by Lord Headley[1]
With very great pleasure I have read Maulana Muhammad Ali’s excellent epitome of Islamic teaching, and I am much impressed by the ability he has shown in condensing, within the space of a few pages, all the essentials of our religion: the simplicity and sincerity of the work cannot but commend it to all those who are earnestly searching for the truth. There is a distinct need of such a concise exposition of Islam, for, notwithstanding the march of education and intelligent reasoning on religious subjects, there still remains in this country a lamentable amount of ignorance respecting the Muslim religion.
To a great extent this is due to the misrepresentations of those who really know, but wilfully mislead the Western mind respecting our faith. Some of the fallacies resulting from this unworthy practice of misrepresentation are that Muslims worship Muhammad, that polygamy is part of the Islamic religion, and that women have no souls. Amazing and incredible as it may seem, I am certain that great many respectable and in other respects fairly educated people in England really believe that we worship Muhammad, are compelled to have great many wives, and that our womenfolk have no souls and cannot enter into Paradise! All these ideas are utterly mistaken. We worship Allah, the one and only God. “Thee only do we worship, and of Thee alone do we beg for assistance,” is part of the Muslim prayer, and we make no distinction between the prophets selected by the Almighty in various stages of the world’s history. There is but one God, and Muhammad is the Prophet, the last Prophet, of God. Polygamy was rampant throughout Arabia before the advent of Muhammad, who merely regulated and placed restrictions on the number of wives a man might have. He also entirely put a stop to female infanticide as practised in Arabia before his time. At the present time, very few Muslims have more than one wife, and woman’s position in the Muslim world is far better than it is in Christian countries.
I hope that steps may be taken to have this little work widely distributed, as I feel sure that a perusal of its pages will bring enlightenment and comfort to those who may as yet be unaware of the true spirit of Islam, and may still be labouring under the delusions brought about, either by want of correct information or by listening to those who should know better than to falsely represent a sister religion.
HEADLEY
Footnotes
[1] Lord Headley (d. 1935) was a British peer who embraced Islam in 1913 at the hand of Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, the pioneer Muslim missionary to Europe, who belonged to the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement. Lord Headley was closely associated with the Woking Muslim Mission in England, which was founded by Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din and run by members of the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha‘at Islam, Lahore.