Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, an appointee of God?

Question:
A member of my family, who is a staunch Lahori Ahmedi has the following observations to make:

“...the entire nation (min hasul Qom) have decided to abuse an appointee of God (Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmed) whose rank was higher than that of many prophets and about whom the Holy Prophet had said that if you live in his era go to him even if you have to crawl all the way on your hands and knees and about whom the Holy Prophet had said if you meet him give him my salutation.”


“Read the Qur’an and see what was the fate of the nations that rejected the messenger sent to them. The nation of Thamud was destroyed just for hamstringing a camel that Allah had appointed as a sign and the examples go on and on. Whenever such incidents are mentioned in the Qur’an, it is often followed by the words: There are signs in this for a people who understand. My dear, in the Book of Allah, there are no favorites that God will treat one nation in one way and another nation in another. Look at the Israelites, they call themselves the chosen nation, and Allah bestowed numerous favors on them but when they rebelled against the commands of Allah, Allah destroyed them and scattered them throughout the world. Do you think that Allah has no honor (no ghairat) that He will stand by idle and allow a beloved of His abused and maligned? Yes! Allah is Merciful and gives time to people to repent but the time is fast running out. What is happening in Pakistan are the small calamities before the big one. Allah first sends the smaller calamities so that people may repent but if they don’t then the big one comes that destroys all the rebellious people. This happened with Pharaoh and all the nations that were destroyed. By the way, I would be interested in knowing the example of a nation that min hasul Qom called the Holy Prophet a liar and fabricator and is doing very well because I would then have to seriously revise my thesis”.


My questions are:

1) Can there be an appointee of God, apart from prophets?
2) Can you please comment on the hadith quoted by this Ahmedi scholar?
3) Can there be ‘aazaab’ on a nation for the way they treated a section of their society?

Response:
If anyone was appointed by God to be accepted by people as His representative, that representative has to prove his credentials first that he was indeed from God. If people ask him questions to satisfy themselves about the claim, one way or the other, it is their right. If they genuinely don’t agree with his claim, they have a right to disagree with him as also to communicate their understanding to others. Most certainly, nobody has a right to castigate, insult, or persecute him or his followers. There is however, a difference between the times of the messengers of God and the other eras. During the former times, God Himself punished through natural calamities people who transgressed limits of acceptable behaviour or through the swords of His believing men.

The quotation mentioned by the scholar is not accompanied by any reference. Whatever the prophet of Islam, alaihissalaam, said about religion was important. We cannot accept anything attributed to him without scrutinizing it properly. All ahadith have come down to us through sources which are less authentic than the Qur’an. We cannot accept any claim about the arrival of a representative of God after the revelation of Qur’an unless it was specifically mentioned in the Qur’an. If God had to send a representative, his arrival should have been mentioned in the Qur’an in clear terms. We should have known him the same way as we knew our children. That is what the Qur’an says about the last prophet: that his arrival was so clearly mentioned in the earlier books that the good People of the Book were waiting for him eagerly. On the other hand if you read the Qur’an from cover to cover, asking the book of God if there was another prophet or His representative likely to come later, you would find the book not just silent, but very clearly saying that prophet Muhammad, alaihissalaam, was “the seal of the prophets”, which meant that the process of the arrival of prophets had come to a closure.

However, believing that no new prophets were to come doesn’t sanction the people who so believe to behave in barbaric ways with those whose claim they dispute. Punishment from God only comes to a nation after a messenger of God is sent by Him (Qur’an; 17: 15); in other cases, the bad times, like the good ones, were just trials and not punishments (Qur’an; 21:35).

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