Ahmadiyyat in the East Indies
Maulvi Rahmat Ali [ra] writes:
The ulema are bitterly opposing our movement here. They are trying to keep the people away from us by all sorts of means. Some of them reported us to the Government, saying that we believed in a bloody Mahdi who proclaims a holy war against the ‘infidels’. I had to send a telegram to contradict this misrepresentation of our Jamaat.
We have started a monthly paper from here in Malaya, the vernacular of the people, and we are thinking of making it a weekly if it proves a success. The ulema are issuing fatwa after fatwa against us and people abuse me openly.
Some of the nobles are favourably disposed towards us and they are beginning to defend our Jamaat against the Maulvis.
Kindly send me some books in English. The number of new converts to our faith by this time is 200 by the grace of God.
Ahmadiyyat in the West Indies
Our brother Mr William R Barker, like Mr Arthur Plant of Manchester, is a very zealous Ahmadi. He preaches the Truth [i.e. Islam Ahmadiyyat] during his travels and distributes our literature wherever he goes.
Recently he went to Jamaica, about which he writes:
Last month our vessel was at Port Royal, Jamaica, British West Indies, a beautiful island with 700,000 population, nearly all black and Christian. Immorality is somewhat rife in the island; about one-third of the blacks have a mixture of white blood and illegitimacy is steadily on the increase.
At Port Royal, Jamaica, there is an old church which held its 200th anniversary, at which eight Bishops of the English Church officiated, including an Archbishop.
I could not help noticing the contrast between them and a coloured girl who was collecting money to pay the expenses of the services. She was the illegitimate daughter of a white father, her mother before her being the illegitimate offspring of a white man. This was after nearly 400 years of Christianity in Jamaica. All must be well with the Church. All must be well with the blacks.
An Ahmadiyya mission in Jamaica would be a blessing to the people, teaching them to take pride in themselves, their race and their faith, which Christianity apparently fails to do in actual practice. I believe such a mission would be a success. I spoke to several and distributed literature.
Lunar influences
The Theosophical Path of August 1926 publishes an interesting article on “More unexplained lunar influences”, written by Mr CJ Ryan. He says:
“In discussing the alleged influence of the moon upon animal and vegetable life, Dr H Munro Fox of the Cairo School of Medicine, Egypt, gives some remarkable data about the habits of a sea-urchin (Echinus) found in the Red Sea, which definitely establish the accuracy of one very ancient belief ridiculed by modern materialism in the mysterious influence of the moon upon reproduction.
“In Southern Europe the sea-urchin is considered a great delicacy and its ways are naturally well known to the fishermen and their customers. It is a matter of common knowledge in Suez at the Red Sea end of the Canal that for a period about every new moon the contents of the sea-urchin’s shell are greatly shrunk and not worth eating, but as the moon increases in light a new crop of eggs begins to grow and just before full moon the empty spaces in the shell are filled with the roe and the creatures become the succulent morsels which have been so greatly esteemed by Southern epicures for thousands of years.”
Miss Elizabeth S Semmens of the Liverpool University, England, “experimented with seeds and growing plants, and found that polarised light greatly stimulated their growth, so that the reason for the ancient superstition of the growth of cucumbers increasing about the period when the moon gives its greatest light (polarised), has been established on reasonable grounds.”
The age-long failure
The Christian quarterly Moslem World seems to be restlessly disturbed by the “age-long failure of the Christian Church” to obtain converts from Islam.
Instead of honestly admitting the superior excellence of Islam, this paper always makes futile efforts in the vain hope of blinding the world to this stern fact.
A short time ago it consoled itself by attributing this failure to an imaginary law of apostasy in Islam. Now it criticises the method of Christian preaching. It says the whole ménage has not been disclosed and that the approach until now was not Christian.
We wonder why millions of pounds and lives have been wasted so far? Was it Islam that the Christian missionaries were preaching? What is most amusing is the suggested new formulation of the whole ménage: “a plain but full presentation of Jesus Christ as a personal and all-sufficient Saviour apart from any Islamic colouring or backing.”
We regret we can detect no improvement and are rather inclined to think that the poor missionaries themselves fail to understand Christianity. They are, however, not to be blamed for not understanding such things as are absolutely beyond human comprehension, i.e. the exclusive monopoly of the sonship, eternal damnation, atonement and the trinity. Surely, Jesus Christ would himself be ashamed of them!
In memory of Hazrat Dr Khalifa Rashid-ud-Din (ra)
“See to it that his name be not forgotten.”
We are deeply grieved to have to record the death of Dr Khalifa Rashid-ud-Din Sahib (ra), the blessed companion of the Promised Messiah (as), may they rest in peace, and the father-in-law of Hazrat Khalifatul Masih II [ra], Head of the Ahmadiyya Community.
His was a life of love, service and devotion, and he was a sincere, steadfast and zealous believer. “His [was] the undiminished, undecaying gladness.”
We offer our sincerest condolences to the whole family.
(Transcribed and edited by Al Hakam from the original English, published in the September 1926 issue of The Review of Religions)