Questioner: How, what more, what can we add in Tabligh once someone says they believe in the Holy Prophet Muhammad and they believe in Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and they believe in other Prophets, but they don’t go no farther.
Huzoor (rh): They do not believe in Hazrat Masih Maud A.S. Is that so?
Questioner: No, they may even believe in him too, but they don’t take no steps. They just say, yes I believe in all Prophets, but they don’t want to take conviction or they don’t want to say, make commitment as I mean.
Huzoor (rh): I’ll explain that. I’ve run into this problem. You sit here, maybe you have to ask a second question, you know, arising from the discussion here, so you keep sitting here for a while. The fact is that the word believe, belief or believe in the verbal form is to be understood in its correct perspective. One may believe in jinns and ghosts and also one may believe in fire and firepower. Now, if the belief is imaginary, it doesn’t require any particular discipline in your life. So you may live to believe in ghosts for a long, long time, yet the concept of those ghosts would not interfere with your daily life in any way. So that belief is like not having any belief. But a belief in fire requires a certain discipline. When you believe in fire, you should know how to best employ a fire and how to avoid the dangers of fire. If you don’t, then your belief is to say that I believe in fire is a misstatement of it. You may put your hand into fire and burn yourself. You may have the possibility of employing fire, employing the fire for certain good tasks to be performed, cooking food and things and yet you would be avoiding it. And yet saying all the time I believe in fire, it would be meaningless, won’t it? So belief in prophets and belief in all the fundamentals of Islam is not like believing in a ghost by a superstitious person. It is like believing in a reality of life and as such it has an effect on your life and disciplines your life and requires you to modulate your life habits according to your belief. Or you are making a false statement about that belief, you do not have that belief. So now coming to a belief in Hazrat Muhammad (saw) and in the book, the Holy Quran, how can you believe in the book while you are ignoring all its commandments? How can you believe in Hazrat Muhammad (saw) while you ignore entirely the way he lived and do not try to follow him and to imitate his life pattern? So belief in this context means this. So anybody who says well I will not be disciplined, I will not be bothered by the teachings of Islam yet I believe, he is not believing in reality, he does not know the true meaning of belief in this context.
