First Grain of Sand — Page 65
THE FIRST CONVERTS OF THE AHMADIYYA MOVEMENT IN THE U. S. S. R. 49 him and Muhammad Hussain to me and employed Muhammad Hussain as the translator to first instruct him to go perform the wuzu and then to listen to this message carefully. I would speak to Muhammad Hussain in Persian, and he would translate it into Turkish for Muhammad Yaar. I vividly remember the moment when I conveyed the arrival of the Promised Messiahas, he began to weep inconsolably. Everything I said, he accepted. During the course of the conversation, we spoke about Prayer. When I told him that we should not pray behind others who have not yet accepted the Messenger sent from God, he then asked why it would be any harm to pray behind other Muslims if the mode and number of Prayers is the same. To this, I replied that accord- ing to God Almighty, their Prayers remain empty of true worship. Those Muslims perform Prayers as a ritual, as they have become deaf to its true sincerity. It is as if the actual fruit slipped away and all that is left in their hand is its outer peel. Their Prayers are like a body from which the soul has departed, and what benefit can you derive from praying behind a dead body? If God Almighty had seen their Prayers as valuable and sincere, He would not have needed to send a Messiah and Mahdi for their reformation. He sent the Messiah to teach Muslims how to benefit from real Prayer and worship. Hearing this, Muhammad Yaar agreed with my response and accepted the invitation to join the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. After a while, the Soviet administration became extremely suspicious of me, and I was left with no means to continue preach- ing. In order to continue to educate my newly converted broth- ers, I would secretly and privately say with my limited Russian