The promised time has come but you turn away from it. One of the perpetual practices of God, which is denied neither by the igno- rant nor the intellectual, is that in His prophecies He may name a particular person or a thing, but the name in fact applies to some other person or thing. For instance, in a dream, we may see the arrival of someone, but he is not the one who comes in real life. The one who comes only bears some of his attributes. Let me illus- trate this point with an extraordinary story. I had a son named Bash i r whom Allah caused to die in infancy. God is indeed the best and most abiding support for those who cultivate piety and righteousness. At that time, I received a revela- tion from my Lord: عَلَیْكَ. ً ال تَفَضُّ َ إِلَیْك ُ نَرُدُّہ ا َّ إِن We shall return him to you out of Our grace. Likewise, his mother also saw in a dream that Bash i r had come and he said to her, ‘I want to embrace you, and I will not part from you soon. ’ After him, Allah gave me another son, and He is the Best of Bestowers, and I realized that he was indeed the same Bash i r and that the All-Knowing One had told the truth. So I named him Bash i r and I see in him the same characteristics as in the Bash i r who passed away. Thus was demonstrated the Divine