About two weeks ago, in the pre-Coronavirus era, a very quiet and Stoic gentleman in Manchester hands me a leaflet proclaiming the new Messiah, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. He seems too polite and graceful to be mad. I learn that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a nineteenth century Indian man who claimed to be an awaited prophet within Islam. Not only does he seem rather meek, but this particular Messiah claimant himself also seems rather nice. He proclaimed an Islam of absolute peace and protested against those who had used it for the ideals of warfare. He also genuinely believed in fostering understanding between different religious groups – particularly, dialogue between Hindus and Muslim. This was in the nineteenth century, which was the beginning of the sorts of strict religious identities that we see today. In his last book, A Message of Peace, he proclaims, “We are mutual neighbours. This requires that we become friends to each other, with purity of heart and sincerity of intentions.” Not only this, he was adept at recognising sins beyond the canon of sins that are usually recognised by the zealous clerics of different religious traditions.
In fact, as I read A Message Of Peace, I am struck by how coherent and rational it all sounds. Ghulam Ahmad offers a liberal and universalistic interpretation of the Qu’ran (of which I know nothing.) He states that the Qu’ran opens with the surah al-Fatihah, which protested against those who try to “monopolise” God’s love for themselves. Ghulam Ahmad’s essence and conception of himself as the Messiah is that the other Messiahs were insufficiently universalistic. “As it is also written in the Gospels that Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) observed that he had been sent only for the lost sheep of Israel.” Ghulam Ahmad believes that Jesus carried on living and eventually died a natural death, a sort of inversion of the death-and-resurrection idea. Far from being crazy, Ghulam Ahmad seems like an interesting thinker who is eminently worth listening to.
Why can’t we have a new Messiah? Yet imagine how wildly improbable it would be for a religious teacher to teach exclusively orally. It contradicts the very idea and essence of the mass media. Ghulam Ahmad’s idea seems to have been that he was a Messiah for all people, and a protest against cultism. He states that the Aryas maintained the idea of divine revelation only to their followers. In this case, I suppose I find myself defending our modern atomised religious traditions because the mass media distorts the subtlety and nuances of prophets. This is why we have a “Christian tradition”, an “Islamic tradition”, etc., because these traditions stem from a prophet who taught certain people thoroughly and individually. Yet I find myself hugely admiring Ghulam Ahmad’s writings, and I learn that people who claim to be the Messiah are not nearly as crazy as I imagined. Besides, Jesus – by today’s standards – was totally crazy.
Squidditas 