Judgment from “second” Cape Town case, 1990, online
Due to the hard work of the Webmaster of www.aaiil.org the Judgment in what we informally call the “second” Cape Town court case, dated February 1990, is now online. It is the scanned image of the typed Judgment. Please access it from this link.
As the learned Lady Judge says on page 2:
“A marathon trial followed, the major portion of which dealt with the issue whether Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who died in India in 1908 was a Muslim or an apostate, and whether one of the two branches of his followers referred to herein as the Ahmedis … consist of Muslims or apostates.”
At this link is an overall summary of the court case, taken from the obituary of Hafiz Sher Muhammad that I wrote following his death in October 1990.
There was an appeal by the anti-Ahmadiyya parties against this judgment, whose result came out in September 1995. You can read my coverage of the appeal and the false representation of it by the anti-Ahmadiyya parties at this link.
From Abdul Momin:
I somehow managed to delete a significant portion of my previous blog entry. The full entry should have read:
I was a bit surprised when I first read in this article that the Hadith: “The learned ones amongst my followers shall be like the prophets of the Israelites,” was not in any of the collection of hadith, and that the Pakistani Ulema had tried to even deny it as a hadith altogether.
Whenever I saw this Hadith being quoted by HMGA in his books, it had a familiar ring to it. This is because when I was in the sixth grade (if my memory serves me right) our Islamiyat teacher told us that the Holy Prophet in a hadith stated “My Ulema shall be like the prophets of Bani Israel.” This happened when I used to live in the former East Pakistan.
Previously, whenever I found this Hadith being quoted by HMGA, I used to wonder if some of the Sunni Ulema were conceited enough to think that this Hadith referred to them -since it contains the word Ulema- and whether they actually thought that they resembled the prophets of Bani Isreal.
As the Sunni Ulema in Bangladesh are not any different in beliefs compared to their Pakistani brethren, I wonder if this denial on the part of the Pakistani religious scholars was solely for the purpose of opposing the Ahmadis, or was it just plain ignorance on their part.