The important thing in preaching is that you should preach with wisdom, because wherever the subject of preaching is mentioned in the Holy Quran, and the word wisdom is also used, it always precedes the other injunctions. So hikmah is first, and mu’aza hasana, that is admonishment in the best manner, that is second. And debate, jadilhum, that comes in the end. So this is the art of preaching which Holy Quran teaches us.
Some people, on the other hand, start preaching with debating, which is putting the cart before the horse. According to the Quranic order, the order is exactly reversed by such people, and it always produces bad results and jolts. So without hikmah, there cannot be a preaching of any sort to anyone, not to mention a Christian, Catholic or any other. It is a general principle laid down by the Holy Quran. So hikmah means anything which would aid your purpose and objective. Anything which goes against your purpose is against hikmah as well.
So you want to win hearts, not to repel them. If you enter a bitter controversy immediately, and that begins from you, it is not the right way according to the Holy Quran of preaching. Moreover, to care for other people’s sentiments is highly important. Even apart from this, it was the tradition of Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa that he would not hurt others’ feelings, even if he had to sacrifice himself. For instance, once it was related to him, I mean it was complained to him by some non-Muslims that when Muslims call you a better prophet or higher prophet in status, then Yunus, Jonah, the one of the belly of the fish, we are hurt, they are followers of Jonah. So Huzoor-e-Ikram did not take this stance because Allah has made me better than everybody else. I am the best of the prophets.
So why shouldn’t the Muslims say that and assert that? He called his companions, ordered his companions to abstain from hurting such people’s sentiments by telling them that I am better than Jonah. Not that he told them they should change their view about him, their faith about him. He said don’t hurt their feelings. This is Islam. So in preaching, it is even more so important that you should be kind and loving and try to avoid any situation where other people’s feelings are hurt. But there are certain situations which cannot be avoided. For instance, Allah is one and despite the fact that the feelings of the entire Arab population was hurt to a point of frenzy and they reacted so violently, their Prophet did not order his followers to save the feelings of the opponents or the idolaters and keep quiet about Allah is one.
So some via media has to be taken in between the two. Try to avoid hurting others’ feelings, yet be adamant and firm in your principles. And the fundamentals cannot be compromised. This is important. So in this regard, if this is the given and you have to work your way within the two walls, then intelligence will have to be employed and this is why Hikmah is required. Hikmah means to solve such situations with wisdom where you are caught in a difficult position. On the one hand there are principles involved and in fact you are calling Christians to be one God. That is important. And on the other hand, if you say Jesus Christ was not a little son of God, he was something else, the feelings are hurt. So how to wriggle out of this difficult situation?
I have personally found myself many a time in this situation while discussing things with some Christian friends and my experience, I can tell you, has been such that I have never come across anyone who said you have hurt my feelings. The fact is that even the Catholics lay stress on the unity of God and they say that three and one and one and three are one and the same thing and this is a division within. Yet the unity is not injured and hurt by this concept. This is something common to all Christian sects. It may be difficult for a non-Christian to comprehend this situation that three and one and one and three, they can be one and the same thing, but this is what they believe. So this is why the Holy Quran addresses them by saying, ta’ala ila kalimatin sawain bainana wa bainakum. And here Allah himself shows the hikmah. The finger of Allah points out at a way out. Always begin with the unity of God. He said you also believe in the unity and we also believe in the unity, but our concepts of unity are different.
So let us settle this issue, whose concept of unity is correct and more according to Jesus Christ’s own concept. So if you begin there, there is a good way of approaching them and debating the issue without hurting their feelings, then you will be laying stress on Jesus Christ’s decision. Say he is a beloved leader of ours as well as yours, whatever you call him, it’s your own business, but we respect him very highly and his word will pass as far as we are concerned. So let’s decide the issue instead of debating it from the Quran and from the Bible. In the Holy Quran you don’t believe, but we believe in the Bible. So that is the common platform and Allah calls you to the common platform of unity. So let us decide this issue from the Bible, what is the concept of unity and which is more understandable and closer to the concept of Jesus Christ himself, peace be upon him. So that is one way of opening the debate without hurting anybody’s feelings. The second way is very helpful and I think it’s very productive. I always claim that I love Jesus Christ better than you and a debate should be held on this issue and I can prove it that I love him better. And why I love him better is because I love the reality of Jesus Christ, not a myth of Jesus Christ, not a concept which doesn’t exist, but a reality of Jesus Christ which is human and in each doctrine where I differ with you, my difference of opinion on each doctrine proves that I love him more than you do.
Now there you can open the debate on this issue, how can the feeling of a Christian be hurt if you are respecting his leader more and this is your claim. Even if it gets hurt after this attitude, then you can’t help it. I mean this is something which is unavoidable. There are some very stupid people and very narrow minded people who are bent upon being hurt. You can’t avoid hurting them. But in principle, in large instances, in large cases, it could be possible to avoid hurting anybody’s feeling and yet calling them to Islam. Now here I’ll further elaborate this point because this is very important. Why I say I love Jesus Christ more than a Catholic or any other Christian, I can prove it logically. No one to believe that Jesus Christ suffered all that he suffered for our sake while he was son of God is less pitiable, more removed from human feeling than if we believed that he was a human being yet he suffered for our sake because then he shared our limitations. Then he shared all our feelings and we know how he suffered and to what extent he suffered. So the suffering must be borne by him as a human being otherwise he is not pitiable.
Now when you say this, the Christians generally take up this position. They say he was son of God in one respect and a complete man in another respect. So he suffered as a man. So the question of son of God does not enter into the premise as far as suffering goes. This has to be decided. So part of the Christianity will fall over and you are one fourth of the better maybe or one fifth of the better and if they insist that suffering was felt by son of God, not by the human part, the moment they take this stance then we don’t know whether he suffered at all or not because God cannot suffer. Because God cannot suffer so it was just a show. Why are you shedding your tears for someone who didn’t suffer at all? He had to be a human being who suffered and this is our position that he was a human being. So if God was attached to that human being, he was a callous passive observer, doing nothing. He was doing nothing to his co-partner with whom he had lived all his life. To save him from that suffering he was just observing, the son of God I mean, the so-called son of God. So we respect him much more and love him much more because we know how he suffered and we can conjecture, we can imagine, we can project ourselves into that situation. Secondly, we love him much more because we cannot believe for a second that Jesus Christ was cursed by God. Whatever concept of fatherhood you may have, this is your game but this thing is unbearable for us, for such a wonderful person as Jesus Christ was, that he should be condemned to hell for three nights and three days, to a cursed position. And if you believe that he died on cross, really, actually, then cursed he must be according to the Bible and this is exactly the belief of most of the Christian sects, that he was cursed by Allah for this very reason. And this is what they say, he took the blame of our crimes, our sins upon himself. So this has to be divided in two parts, suffering prior to crucifixion, not to death, so-called death, during the crucifixion and immediately what happened after the crucifixion. Actually the Christians do not analyze it and divide it into two parts. But when you enter a logical discussion, you have to do it, otherwise things will remain confused. The man who suffered on the cross, he was a man or he didn’t suffer, this is quite logical and no third conclusion can be drawn from this. Secondly, when he ultimately, if he ultimately gave up ghost, then what happened to him? If he died upon the cross, according to the Bible, he should go to the hell. And for three days and three nights, he spent in that situation, which was a curse from Allah, that is he was removed from his father. That is the concept of curse, he went away, there was a distance which was created between him and the father.
So for those three days and nights, he was a cursed man and we cannot believe in that. We love him far too much to believe that he was cursed even for one single instance. It injures our feelings. They should try to avoid hurting us by that view. It’s not we who are hurting them, they are being cruel and unjust to us because we believe that it is most degrading for our holy prophet to be called that he was cursed for three days, even for three seconds is far too much for us. So we love him definitely more than the Christians do. Moreover, as I said earlier, if you turn your master into a myth, then what you love is just a shadow and not a substantial thing. So a debate should be held, who is loving the reality of Christ? So whoever loves the reality of Christ, he loves him more of course and he is the only one who loves. There is no question of more or less in fact then. The question is you are loving something else, it is like aiming at the shadow of a bird and pulling the trigger off and expecting that the bird would be killed. If the direction of your emotions, your thoughts, your views is misdirected, is wrong, off the mark, then you don’t love the reality at all. As I have explained, that bird will never be killed, however good aim you may have, you will be aiming in the wrong direction. But a man with less powerful weapons, with worse aim than you, stands a better chance of making a kill, if not every day, someday, if he knows which the bird is, if he always aims at the bird.
So we love him more because we love the reality of Christ and you are loving a myth, a figurehead. Then we love him much more than you because we can prove that whatever he did, it was within our capacity to follow him. A master who cannot be followed, he is useless as master. Whatever he did, being a human being, he was a model for us and every human being could follow that model. So we may turn his concept into a very useful, beneficial concept. Jesus Christ is within your reach to follow. When you turn him into God and confuse the issues of his personalities, give him a dual personality, God come man, then we don’t know in what actions he was remaining within his human capacity and what actions were performed beyond the human capacity. In his capacity, a son of God, because in dual personality, the actions have to be ascertained and positively determined which action springs from which capacity. So as there is no way of finding out, there is no way of finding out which we can follow and which we cannot.
For instance, he is walking on the river or walking in the air or performing all the miracles. If they were not acts of man, then we have no interest. Let him do, what difference does it make? If they were acts of man, then we should know and we should try to follow them. But they have never been followed, later on. So either they were just stories or they were not acts to be followed. But anyway, that is another issue, I am leaving that, you shouldn’t enter at this stage. Stick to this one particular point, that Jesus Christ we love is within our approach. We can fondle with him, we can caress him, we can follow him, we can make him our own, we can make him enter our whole life, we can make him run through our bloodstream. This is the love and your Jesus Christ is such a doubtful figure as part of it is God and part of it is human being and you don’t know which action belongs to which part, which capacity. So you have entirely confused the issue. It is like a debate once held between an illiterate Sindhi Ahmadi and a Christian scholar. This Sindhi illiterate Ahmadi was very fond of preaching, but he was totally ignorant, he couldn’t write or read his name either. But because he was very fond and very devout, so Allah used to help him miraculously whenever he entered a debate with a great scholar, some sort of scholar. So he, it was related about him by some Sindhi to me, that once a Christian, European Christian who had learned to speak the vernacular language, went to his village and this gentleman, this Ahmadi Sindhi greeted him and said, look here I should like to learn something of Jesus Christ, I love him so much and you tell me something about him. So he gave him, I mean quoted some miracles, told him about some miracles of Jesus Christ and how he lived and this and that.
So behaving very innocently he said, but tell me father, can I follow anything which Jesus Christ did? He said, of course he is a model for you. He said, but I can’t understand it because from my childhood I have been told that Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa is a model for me. So the concept of model I have is this, that if he said prayers in a manner that I can never reach that ultimate, yet I can say that prayer to some degree. If I can’t follow him to the final extent, I can take a few steps in that direction. So that assures me that he is a model. If I make a little more effort, I can go proceed a bit further and if I make a little more effort, I can take a few more steps in that direction. So he kept fasts. I also keep fasts, although the quality of his fast is much better, but I know and it gives me confidence that I am following him. So one after the other he named certain aspects of Huzoor’s contact and said that look here I can demonstrate that I can also take some steps in that direction. Then he said, you have told me that our model Jesus Christ used to walk in the air.
So don’t walk that high, just walk half an inch above the ground and then I will see if you can really follow Jesus Christ or not. This man was non-plussed, because all the miracles he had quoted to him belong to super human sphere and this was the point which he wanted to make. And this is the point which can be established, that when you turn him into son of God, you injure his position as a model. And that hurts us. He was a model and a perfect model for his time. Now here again the word perfect I have used intentionally. Never enter a debate with Christians telling them that Christianity was imperfect or Judaism was imperfect. This perfection is a relative term. No prophet was imperfect in the context of his time, in the relationship to his people and the advancement of his men of his time. He was perfect in that order and the book also was perfect in that order. Imperfection can never flow from Allah who is himself perfect.
Only the difference is that he is perfect absolutely and those things who are finite, they cannot reach absolute perfection. So their perfection is always relative. So Allah reveals to him, to human beings, always perfectly, keeping them in mind, keeping their capacity and their requirements in mind. It is like you are walking to the ocean with a pail to fill it with the water. It is not the ocean which determines how much water it is going to give you. It is your capacity to carry it. But one thing is certain that it can fill you to the brim. However big your pail be, you can collect all the containers in the world, yet the ocean will always fill you to perfection. That is the concept of perfection as applied to benefit flowing from God. So never take this stance that Jesus Christ was imperfect or the teachings were imperfect. Take this stance that in relation to the time they were perfect and when the time advances, that teaching which comes later on is more perfect compared to that because it applies to a different time, values have changed.
So when you say that, you tell them that we treat Jesus Christ as a perfect model. This is why I said the word perfect model, for his people, for his time. But calling him son of God, you no longer treat him as a perfect model for human beings because we are confused in what capacity he did what. Then we can claim that we love him more because we believe that whenever he prayed in our nest, it was impossible for God to reject him. But you claim that he prayed in our nest and at the time of extreme crisis, his prayer was rejected. And also you contradict yourself and attribute that contradiction to Jesus Christ’s character. And contradiction is dissembling. In fact it is a sort of dissemblance in man’s character. You claim that Jesus Christ wanted to sacrifice all he had for the sake of humanity. Yet when the time of crisis, of the final trial came, he started praying to Allah, O my Lord, O my Lord, why have you deserted me at this hour of crisis? Either he was misstating the fact that God had not deserted him. In that case, he was a liar. We don’t believe that he was a liar. And God was committing the crime of desertion.
Now in that case God was true, but he was a liar. If he was telling the truth, then he was alright, God was wrong and he was committing the act of desertion to his dear son. Either of the two situations is not acceptable to us because we love both Jesus Christ and God. The only logical, acceptable conclusion is this, that when Jesus Christ said, Eli Eli namah sabachthani, that was the final, I mean the ultimate in prayer. And it was accepted by Lord. He was saved at the ignoble death upon cross. And this is our case. So this solves the whole situation. We love him, we treat him as a most honest and perfect man. We believe that his relationship with God was perfect. He also loved him. He couldn’t have rejected his hand when it was extended towards him. And he saved him from this ignoble death, yet he was the dearest person because he suffered so much for the sake of humanity. Being a real man, being a human being, this is the greatness of Jesus Christ. So this is a way of approaching things where at no step a Christian can say that you are hurting our feelings.
On the other hand, you start taking this stance, that mind you, we don’t mind you go on hurting our feelings, but it is you who are hurting our feelings and we now love Jesus Christ better than you do. Then we can say that we love him so much that the concept of his coming is so practical that we hold. The concept of his coming again that we hold is so practical and real that not only can he come, he has come. But your concept has become so mythical, so out of this world, so bizarre that it has never happened and it is not going to happ
