THE SAHABA alaihim-ur-ridwan (radi allah anhu)
Allahu ta’ala created Paradise and Hell beforehand. Preordaining, in the eternal past, that He would fill both of them with men and genies, He declared this fact in His Books. As there have been believing and good people deserving Paradise since (the first man and Prophet) Adam ‘alaihis-salam’, there have also been faithless, unwise and wicked people who have been committing the evils which will carry them to Hell. These two groups of people will go on occupying the earth till Doomsday. The number of angels is incomparably greater than that of men, and they are all faithful and obedient. Men, by contrast, are more rarely faithful than they are faithless, disobedient and transgressive. Good people and wicked ones have always tried to annihilate each other; the wicked have also attacked one another and lived in distress and anxiety throughout history. Believers have performed jihad in order to discipline unbelievers and to guide them to true faith and thereby to endless bliss, and to steer mankind to a happy and peaceful life in this world and the next. Unbelievers, on the other hand, have established dictatorial regimes, wherein a minor group abuses the weak and the inferior in order to lead a life of debauchery and dissipation and to satisfy their voluptuous desires. And, in order to conceal their evils, harms and disservices, they have attacked Prophets ‘alaihim-us-salam’ and the religions they brought because they established the principles of ethics, virtue and integrity. In some centuries these attacks were pressed with deadly weaponry, and sometimes they were made in clandestine warfare, which included false propaganda, mischief-making, raising social commotions, subversion, undermining religions from within, and destroying Islamic states from the interior.
Likewise, the luminous Islamic religion, which is a guide to salvation and improvement and a beacon to material and spiritual progress, and which was revealed to our master, the final and the highest Prophet Muhammad Mustafa ‘sall-Allahu alaihi wa sallam’ whom Allahu ta’ala created as the most superior, the most beautiful and the most honourable one of the entire mankind worldover in all respects, and chose and sent him as the Prophet to all nations, was subjected to the same treatment. Faithless, immoral and lecherous people not only attacked His religion in crusading expeditions, which included all sorts of torment and barbarity, but also strove hard to dupe Muslims by disguising themselves as Muslims, making mendacious and misleading oral and written statements, setting brothers against one another and thereby demolishing Islam from within. The damage caused by their seditionary endeavours howls of their success.
Subversive activities among Muslims date back to the time of the Ashab-i-kiram ‘alaihim-ur-ridwan’, when a Yemeni Jew, who had professed to embrace Islam and changed his name to Abdullah bin Saba’, sowed the first seeds of discord among Muslims. He started a diabolical trend. He attempted to vilify the Sahaba, who were the companions of the Messenger of Allah ‘sall-Allahu ’alaihi wa sallam’. The heresy invented by the Jew was called the Rafidi sect, an appellation which has ultimately changed into the Shiite sect. His example was followed by many an enemy of religion, who invented many a heresy under the cloak of religious men and misled millions of Muslims out of the true course.
The Messenger of Allah ‘sall-Allahu ’alaihi wa sallam’ had foretold about this deplorable catastrophe that was going to befall his Umma (Muslims), with the following statements:
“My Umma will part into seventy-three different groups. Seventy-two of them will swerve from the right path and end up in Hell. One group will abide by my and my Sahaba’s path.” This group of the right path has been called Ahl as-sunna(t).
THE SAHABA alaihim-ur-ridwan (radi allah anhu)
The earliest of these heretical sects, the Rafidi sect, which is the worst, too, reappears from time to time and spreads among ignorant communities and the faithless fan it to exploit it as a weapon. That this sect is a non-scientific assortment of distorted facts and events reinforced with some misinterpreted Qoranic verses and Prophetic utterances manifests itself in the so-called book Husniyya, one of their recent publications, in the booklets which they sometimes hand out to uneducated people at the entrances of mosques, and in the statements they make. Naming a few valuable books is one of the stratagems that they use to make their absurdities believable, although they cannot cite a single line from those authentic books. When uneducated people hear the names of those books, they believe these people. Their absurd and unsound slanders, and the true tenets of belief explained in the light of Qur’an al-kerim and hadith-i-sherifs by the scholars of (the right path called) Ahl as-Sunnat, are collated under the adjudication of authentic documents in the book Ashab-i-kiram (Sahaba ‘The blessed’), by Sayyid Abdulhakim Effendi
THE SAHABA alaihim-ur-ridwan (radi allah anhu)
‘rahmatullahi ’aleyh’. During the printing of this book, a list of the biographies of the two hundred and sixty-five celebrities mentioned in the book was appended in alphabetical order for the purpose of informing our dear readers about them.
Muslims on the earth today have parted into three groups. The first group is Muslims who follow the path led by the Ashab-ikiram. They are called the Ahl as-Sunnat, or the Sunni Muslims (Sunnites), or the Firqa-i-najiyya (the group to be saved from Hell). In the second group are the enemies of the Ashab-i-kiram. They are called Rafidis, or Shiis (Shiites), or Firqa-i-dalla (heretical group). The third group is inimical towards the Shiites as well as towards the Sunnites. They are called Wahhabis, or Nejdis, which originates from the Arabian province Nejd, the birthplace of the heresy. The third group are also called the Firqai- mel’una (the accursed group). They call Muslims ‘disbelievers’. Our Prophet has accursed a person who calls a Muslim ‘disbeliever’. The breaking of Muslims into these three groups was contrived by Jews and British plotters.
THE SAHABA alaihim-ur-ridwan (radi allah anhu)
Any person who indulges in the sensuous desires of his nafs and has an evil heart will go to Hell, regardless of the group he belongs to. Every Muslim should continually say the words, “La ilaha il-l- Allah,” in order to purify himself of the unbelief and sinfulness which are inherent in his nature, -this act of purification is termed ‘Tazkiya-i-nafs’-, and also the words, “Astaghfirullah,” in order to purify his heart from the disbelief and sinfulness which he contracted from his nafs, from the devil, from evil company or from harmful and subversive literature. If a person obeys the (commandments and prohibitions of the) Shari’at, his prayers will certainly be accepted. Not performing (the daily prayers called) namaz, looking at women who have not covered their bodies properly or at other people who expose those parts of their body that must be covered, and consuming goods that have been earned through (an illegal way called) haram, are symptoms of a person’s disobeying the Shari’at. Such a person’s prayers will not be accepted. THE SAHABA alaihim-ur-ridwan (radi allah anhu)
