A Verdict Required — Page 10
10 A VERDICT REQUIRED and righteous servants of God-record your signature at the end of this essay for the purpose of attestation. I have firm faith that God Almighty will reward them for this truthful testimony and will grant them a full share of success and prosperity in this world and the next. Otherwise, the manifesta- tion of the evil consequences of concealing true testimony is inev- itable according to Divine law. However, if in someone's view, the Divinely revealed testimonies mentioned below do not afford sat- isfaction; rather, in their opinion, it was actually a human scheme that was paraded as a Divinely revealed prophecy, the result of which was that ultimately-on account of this shrewd conspira- cy-Lekh Ram was murdered on 6 March 1897 in Lahore, then such an individual has the option not to record his testimony on this document, and he may proceed to count me amongst the murderers. But if, in his view, these Divinely revealed testimonies are worthy of credibility from which I am entitled to benefit, then I make no demand for religious sympathy at this time, but rather human sympathy, and that, too, only up to the extent that the law grants me the right on the basis of true and proper justice. I solicit this with the utmost respect from the sagacious by way of an istiftā' [demand for a verdict]. And what is it that I seek from the scholarly circles through the means of this Istiftā? Only this that they diligently record their opinion by way of a fatwa [religious verdict] on all [the evi- dence] that I present before them of a well-arranged and complete series of prophecies concerning the death of Lekh Ram, and that they testify with the zeal of their clear conscience whether reason and righteousness deem it obligatory to ascribe the extraordinary