The Light of Truth — Page 255
A CHALLENGE TO IMAD-UD-DIN AND HIS ASSOCIATES I have written this hastily prepared discourse in Arabic for these fundamental aims. Nevertheless, it contains pearls of expression that are of the finest quality, as well as lustrous discourses and rarely used words. I have adorned it with the charms of metaphor and embellished its passages with the pearls of allusion. It contains many proverbs of the Arabs, and literary expressions, as well as original poems and elegantly composed Qaşā'id. What's more, I did not simply re-use poems from other languages; rather, all the poems in this book are the product of my thoughts, and the fruit borne by the trees of my intellect. I did all this to gauge thereby the depth of your intellect, the breadth of your scholarship, the full extent of your knowledge, and the soundness of your reasoning. Thus, it may be made clear to the people whether your claim is true and all your bluster, and whether, as you allege, you possess the right to critique the Book of Allah-the Holy Quran-and its elo- quence, the Scripture of the Gracious God and its richness—or whether you are merely a liar and deceiver. My Lord has revealed to me that you do not possess the necessary skills for this contest. Allah shall expose your weak- ness and humiliate you, and establish that you are a prisoner of ignorance and darkness. Even if all your people were to join you in this plan, all of you would return defeated. This is despite my acknowledgment that this treatise does not constitute the highest quality of written composition; rather, I have written it quite hastily. I am certain that producing something similar to this will be a simple matter for those who are skilled in Arabic. In fact, the weakest efforts of scholars would suffice for this task. So, if you truly possess literary prowess, it would not sur- prise me if you were to set forth a composition more beautiful and eloquent than what I have written here in the space of a 255