July

2014

July

2014
Webcasting on the worlds first real-time Islamic service at
www.virtualmosque.co.uk
Editors:
Shahid Aziz
Mustaq Ali
Contents:
The Call of the Messiah

Page
1

So, What Did the Muslims Do for the

Jews? by David J Wasserstein
3
The Teachings of Islam on Fasting

well-founded principles of natural science; that

many of its claims are repugnant to what is indicated by reason and good sense; that its
teaching inculcates ways and means of coercion
and oppression, injustice and unfairness, and
that many of its tenets are inconsistent with
and contrary to the Divine attributes and the
laws of nature. Very many of the Christian missionaries and Arya Samajists have most boldly
and arrogantly denied the miracles of the Holy
Prophet and the prophecies and signs of the
Holy Quran, and have drawn such a dreadful

The Call of the Messiah

by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad,
the Promised Messiah and Mahdi
The present age
And so this prophecy, in every age and time,
came to be fulfilled in one respect or another,
and Almighty Gods safeguarding of His honour
and Almighty Gods help have brought forth in
every age a defender empowered to tackle and
repulse an enemy onslaught of whatever kind
and from wheresoever it may have been
launched. But this age in which we are living has
been one in which the enemy has launched a full
-scale attack from all directions, and it has been
a time of terrible tempest such as Islam has
never witnessed since the introduction to the
world of the Holy Quran. Visionless and vile
people have also mounted an assault on the literal integrity of the Quranic text and written
incorrect translations and commentaries, and
many Christians and some materialists, as well
as unintelligent Muslims, have, under the cover
of translations and commentaries, sought to
corrupt and contaminate the true meaning of
the Divine Word. Many have been emphatic that
the Holy Quran, in many places, stands opposed
to rational, intellectual knowledge and to the

picture of the sacred Word of God, of Islam and

of the Holy Prophet, fabricating vile and vicious
falsehoods, that every seeker-after-truth would
necessarily be repulsed and disgusted by them.
The present age, then, was a time that naturally
demanded that, just as a storm of opposition

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had arisen to mount an aggressive attack from
all quarters, the defence should accordingly be
conducted on every front. At the same time, it
was the beginning of the 14th Century Hijra, so
that God Most High, according to His promise
held out in the verse
, Behold, We Ourselves have sent down
the Reminder and We Ourselves shall be its
Guardian (15:9), raised a mujaddid at the head
of the 14th century to rectify and remedy this
evil. Now, since every mujaddid has a particular
name in Gods nomenclature, and just as an author gives a title to his book according to the
subject matter discussed therein, in the same
way, God Most High conferred upon this
Mujaddid, in view of the duty to be assigned
him, the appellation of Messiah, since it had
been ordained that the Messiah would rectify
and remedy the evils of the Cross typifying the
final age. Accordingly, the man who had been
entrusted with this mission would necessarily
be given the name Promised Messiah, note it
carefully, being one who had been raised to execute and accomplish the task of breaking the
Cross. And is this, then, the selfsame age or not?
Think it over very seriously, and may God Most
High help and save you.

which is very much in the same way that Gods

good and righteous people, just like the Children of Israel, suffered in Makkah, continuously
for thirteen years, the severest persecution at
the hands of the unbelievers, which was even
more cruel and inhuman than that which Pharaoh had inflicted on the Israelites, so that these
righteous and noble people, along with that noblest of the noble, and at his suggestion, fled
from Makkah just as the Children of Israel had

The Promised Messiah in the Quran

All this investigation points to the clear conclusion that people who think that no mention of
the Promised Messiah has been made in the
Holy Quran are greatly in error. The truth of the
matter, rather, is that the Promised Messiah is
extensively indicated in the Holy Quran. In the
, As We sent a
verse
Messenger to Pharaoh (73:15), the Holy Quran
has indicated in clear terms that the Holy
Prophet is the like of Moses, for the significance
of the verse undoubtedly is: We have sent this
prophet in the likeness of that prophet who had
been sent to Pharaoh. The hard facts of history
have borne out that this statement made by God
Most High is correct and true, given that, just as
God Most High, having sent Moses to Pharaoh,
finally swept away and made an end of Pharaoh
before the very eyes of the Israelites, and delivered them from Pharaohs tyranny and oppression, not in any fanciful or whimsical way, but
actually, as a matter of fact and observation,

fled from Egypt. Now the Makkans ran after

them and pursued them that they might put the
fugitives to death, very much as Pharaoh had
done with the aim and intention of killing the
Children of Israel. The Makkans were at last
done to death and annihilated at Badr in consequence of their homicidal pursuit in the same
manner as Pharaoh and his hordes were annihilated in the river Nile, and it was to unravel this
riddle that the Holy Prophet, when he saw Abu
Jahls dead body among the slain at Badr, remarked that he (Abu Jahl) was the Pharaoh of
this Ummah. In short, just as the drowning of
Pharaoh and his army in the Nile was a matter

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of fact, a visible event which cannot be gainsaid or
disputed, in the same way, the destruction of Abu
Jahl and his army at Badr at the time of pursuit
was an event that could be seen and felt, and to
reject and deny it would be sheer folly or stupidity.

Jesus not the like of Moses

Both these historical facts, then, in terms of all the
events and occurrences that they involve, bear a
close resemblance to each other just as if they are
twin brothers, and the Christian claim that this like
of Moses is none else but Jesus Christ is not only
repugnant but shameful as well, because likeness
must necessarily be in matters that are perceptible, clear and decisive, and not involve some vain
and preposterous claim
that is itself open to
strong objection and
denial. How baseless
and empty is the argument that, just as Moses
was the deliverer of the
Children of Israel, in the
same way Jesus was the
deliverer of the Christians, in that these are
merely the baseless conceptions of their own minds, which have no clear
and explicit sign to support them! Had there been
any sign of bringing salvation, the Jews would, in
the same way, have accepted Jesus most gratefully,
and acknowledged the fact of his being their saviour, and sung thanksgiving songs as they had done
after the event at the Nile. But those noble men of
God whom our master and lord, the Holy Prophet,
had delivered from the tyranny and oppression of
the Makkans sang songs of joy after the event of
Badr in the same way as had the Children of Israel
on the river Nile. Those Arabic songs, sung on the
field of Badr, have come down to us, preserved in
the pages of books.

So, What Did the Muslims Do

for the Jews?
THE JC ESSAY
by David J Wasserstein
Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth. The argument for it is double. First, in

570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born,

the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion.
And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity also in Christendom through the medieval period into the modern world.
By the fourth century, Christianity had become
the dominant religion in the Roman empire. One
aspect of this success was opposition to rival
faiths, including Judaism, along with massive conversion of members of such faiths, sometimes by
force, to Christianity. Much of our testimony about
Jewish existence in the Roman empire from this
time on consists of accounts of conversions.
Great and permanent
reductions in numbers
through
conversion,
between the fourth and
the seventh centuries,
brought with them a
gradual but relentless
whittling away of the
status, rights, social
and economic existence, and religious and cultural
life of Jews all over the Roman empire.
A long series of enactments deprived Jewish
people of their rights as citizens, prevented them
from fulfilling their religious obligations, and excluded them from the society of their fellows.
Had Islam not come along, Jewry in the west
would have declined to disappearance and Jewry
in the east would have become just another oriental cult.
This went along with the centuries-long military and political struggle with Persia. As a tiny
element in the Christian world, the Jews should
not have been affected much by this broad, political issue. Yet it affected them critically, because the
Persian empire at this time included Babylon
now Iraq at the time home to the worlds greatest
concentration of Jews.
Here also were the greatest centres of Jewish
intellectual life. The most important single work of
Jewish cultural creativity in over 3,000 years, apart
from the Bible itself the Talmud came into being in Babylon. The struggle between Persia and

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Byzantium, in our period, led increasingly to a
separation between Jews under Byzantine,
Christian rule and Jews under Persian rule.
Beyond all this, the Jews who lived under
Christian rule seemed to have lost the knowledge of their own culturally specific languages
Hebrew and Aramaic and to have taken on the
use of Latin or Greek or other non-Jewish, local,
languages. This in turn must
have meant that they also lost
access to the central literary
works of Jewish culture the
Torah,
Mishnah,
poetry,
midrash, even liturgy.
The loss of the unifying
force represented by language
and of the associated literature was a major step towards assimilation and disappearance. In these circumstances, with contact with the
one place where Jewish cultural life continued to prosper
Babylon cut off by conflict
with Persia, Jewish life in the
Christian world of late antiquity was not simply a pale
shadow of what it had been
three or four centuries earlier.
It was doomed.
Had Islam not come along, the conflict with
Persia would have continued. The separation
between western Judaism, that of Christendom,
and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia,
would have intensified. Jewry in the west would
have declined to disappearance in many areas.
And Jewry in the east would have become just
another oriental cult.
But this was all prevented by the rise of
Islam. The Islamic conquests of the seventh century changed the world, and did so with dramatic, wide-ranging and permanent effect for
the Jews.
Within a century of the death of Mohammad,
in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost
the whole of the world where Jews lived, from
Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and

beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were

now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence. Their fortunes
changed in legal, demographic, social, religious,
political, geographical, economic, linguistic and
cultural terms all for the better.
First, things improved politically. Almost
everywhere in Christendom where Jews had
lived now formed part of the
same political space as Babylon
Cordoba and Basra lay in the
same political world. The old
frontier between the vital centre in Babylonia and the Jews of
the Mediterranean basin was
swept away, forever.
Political change was partnered
by change in the legal status of
the Jewish population: although
it is not always clear what happened during the Muslim conquests, one thing is certain. The
result of the conquests was, by
and large, to make the Jews second-class citizens.
This should not be misunderstood: to be a second-class
citizen was a far better thing to
be than not to be a citizen at all.
For most of these Jews, second-class citizenship
represented a major advance. In Visigothic
Spain, for example, shortly before the Muslim
conquest in 711, the Jews had seen their
children removed from them and forcibly converted to Christianity and had themselves been
enslaved.
In the developing Islamic societies of the
classical and medieval periods, being a Jew
meant belonging to a category defined under
law, enjoying certain rights and protections,
alongside various obligations. These rights and
protections were not as extensive or as generous
as those enjoyed by Muslims, and the obligations were greater but, for the first few centuries, the Muslims themselves were a minority,
and the practical differences were not all that
great.
Along with legal near-equality came social

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and economic equality. Jews were not confined
to ghettos, either literally or in terms of economic activity. The societies of Islam were, in
effect, open societies. In religious terms, too,
Jews enjoyed virtually full freedom. They might
not build many new synagogues in theory
and they might not make too public their profession of their faith, but there was no really significant restriction on the practice of their religion.
Along with internal legal autonomy, they also
enjoyed formal representation, through leaders
of their own, before the authorities of the state.
Imperfect and often not quite as rosy as this
might sound, it was at least the broad norm.
The political unity brought by the new
Islamic world-empire did not last, but it created
a vast Islamic world civilisation, similar to the
older Christian civilisation that it replaced. Within this huge area, Jews
lived and enjoyed broadly similar
status and rights everywhere. They
could move around, maintain contacts, and develop their identity as
Jews. A great new expansion of trade
from the ninth century onwards
brought the Spanish Jews like the
Muslims into touch with the Jews
and the Muslims even of India.
All this was encouraged by a further, critical development. Huge numbers of people in the new world of
Islam adopted the language of the Muslim Arabs.
Arabic gradually became the principal language
of this vast area, excluding almost all the rest:
Greek and Syriac, Aramaic and Coptic and Latin
all died out, replaced by Arabic. Persian, too,
went into a long retreat, to reappear later heavily influenced by Arabic.
The Jews moved over to Arabic very rapidly.
By the early 10th century, only 300 years after
the conquests, Saadya Gaon was translating the
Bible into Arabic. Bible translation is a massive
task it is not undertaken unless there is a need
for it. By about the year 900, the Jews had
largely abandoned other languages and taken on
Arabic.
The change of language in its turn brought
the Jews into direct contact with broader cultural developments. The result from the 10th

century on was a striking pairing of two cultures. The Jews of the Islamic world developed
an entirely new culture, which differed from
their culture before Islam in terms of language,
cultural forms, influences, and uses. Instead of
being concerned primarily with religion, the
new Jewish culture of the Islamic world, like
that of its neighbours, mixed the religious and
the secular to a high degree. The contrast, both
with the past and with medieval Christian
Europe, was enormous.
Like their neighbours, these Jews wrote in
Arabic in part, and in a Jewish form of that language. The use of Arabic brought them close to
the Arabs. But the use of a specific Jewish form
of that language maintained the barriers between Jew and Muslim. The subjects that Jews
wrote about, and the literary forms in
which they wrote about them, were
largely new ones, borrowed from the
Muslims and developed in tandem
with developments in Arabic Islam.
Also at this time, Hebrew was revived
as a language of high literature, parallel to the use among the Muslims of a
high form of Arabic for similar purposes. Along with its use for poetry
and artistic prose, secular writing of
all forms in Hebrew and in (Judeo-)
Arabic came into being, some of it of
high quality.
Much of the greatest poetry in Hebrew written since the Bible comes from this period.
Saadya Gaon, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra
(Moses and Abraham), Maimonides, Yehuda
Halevi, Yehudah al-Harizi, Samuel ha-Nagid, and
many more all of these names, well known today, belong in the first rank of Jewish literary
and cultural endeavour.
Where did these Jews produce all this?
When did they and their neighbours achieve this
symbiosis, this mode of living together? The
Jews did it in a number of centres of excellence.
The most outstanding of these was Islamic
Spain, where there was a true Jewish Golden
Age, alongside a wave of cultural achievement
among the Muslim population. The Spanish case
illustrates a more general pattern, too.
What happened in Islamic Spain waves of

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Jewish cultural prosperity paralleling waves of
cultural prosperity among the Muslims exemplifies a larger pattern in Arab Islam. In Baghdad, between the ninth and the twelfth centuries; in Qayrawan (in north Africa), between the
ninth and the 11th centuries; in Cairo, between
the 10th and the 12th centuries, and elsewhere,
the rise and fall of cultural centres of Islam
tended to be reflected in the rise and fall of Jewish cultural activity in the same places.

(David J Wasserstein is the Eugene Greener Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. This
article is adapted from last weeks Jordan Lectures in
Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and
African Studies.)

This was not coincidence, and nor was it the

product of particularly enlightened liberal patronage by Muslim rulers. It was the product of
a number of deeper features of these societies,
social and cultural, legal and economic, linguistic and political, which together enabled and
indeed encouraged the Jews of the Islamic world
to create a novel sub-culture within the high
civilisation of the time.

The Teachings of Islam

on Fasting

This did not last

for ever; the period of
culturally successful
symbiosis
between
Jew and Arab Muslim
in the middle ages
came to a close by
about 1300. In reality,
it had reached this
point even earlier,
with the overall relative decline in the importance and vitality of
Arabic culture, both in relation to western European cultures and in relation to other cultural
forms within Islam itself; Persian and Turkish.
Jewish cultural prosperity in the middle
ages operated in large part as a function of Muslim, Arabic cultural (and to some degree political) prosperity: when Muslim Arabic culture
thrived, so did that of the Jews; when Muslim
Arabic culture declined, so did that of the Jews.
In the case of the Jews, however, the cultural
capital thus created also served as the seed-bed
of further growth elsewhere in Christian Spain
and in the Christian world more generally.
The Islamic world was not the only source of
inspiration for the Jewish cultural revival that
came later in Christian Europe, but it certainly
was a major contributor to that development. Its
significance cannot be overestimated.

[Source: The Jewish Chronicle Online at http://

www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/
comment/68082/so-what-did-muslims-do-jews, May
24, 2012.]

The importance of self-reform and

abstention from base desires
1. O you who believe, fasting is prescribed for you
as it was prescribed for those before you, so that
you may guard against
evil. (The Holy Quran,
2:183.)
2. Allah says: And when My
servants
ask
you
(O
Prophet) about Me, surely I
am near. I answer the prayer
of the suppliant when he
calls on Me, so they should
hear My call and believe in
Me that they may walk in
the right way. (2:186.)
3. And swallow not up your
property among yourselves by false means, nor
seek to gain access thereby to the authorities so
that you may swallow up other peoples property
wrongfully while you know. (2:188.)
4. He who does not give up uttering falsehood and
acting according to it, God has no need of his giving
up his food and drink. (The Holy Prophet Muhammad.)
5. Jesus fasted forty days and forty nights, and explained it by saying: It is written, Man shall not live
by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds
from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:24). Moses
also fasted forty days and forty nights (Exodus,
34:28).

The purpose of fasting in Islam

1. To develop and strengthen our powers of selfcontrol, so that we can resist wrongful desires and
bad habits, and therefore guard against evil (see

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extract 1 above). In fasting, by refraining from
the natural human urges to satisfy ones appetite, we are exercising our ability of selfrestraint, so that we can then apply it in our
everyday life to bring about self-improvement.
2. To attain nearness and closeness to God so
that He becomes a reality in our lives. As we
bear the rigours of fasting purely for the sake of
following a Divine commandment, knowing and feeling
that He can see all our actions, however secret, it intensifies the consciousness of
God in our hearts, resulting
in a higher spiritual experience (see extract 2 above).
3. To learn to refrain from
usurping others rights and
belongings. In fasting we
voluntarily give up even what
is rightfully ours; how can
then we think of unlawfully
taking what is not ours but
belongs to someone else?
(See extract 3 above.)
4. Charity and generosity are
especially
urged
during
Ramadan. We learn to give,
and not to take. The deprivation of fasting
makes us sympathise with the suffering of others, and want to try to alleviate it; and it makes
us remember the blessings of life which we normally take for granted.
Fasting in Islam does not just consist of refraining from eating and drinking, but from
every kind of selfish desire and wrongdoing.
The fast is not merely of the body, but essentially that of the spirit as well (see extract 4
above). The physical fast is a symbol and outward expression of the real, inner fast.
Fasting is a spiritual practice to be found in
all religions (see extracts 1 and 5 above). The
great Founders of various faiths, such as Buddha, Moses and Jesus, practised quite rigorous
fasting as a preliminary to attaining their first
experience of spiritual enlightenment and communion with God. This kind of communion is
indicated in extract 2 above.

Maulana Muhammad Ali on fasting

The real purpose of fasting is to attain righteousness. A person who undergoes hunger and
thirst, but does not behave righteously, has done
nothing. If someone is told the aim and object of
doing a certain duty, and he does that duty but
without attaining the required aim and object, it
is as if he has not done that duty.

Special spiritual exertions in the month of

Ramadan
Every year in the month of
Ramadan, Maulana Muhammad Ali in his khutbas and
writings used to exhort the
Jamaat to undertake a spiritual exertion (mujahida) in
two forms. One was to fall in
prayer before God and beseech Him tearfully in
tahajjud prayers to enable
us to carry out the work of
the propagation of Islam
and the Quran, and the
other was to make financial
sacrifices. In this connection
he wrote many heart-felt,
moving prayers and entreated every member of the Jamaat that at
least in the month of Ramadan they should treat
the tahajjud prayer as obligatory for them. Once
he suggested three types of supplications which
were as follows:
1. Prayer for spiritual fostering by Allah:
All praise is for Allah, the Lord of the worlds.
O God, Your providence comprehends
every iota of the universe. You have provided the
very best means for the physical development of
human beings. Now provide for Your creation,
who have moved far off from You and are lost in
darkness racing towards destruction, spiritual
nourishment through the Quran. Acquaint their
hearts with the bliss that is attained by bowing
at Your threshold.
O God, Who granted the Holy Prophet Muhammad and his Companions unique success
enabling them to transform the destinies of en-

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tire countries and nations, foster and nourish us
and our Jamaat today to make it reach the pinnacle of success in spreading the Quran and
propagating Islam in the world. Let the foundations for the propagation of Your religion be laid
by our hands, upon which an edifice continues
to be raised till the Day of Judgment.
2. Prayer for triumph over unbelief:
Forgive us, grant us protection, have mercy on
us. You are our Patron, grant us victory over the
disbelieving people!
O God, unbelief is dominant over the
world. Love of worldly things and wealth have
taken hold of human hearts. Human beings are
being led astray by possession of physical
power, material resources and outward adornments. But, O God, it is Your promise that You
shall make Islam triumph in the world. It is Your
promise that after falling into the greatest deviation and wrongdoing people will again turn to
You. Fulfil this promise of Yours today and let
the truth overcome falsehood and let Islam triumph over unbelief.
O God, the armies of unbelief and misguidance are attacking with full force. Your strength
in the past too has been manifested through
weak human beings. Let it be manifest today
through this small Jamaat. We are weak, humble and sinners but we have a strong zeal to see
Islam prevail over unbelief. Forgive us our
faults, grant us protection, save us from stumbling, and be our helper and make this weak
Jamaat of Islam overcome the vast strength of
unbelief. O God, make the Quran and Muhammad Rasulullah and Islam triumphant in the
world, and wipe away the forces of unbelief and
misguidance.
3. Prayer for help from Allah:
Thee do we serve and Thee do we beseech for
help.

O God, we do as much as it is in our power

to obey You and to spread Your name and Your
Word in the world, but we are weak and cannot
fully discharge our duty of obeying You. Help us
and produce within us the greatest strength to
obey You.
O God, spreading Your name in the world is
the exalted mission for which You had been appointing Your chosen ones, and it was only with
Your help
that
they
succeeded
in achieving
this
magnificent
goal.
One
such chosen
man
of
Yours has
entrusted
us with this
task, but we
are small in
numbers,
weak, and
lacking in means. We are opposed not only by
outsiders but also by our own who hamper our
way. Guide us through Your graciousness and
infuse in us the same strength with which You
have ever filled Your chosen ones, and create in
our hearts the same light with which You have
been illuminating the hearts of Your chosen
ones.
O God, spreading Your message in the world
is the most difficult of tasks in the world. Whenever such a reformation came about, it was not
because of the strength of any man or army but
it was from Your aid and succour. So we seek
from You that help and aid which You have been
bestowing upon Your chosen ones.
(Adapted from A Mighty Striving, pp. 314315.)

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