The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement Blog

Archive for the ‘general’ Category

It is reported from Lahore that Akhtar-un-Nisa Begum, the last of the sons and daughters of Hazrat Maulana Muhammad Ali, passed away today, 6th February, at Darus Salaam, the Lahore Ahmadiyya centre in Garden Town, Lahore. Inna li-llahi wa inna ilai-hi raajioon. She was 93 years of age.

She was still regularly participating in the activities of the Jama`at. She was a member of the executive committee of the Ahmadiyya Women’s Association and attended their monthly meeting just three days ago. She also attended the Jumua prayers yesterday.

Glancing through pages of Paigham-i-Sulh of the 1930s, one comes across reports of activities of the Young Ahmadi Girls Association. Miss Akhtar-un-Nisa was the moving force behind this organization.

May Allah grant her a high place in Paradise, along with her earlier departed elders, and may He also grant patience and fortitude to the bereaved family to bear this irreparable loss. Ameen.

Submitted by Usman.

An article today in the Daily Times laments that much of Pakistan’s problems today can be traced to the country’s ideological boundaries that have been defined by the political mullahs. This has been in cohorts with politicians and dictators as by themselves the mullahs have no political power. He goes on to say that this ideology is the opposite of the vision of the country’s founder and that Sufi Islam presents the correct religious ideology that would have saved Pakistan. According to the writer the rot started with Bhutto “when he declared Ahmadis a minority, banned liquor and racing and designated Friday as a weekly holiday.”

It is a fact that in the Mullah’s zeal to outcast the Ahmadis, some fundamental sufi concepts have been labelled as heretic as well. The result is that in Pakistan today, it has consequently become very difficult to have an alternative religious ideology for the nation that can credibly challenge the extremist ideology. This is even more unfortunate because the extremist ideology is not the view of the majority; but with the deliberate exclusion of competing ideologies, it may very well become so over the passage of time.

Submitted by Rashid Jahangiri.

While surfing Pak Tea House blog I was intrigued by name of Muhammad Yusuf Ali.
Wikipedia entry says:

“Mr. Ali testified during the trial that according to Islamic beliefs all human beings are representative of God Almighty and all Muslims should also strive to be a representative of Prophet Muhammad. He advocated that to gain human excellence all human-beings should respect each other and live life according to examples set by their great leaders such as Prophet Muhammad, Prophet Jesus, Prophet Moses, Mahatama Buddha, etc. Mr. Ali admitted that he himself lives life according to teachings, examples and guidance of the Prophet Muhammad, strives to fulfill his mission, and considers himself his humble and true representative.”

I never heard of this gentleman, and will appreciate if anyone can share information. To me his message sounds like LAM message.

About 4 or 5 years ago, during conversation with (late) Abdul Manan Omar sahib on propagation of HMGA message, he said HMGA message would be spread by those who may not be related to either of the two branches of Ahmadis. In this regard he gave example of Muslims, whose mosque is near our jamaat headquarters in Lahore. I never heard of that group of Muslims, neither before nor after that. I’m curious if anyone knows about them. And whether Muhammad Yusuf Ali was connected to them?

Link to Wikipedia entry

Yes, there is a book The Life of Mohammed, by George Bush, published in New York by Harper!

But this is a Rev. George Bush who lived during 1796-1859.

Here is the title page:

Here is an interesting extract from page 18 of the book:

Here is a link to the book.

At this link you can view a photograph I recently found, which shows some students from the year 4 medical class at the Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore, from the year 1951, along with some staff. Dr Allah Bakhsh, who later in 1965 became General Secretary of the AAIIL in his retirement, is 4th from the left in the seated row (wearing glasses).

In the mid-1950s he became Chief Chemical Examiner of the city of Karachi, from which post he retired in 1960. Serving in that post required a high degree of probity, honesty and integrity since he was responsible for the post-mortem reports in murder cases. Some of these crimes were carried out at the behest of wealthy, influential persons who were prepared to offer large bribes to get a report which cleared the murderer.

I was unable to get the previous spam-protection script to work today, which required you to specify the current year when submitting a comment. When I switched the script off, two auto-spam comments appeared in the moderation queue within a few minutes!

I have now installed a different spam protection method which doesn’t require comment posters to type the answer to any question. This saves you the extra bother, as well as providing me with spam protection (if the claim is true!).

Zahid Aziz

As our contributors know, when submitting a comment they are required to type the current year (2009 at present) in a box. This eliminates spam/advertising comments from being auto-submitted because this number has to be typed manually by a human.

I hope to modify the programming code in a day or two to make it recognise 2010 as the current year. I will announce it here when that has been done. Till then it is still 2009.

Our esteemed contributor Ikram has reminded me that today, 28th December, is the anniversary of the death of Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din sahib (may the mercy of Allah be upon him), which took place in Lahore in 1932. He is buried in the old Lahore Ahmadiyya section in the great Miani sahib cemetery in Lahore.

This is a link to a page of contents giving links to information about the life of the Khwaja sahib.

One of these links is to the Muslim League records showing that condolences were expressed at its annual meeting.

Here is a link to the special issue of The Islamic Review, April-May 1933, published in tribute to him.

I was at the annual gathering of the AAIIL in Lahore in December 1982. I remember the late Mirza Masud Baig, General-Secretary, walked in to one session and reminded people that that day was the 50th anniversary of the death of Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.

I am not here expressing any view on the validity or otherwise of man-made climate change theories, but I found the following lines interesting at the start of an article by Ian Plimer, Professor of Geology at the University of Adelaide:

“Perhaps it is comforting to believe that science is an absolute discipline: immune from fads, fanatics and frauds, untroubled by extremists, evangelists, glory-seekers and bigots. But it is not. It is as vulnerable to the vested interests and biases of its practitioners as any corporate entity or political party.

Uncomfortable truths are suppressed and dubious evidence given undue prominence.

Nowhere is this more worryingly obvious than in the science of climate change. As a field of research it has become so heavily politicised that opposing views are spoken of in terms of religion: believers and non-believers, with the accent being on the righteousness of the former and the benighted state of the latter.”

See this link.

Human beings are as fallible and as influenced by their preconceptions, upbringing, egos and desires, in the field of rational science as in any other field such as religion.

Submitted by Rashid Jahangiri.

HMGA was perhaps the first Muslim to initiate Interfaith dialogue in modern times. Especially when Christian West and Muslim East started to interact in last couple of hundred years. He started Interfaith Dialogue in Qadian and then the famous occasion in Lahore in 1896 when he wrote ‘The teachings of Islam’.

In post 9/11/ era his tradition has gained some momentum. Muslims in general have started following HMGA’s one more tradition. Check this New York Times article:

3 Clergymen Tell How Differences of Faith Led to Friendship
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: November 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/us/24amigos.html?_r=1&hp

Note: Please read also this lengthy article in The Light, U.K., about Interfaith dialogue and the Ahmadiyya Movement’s role in it, from page 1 to 7.