Maulana Wahiduddin Khan I Search for Truth
All the prophets who have come from God have met a similar fate: they were ignored by the great figures of their society. People who were themselves the focus of popular attention did not pay any regard to the prophets who had been sent by God.
All these great established figures not only believed in God; they also believed that God sent His prophets to the world. Some of them were even awaiting a new prophet. In their sermons they used to recall ecstatically the prophecies of his advent. But when he came to the world, not only did they not recognize him, but they denied him and poured scorn upon him.
Their religion consisted of blind adherence to the religion of their forefathers. That is why they were only able to recognize those prophets who had established themselves in the contest of ancestral religion. Such prophets were part and parcel of the national heritage, the root-source of great historical traditions. People who could recognize a prophet only by extraneous attributes such as these, failed to recognize contemporary prophets, for they could not detect in them the attributes which they looked for in a prophet. A contemporary prophet has the intrinsic worth of his teachings to show that he is a prophet; he does not have the ratification of society and convention. To be able to recognize a contemporary prophet, then, one must be able to judge matters on pure merit. This was something that these people proved themselves unable to do.
While denying the prophet of the day, they at the same time presented themselves as standard-bearers of the Faith, champions of religious institutions in the public eye. They prided themselves on their affiliation to ancient prophets. But their piety did not raise them in God’s sight, for it came from a blind adherence to convention rather than from a conscious acknowledgement of truth.
In the next world the stark truth will be made manifest to these people. They will be shown that the one they ridiculed was the very one whom God had chosen to teach His word. How then will they be able to hold up their heads in the everlasting world of God, when they had denied God’s representative on earth? When the time of reckoning is upon them, lamenting their failure to see and believe the light which would have illuminated their path for all time will be of no avail. It will be too late then to make amends.