The Message or A Cry of Anguish — Page 57
THE MESSAGE OR A CRY OF ANGUISH 57 Following these principles, were it possible for this Anjuman to truly adhere to the truth? 2. THE SECOND OBJECTION: They wish to accuse me that in my memorial dated 24 February 1898, I requested the book Ummahātul-Mu'minin to be banned, believing it to be a cause of public disturbance, and I also suggested that the Government promulgate a law to the effect that the followers of each religion must confine themselves to expounding the beauties of their religion and not attack other people. In other words, I sent a second memorial against the first one. In response to this objection, firstly I would like to make it clear that I never requested in my memorial dated 24 February 1898 for Ummahātul-Mu'minin to be banned. On careful perusal of my memorial, one finds that even though I admitted therein that this treatise Ummahātul-Mu'minin might lead to public disorder, I never requested the Government to ban, cease or burn this trea- tise. Rather I wrote in the same memorial that this treatise was already published and sent to thousands of Muslims free of cost without their demand. Among them are many of my honourable friends. How then could it be that in that memorial I should have sought the ban of the book? I declared the aforementioned treatise to be the cause of public disorder on page 9. Then on page 10 I called on the Government to adopt one of two meas- ures in order to curb such malicious writings; either it should direct each party of the debate that, when criticising, they should