Questioner: Huzoor, my question is that there is a prophecy that when the promised Messiah will come, the power of the devil will shrink. My question is whether it is because of the advent of the promised Messiah or anyway the efforts of the promised Messiah are involved in it?
Huzoor (rh): Well, both things happen, gradually and when you see such prophecies, you must interpret them in the historical context. Previously such prophecies have been made and we have seen them fulfilled earlier. So this prophecy should not be treated differently. These things happen on a larger and grander scale and the pace is completely different from the pace of individual events. So sometimes people totally miss what is happening. Now since the time of the Hazrat Messiah-e-Maud a.s, things have been happening which have been totally ignored by the opponents of Ahmadiyyat and they always come out with the same demand, where is the shrinkage of Dajjal (anti-christ)? While here you are a proof that Dajjal has shrunken to this island now because Jaiyat was made symbolic by the British government and it was the British who represented both the imperialism and the Jaliyat of Christianity at the time of the Hazrat Messiah-e-Maud a.s, and that was a time when they proudly said that the sun does not set upon our empire. Yet, from the time of the Hazrat Messiah-e-Maud a.s, despite the fact that Ahmadiyyat did not have to fight a battle physically, the British went into shrinkage and from then on the British empire was never on the increase as previously it was. One after the other they left the country and ultimately they got, they shrank to the size of their island except for that Falklands island perhaps, you know, for that they had to pay a big price.
But anyway, I mean that process is still on and also other territories, Muslim territories are occupied by other powers. They were also liberated in the same process. So one shrinkage we have observed has taken place over a hundred years and still continues. The other shrinkage is the spiritual shrinkage, and the attitude of the Western world and Christianity and the great hopes they were pinning on the future of Christianity, they have completely been shattered. Their dreams have been shattered and now they are going into defensive instead of offensive.
In Africa what has happened? They have themselves accepted their defeat at the hands of Ahmadiyyat. They have written it in so many words that there was a time when we dreamt that because we are creating chains of missionaries from one coast of Africa to another, within a matter of years we will see the entire Africa in the lap of Christianity. But what do we see now? While Ahmadis gain ten Africans for Islam, we gain only one for Christianity. This is the proportion. So all these admissions of defeat by the Christian scholars themselves prove that spiritually also they are shrinking and not only in this direction, in so many other directions they are shrinking. Their hostile attitude to Islam has totally changed now. In appearance. They are very cautious now. They also sting now, they also stab now, but not as daringly and openly and as crudely as they used to do once. Now they are afraid of attacking Hazrat Mohammad Mustafa ο·Ί, frontally at least. So that is also a change in their attitude. Among them are scholars who are really turning sympathetic to the cause of Islam, and they are thinking, I mean they are revising their views on Islam and Ahmadis also everywhere are rebutting attacks on Islam in every direction, every religious direction, and we are on the increase and we are gaining ground and relatively when we gain ground, of course the enemy loses some ground otherwise we couldn’t have gained. So this is the shrinkage which was mentioned, but people who do not know the historical phenomena of the earlier times, they think some miracle of a different type would happen this time. The Imam Mehdi raises a voice and suddenly the whole world of the Jaliyat melts away like the ice melts and instead of a regular shrinkage, which is logical and which has a historical base, they want cheap miracles to happen, which never do.
