During 1890’s Maulvi Muhammad Husain of Batala, a staunch enemy of the Promised Messiah(as), became extremely active in his enmity towards him and the front on which his unbridled enthusiasm was shown was nothing but the effort that he made to misguide the British Government regarding him and to impress on it that Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad(as) was disloyal to the Government and a rebel against it. As he could not achieve this objective without stooping to falsehoods and meanness, he exactly did that. The lies that he told to the Government were twofold: First, he knew, and had previously admitted, that the Promised Messiah(as) was a loyal subject and was not a rebel, and yet to the Government he told a bare-faced lie that he was so; second, in order to be in the good books of the Government, he informed it that he neither believed in violent Jihad, nor did he believe in a Mahdi that would shed blood; and to compound his lies he shamelessly submitted to the Government that the beliefs of the Promised Messiah(as) were diametrically opposed to his own.

So that time had come when the Promised Messiah(as) should have had addressed these lies and calumnies before the Government and once again reassured it about his loyalty to it. Hence, he wrote Haqiqat-ul-Mahdi. After a brief account of the enmity that Muhammad Husain and the Ahl-e-Hadith harbour towards him, he first gives his own belief [about the Mahdi] and that of the Ahl-e-Hadith to draw a comparison between the two. Then he further expounds on the deep-rooted enmity of Muhammad Husain towards him and on how it had translated into his nefarious activities against him—covering the fatwa issued by Muhammad Husain about the Promised Messiah(as) and his [Muhammad Husain’s] hypocrisy as well as his efforts to turn the people and the Government against him. In the course of this discussion he also elaborates on the nature of prophecies and categorically states that no prophecy of his remained unfulfilled.

The main thrust comes at the end of the text, in a plea addressed to the Government, where he proposes a test in order to enable the Government to differentiate between the sincere and the hypocrite, the liar and the truthful. And, in order to fulfil the conditions set out in the test, he had written his own beliefs regarding the disputed matters in Arabic with its Persian translation to be submitted to the Government and distributed in Muslim counties; and he had, in his plea to the Government, hoped that Muhammad Husain would do the same. The Arabic and Persian texts were appended to the Urdu text which was eventually published in a one volume book.

Mirza Anas Ahmad, M.A., M.Litt. (Oxon)
June 2017