DIVINE DEATH SQUAD

- by Gulzar Anwar -

Part I

Death is sure of one who is born. It is the one reality the man always prefers not to face, forgets or skips over conveniently although he knows there is no escape from it. He sees his fellow beings dying everyday around him but refuses to take lessons to fashion his life in a decent way. He attends the funerals, says the farewell prayers for his friends and foes alike, takes a last look of the dead bodies, whom he has to follow one day, often accompanies the cortege to the cemetery, watches with remorse the rites of burial and throws the customary last "handful" of dust on the grave but is not prepared to heed and take an insight into the final end of man which is very tragic to say the least. I translate below a Persian quatrain which is a stern reminder to man to realise his real status in this world and mend his ways before the time runs out for him to avoid his frightful end:

"Come for a moment and pass through the graveyard. Cast a glance at your final destination. Thousands of beautiful faces lying under the dust. Look, cast off all the spite and disdain from your head."

But the man is intransigent, contumacious and refuses to recognise his real state which is "dust he is and unto dust he has to return" and overlooks the fact that once he transmutes from his terrestrial repose, he loses all his significance whatsoever except that he will for sure receive the recompense for his deeds strictly according to their being good or bad during his incarnate period on this earth. Inspite of this miserable end, he is busy making problems for others and is generally given to strutting out before his fellow beings and shows spite to everything which does not fall within his good will. The two inherent evils in a man i.e. corruption and greed, which are the source of all the trouble for the entire human race, accompany him right to the end and are deposited with him in the bowls of earth but even the fright of death does not impel the person to expel these evils from his body frame. The man fails to gain awareness of his self and remains a captive of his desires all his life, is generally lost in its momentary pleasures and when the death brings the curtains down on him, he is already ill-prepared to cross over to his eternal abode. Life is only an illusion and death serves to disillusion the man in regard to any misgivings he may have had about life in his mind. It is important to always keep the efflux of time in mind, as the death sounds no alarm bells when it comes. It is inevitable and can be sudden and unexpected and is not used to giving any respite to anyone when it strikes at its appointed hour. Nevertheless, sometime it casts its shadows before when someone is terminally or very seriously ill but no one can predict its arrival time accurately. It is a gateway to the afterworld. None has been given the power to administer it to any one at will nor can any one delay or hasten its arrival. You cannot hide from it. Death is a logical end to a man’s earthly life, which is only a probation to test him, and you cannot transfer one man’s death to the other. Your deeds good or bad have nothing to do with the arrival of your appointed time. It is pre-determined and fixed and cannot be averted. Every one will take his turn on his appointed time. There is no man-made pattern for death as it is solely determined by the will of God. Scanning the history of mankind, at no place does one come across that the arrival of death was determined by any single act of man falling in the category of good or bad or any holy man was in control of delaying or hastening the death of any one. God is merciful and judicious and does not interfere with the schedule of the demise of human beings already charted out from day one. All men are born equal and there is no divine discrimination inasmuch as the final exit of man from this world is concerned. His stay here is neither prolonged nor cut short. The schedule of arrival and departure is, per se, tight and not pliable and cannot therefore be interpolated or interfered with. In other words, the arrival time of death is precise and immutable. He is Almighty God who does not personalise the arrival of death in different cases as, despite being All Powerful, He is free from any shallow thinking, prejudice or giving preferential treatment in isolated cases for altering the chart of death, even on the demand of his most favoured people, which otherwise is already clearly drawn out leaving no room for alteration at any time. They say that the final day of a human being is determined the moment he arrives in this world. According to a time-worn Punjabi maxim, you cannot trust on death or a guest. They will arrive any time, and without notice, and you may not be ready for them. Yet, you have to welcome them with open arms whether you like it or not. In short, life is a conundrum or a long lane which has many a turning. The behaviour of life is fulsome. The man winds down through the journey of life as a wayfarer and faces all kinds of troubles along the way until he wears himself down through the ups and downs of life. The weary body needs rest and it is here where the death proves a great leveller. It should be enough to say now that no body knows what he is going to do tomorrow and where and when he is going to die. Remember for one last time, dear readers, that the life span of a human being is pretty well planned which is always reducing, as the countdown continues, the shadows of death are lengthening with every passing day and we get a step closer to the ultimate reality of leaving this temporary abode to meet our Creator. About death, Mirza Sahib, in his book "The Philosophy of the Teaching of Islam", while dilating on the third question, gives his valued opinion in his opening remarks before he proceeds to talk at length:

"... man ... does not come into the world of his own accord, nor will he depart therefrom of his own will.."

Surely, the Almighty Allah controls the exit and entry of man from and into this world. That should be a proof enough to vitiate the claims of anybody who professes to possess the power of invoking the death out of turn, delaying it or postponing it for any reasons, whatsoever, in any body’s case however evil he might be. Nothwithstanding the above, my Qadiani friends have their own logic about death. They not only warn people for dying a miserable death, they summon death to punish their enemies as also quote cases where death, in the past, had arrived out of turn or immediately on people who offended their spiritual leader or the community, in general, in an oppressive or abusive way. From the internet I found people delivering death threats and intimidating others about the arrival of their death in a given period of time. How do they forecast this, and on what authority do they do so, I do not know but below I reproduce one Mr. Shahid Eithisham Mirza from USA issuing death warrants to Dr. Rashid and with considerable conviction. Read and enjoy:

"i am going to allaha tonight .therefore ,i am giving you notice the same you sent to hazoor .in eight days some hell things will happen with you,if you do not repent .i am going to allaha tonight just for you satin,.rasheed you are in a trap. nobody can help you except allaha .repent as early as possible. shahid ahtisham mirza new york "

You see he says he is going to see Allah during the quiet of night. As I say, he has chosen the night to plan his punitive action, with some divine aid as an appanage, avoiding the daylight hours when the people are dispersed all over the place, lest some body spots him going heavenwards. He is not nocturnal though, only the bats are! Where is the meeting place with God fixed, he does not say anything about it despite knowing full well that God has no study set aside to receive people? This is only the beginning of the real threat. He is simply setting up his target (Dr. Rashid) for the final and fatal blow. I have reproduced the above exactly as it was and have neither altered even a comma nor changed the lower or upper cases. How do you find it? Does it make any sense to you?. Look the way he is treating the Almighty Allah. Nothing more than an intimate/trusted friend next door who can be visited and called upon any time to come out and destroy a naughty person who has been misbehaving lately and causing ripples in the peace and quiet of the community people. Look the way the threat is being taken to its logical conclusion. He is relentless and says again:

"if nothing happened to you in 8 days i will assume that there is no true religion on the earth.in both case you will get punishment .therefore,ready for it. may be in next few days your whole life will be in hell inshalla.you will know what i mean very soon ."

Please watch out carefully the tenor of threat being delivered gradually, the quality of language being used and the punctuation applied.Any boy in Pakistan at the high school level will do a better job when writing something to someone. If the threat does not take its toll, the poor religion has to be the ultimate sufferer as if the Almighty does not exterminate the troublesome person the religion loses its licit standing in the estimation of Mr. Eihtisham. That is typical Qadiani logic in my opinion which few people, like me, will understand. You are not done with yet, an astonishing piece of considerable daring and pluck is still to follow:

"if i admite that Mirza sahib is liar then same time i will believe that all prophets are liar,there will we no more prophethood in the universe ... "

To me the above appears to be the outcome of a disturbed mind and when someone goes to the extent of saying that if such and such person is a liar then the whole company of prophets gone by are liars too, you have hardly a chance to give him a piece of wise counsel but you can certainly give him a peace of mind if you want to. Only the Almighty Allah can help him. By even the simplest psycho-analysis, such a person will deserve all my sympathies. Let us proceed to see what he says next:

".......i am coming with you punishment with the army of Allaha.now you cannot run .your time is over .it is end of the thread which was loosen by Allah.......... "

See the garbage he makes out from the words he uses and the sentences he constructs for invoking divine help to destroy someone he is at variance with. Talking about the army of Allah and the punishment hardly makes any sense to anyone with a sane mind. He is coming with a bagful of punishment and is asking his adversary to show courage and stay there to face the awesome punishment he is bringing along. Not content with the above, he proceeds further:

"... it is a life and death game .i am not a religious person but my allaha is coming to give my reply.wait for him... "

See the way Allah has been reduced to a commodity under the exclusive use of these people. Where is Allah coming, he fails to cite exactly? So, you see the threat was delivered in pieces and consummated with the final warning that Allah is on the way to arrive any moment and will take it upon Himself to deliver the final blow. He is not the first person to talk balderdash. This is their stock in trade. A no-nonsense guy will hardly brook such a nonsense but Dr. Rashid must be a remarkably patient person who has quietly taken these body blows without delivering anything in return. I think these people are mentally sick and need help. Show some compassion to them instead of getting cross. Now if you read Mr. Shahid Eitisham Mirza’s letters carefully, you will see the kind of ordinary grammatical mistakes he makes. I was flabbergasted to read the low level of his skill for letter-writing despite living in USA where he was expected to know a lot more of the English language, at least the colloquial English if not the literary side of it. His knowledge of English is not only poor but, apart from poor grammar, his ken for proper spelling is sadly missing. He did not realise that if his grammar was not correct and spellings good, how will God understand his request when he was going to be in direct communication with Him face to face? When someone does not understand your speech - because either it is faltering, impaired, obscure or cryptic - he finds it unwieldy to talk to you and prefers to dismiss you at once. Allah is Himself beautiful and loves all things of beauty. So, you have to sound beautiful in your speech too before being admitted for audience by Him. For a change, in the context of death, a few quotations from the Holy Book:

1.     Everything that is thereon will pass away.

2.     Every soul must taste of death.

3.     Wheresoever ye may be, death will find you out, even though ye are in towers built up strong and high.

Life may not be bed of roses but it can be made a full cup of joy, although a full cup always needs a steady hand otherwise it is bound to spill over. Death on the other hand offers nothing of the sort as it shuts the doors of this world on a man once he transits into the afterlife. Moulvi Mohammad Hussain Batalvi is quoted to have died miserably and his family having suffered a disgraceful end except for his grandson who is said to have escaped the punishment by entering the fold of Jamaat. Pray, tell me even if Batalvi was punished by the Almighty for offending Mirza Sahib, what was the fault of his family? Can the punishment for an offence committed by father be passed on to the son? What divine justice? It requires some explanation at least to satisfy a mind like me which does not reconcile to such crazy ideas. Suppose what happened to Maulana Batalvi was true, why did it not come true in the case of Abdullah Atham, Dr. Abdul Hakim Khan and Sanaullah Amritsari and why these avowed enemies of Mirza Sahib got away without any punishment? True that what is good for the goose may not necessarily be good for the gander but what is good for one goose must, at least, be good for all the geese. So, if Batalvi had to suffer as a consequence of slighting Mirza Sahib, Atham, Hakim and Amritsari should never have been spared and instead driven to go over the precipice. The way the Qadianis present their case vis-a-vis the deaths of their enemies, I can make out only one conclusion now and that is that a Divine Death Squad has been outfitted which is on constant patrol, watching the people carefully and any time someone is found causing problems to my Qadiani friends, this Divine Death Squad quickly moves in, immediately intervenes and the man planning to inflict any harm to them or having some damage done already will instantly pass on to the other side of the fence without getting a chance to atone for his sins. Here is another case of Pundit Lekh Ram who is also said to have died because of the imprecation of Mirza Sahib and as presaged by him. Now, if you look into the mysterious cir*****stances in which Lekh Ram died, this will give you plenty of food for thought and you will not fail to arrive at the conclusion that the eventful death of Lekh Ram made the whole case dubious, especially, when the killer was never apprehended. In such a case you cannot say for sure whether the whole thing was planned or intended or happened without any extraneous help or better still it was out and out adventitious. Only the sleuths of extraordinary ability and experience can prove it. But, in this case, a sinful man died converting another innocent person sinful who was made to commit a murder only to fulfil a prophecy. However, if the killer of Lekh Ram was one of the members of the Divine Death Squad then it would certainly make some sense to me or to any one else for that matter.In another way, had the God decided to take Lekh Ram’s life, as a routine, the death could have come through cardiac arrest or simple asphyxiation or some other similar causes which are much more easily believable than through the knife of a murderer in order to later avoid demystifying the death clouded in mystery. The episode of Lekh Ram begins when on April 12, 1893, Mirza Sahib proclaimed through a handbill that he saw a fearsome looking man in a vision who looked like an angel. Remember readers that an angel is always presented as a model of innocence, like angelic looks etc., whereas in the vision to Mirza Sahib he appears as an awesome person or, more exactly, as a demon. It cannot be phased in words to establish what an angel exactly looks like but, as far as I have been told, an angel is an intermediary between God and His prophets, is a bodiless spirit and is not visible to human eyes. According to our Holy Book:

"If thou couldst see when the angels take the souls of the unbelievers (at death) (how) they smite their faces and their backs (saying). Taste the penalty of the blazing fire. "

Now, many people must have seen unbelievers dying before their eyes but never seen the punishment being inflicted on their backs and faces by the angels. Angels are a metaphysical being and cannot be seen. So, as a human being, you are not supposed to see them, much less see the punishment they inflict. However, the angel asked Mirza Sahib about the address of Lekh Ram and another enemy of his. Mirza Sahib immediately assumed that he (angel) had been commissioned to inflict punishment on Lekh Ram and the other person. Pray tell me, does it stand to reason that an angel sent to do a job directly by the All-Knowing God should need to ask for the address of his victim from Mirza Sahib or any other mortal in the same token? On such an important mission the angel is coming inadequately briefed, and therefore wholly unprepared, to locate the whereabouts of his quarry. Suppose, by then, Lekh Ram had left his home to go somewhere, how the Angel would have tracked him down? There can be a legitimate poser here that since it was an angel of doom, it had to look ugly and frightening. The answer is that the angels and demons are two different creatures and have no sameness in their appearance. The angels are, however, reported in the scriptures to have come in human form only to some prophets. Therefore, Lekh Ram was not supposed to see the angel whether he was ugly or good looking. Lekh Ram was only a polytheist and a victim and, therefore, not expected to see the angel in any form when he arrived to take his life. Strange, my Qadianis friends rejoice over such ridiculous stories. The date for the death of Abdullah Atham was set for September 5, 1894. A day earlier some incantation was done on grams which were thrown in a deserted well and those given this assignment were asked not to look back after completing the task and return with all haste. This was done to doubly make sure that Atham died as anticipated but he survived and was duly taken out in a procession by Christians through the Amritsar streets. Where was the Divine Death Squad then? May be holidaying somewhere on a beach to let Atham hold up the prophesy for sheer joy because he needed a boost for his failing health. While addressing Maulana Sanaullah Amritsari, Mirza Sahib said: "If I am a liar I shall die in your life time because a liar always dies in the life time of his worst enemies" and later-on Mirza Sahib confirmed unequivocally that "these words were not his but from God". What happened eventually was that Mirza Sahib, on the contrary, died in May, 1908 and Sanaullah Sahib lived until well after the formation of Pakistan. Again we see the Divine Death Squad hamstrung, in some way, and sparing Maulana Amritsari for no good reasons. Dr. Abdul Hakim Khan of Patiala was an inveterate enemy of Mirza Sahib. He proclaimed that Mirza Sahib will die before August 4, 1908 and to retaliate Mirza Sahib counter-forecast his death. The result was that Mirza Sahib died on August 4, 1908 and Dr. Abdul Hakim Khan lived longer after that. The activities of the Divine Death Squad are again not visible here as it looks they were loathsome to react in time. Also, there are other cases which are cited by Qadianis like those of Saadullah Ludhkianvi who is said to have died without posterity, Chiragh Din Jamooni who was mowed down by plague and Dr. Dowie of USA who was incapacitated by paralysis and later passed away. Although, these incidents can be easily discussed like dying, without children, has directly to do with sterility problem either in husband or wife or both and dying by paralysis is a kind of some biological malfunction in a human body and both these cases constitute questions of medical science while death through plague directly results out of a calamity which strikes people, without distinction, and is beyond anybody’s control. Still, inspite of these good reasons, I do not think it will serve any useful purpose to go into the details of these cases. Whichever way my Qadiani friends prefer to feel, it would suit me fine and I would rather like not to dispute. Even if you agree to concede that these cases were a genuine fallout of Mirza Sahib’s malediction or hex, the fact remains that the Divine Death Squad is very selective in the choice of its victims in that it leaves out those who are more prominent like Atham, Amritsari and Dr. Abdul Hakim Khan but clubs down the unknown quantities like those named in the beginning of this paragraph. The cases, cited in the above and following paragraphs, can be read on their website in Urdu, available in an easy-to-read book form, by just clicking. The comments and translation are mine and I stand to be corrected in regard to any mistake that I might have made. I have discussed frankly with no prejudice nor do I intend to hurt anyone. Yet, if anyone feels that I was offensive, rude or hostile in any way, whatsoever, I sincerely apologise him. I hope I have clarified my position on the subject.