|
Prophet
Muhammad And The Emperor Constantine
The most wonderful and, perhaps, the
most manifest prophecy about the divine mission of the
greatest man and the Messenger of God, contained in the
seventh chapter of the Book of the Prophet Daniel,
deserves to be seriously studied and impartially
considered. In it great events in the history of mankind,
which succeed each other within a period of more than a
thousand years, are represented by the figures of four
formidable monsters in a prophetical vision to Daniel.
"Four winds of heaven were roaring against the great
sea." The first beast that comes out from the deep
sea is a winged lion; then comes forth the second beast in
the shape of a bear holding three ribs between its teeth.
This is succeeded by the third terrible beast in the form
of a tiger having four wings and four heads. The fourth
beast, which is more formidable and ferocious than the
former ones, is a monster with ten horns upon its head,
and has iron teeth in its mouth. Then a little horn shoot
up amidst the others, before which three horns break down.
Behold, human eyes and mouth appear upon this horn, and it
begins to speak great things against the Most High.
Suddenly, in the midst of the firma- ment the vision of
the Eternal is seen amidst a resplendent light, seated
upon His tribune (Arabic: Korsi) of the flames of light
whose wheels were of shining light (1). A river of light
is flowing and going forth before Him; and millions of
celes- tial beings are worshiping Him and tens and tens of
thousands of them are standing before Him. The Judgment
Court is, as it were, holding its extraordinary session;
the books are opened. The body of the beast is burnt with
fire, but the blaspheming Horn is left alive until a
"Bar Nasha" - that is, a "Son of Man"
- is taken up on the clouds and presented to the Eternal,
from whom he receives power, honor and kingdom for ever.
The stupefied Prophet approaches one of those standing by
and beseeches him to explain the mean- ing of this
wonderful vision. The good Angel gives the interpretation
of it in such a manner that the whole mystery enveloped in
the figurative or allegorical language and image is
brought to light.
------------ Footnote (1) The
original word is nur, and, like the Arabic word, ir means
"light" rather than "fire," which is
represented in the text by "ish." ------------
end of footnote
Being a prince of the royal family,
Daniel was taken, together with three other Jewish youths,
to the palace of the King of Babylon, where he was
educated in all the knowledge of the Chaldeans. He lived
there until the Persian Conquest and the fall of the
Babylonian Empire. He prophesied under Nebuchadnezzar as
well as under Darius. The Biblical critics do not ascribe
the authorship of the entire Book to Daniel, who lived and
died at least a couple of centuries before the Greek
Conquest, which he mentions under the name of "Yavan
= Ionia." The first eight chapters - if I am not
mistaken - are written in the Chaldean and the latter
portion in the Hebrew. For our immediate purpose it is not
so much the date and the authorship of the book that forms
the important question as the actual fulfillment of the
prophecy, contained in the Septuagint version, which was
made some three centuries before the Christian era.
According to the interpretation by the
Angel, each one of the four beasts represents an empire.
The eagle-winged lion signifies the Chaldean Empire, which
was mighty and rapid like an eagle to pounce upon the
enemy. The bear represents the "Madai-Paris," or
the Medo-Persian Empire, which extended its conquests as
far as the Adriatic Sea and Ethiopia, thus holding with
its teeth a rib from the body of each one of the three
continents of the Eastern Hemisphere. The third beast,
from its tigrish nature of swift bounds and fierceness,
typifies the triumphant marches of Alexander the Great,
whose vast empire was, after his death, divided into four
kingdoms.
But the Angel who interprets the vision
does not stop to explain with details the first three
kingdoms as he does when he comes to the fourth beast.
Here he enters with emphasis into details. Here the scene
in the vision is magnified. The beast is practically a
monster and a huge demon. This is the formidable Roman
Empire. The ten horns are the ten Emperors of Rome who
persecuted the early Christians. Turn the pages of any
Church history for the first three centuries down to the
time of the so-called conversion of Constantine the Great,
and you will read nothing but the horrors of the famous
"Ten Persecutions."
So far, all these four beasts represent
the "Power of Darkness," namely, the kingdom of
satan, idolatry.
In this connection let me divert your
attention to a luminous truth embodied in that
particularly important article of the Faith of Islam:
"The Good and Evil are from Allah.' It will be
remembered that the old Persians believed in a
"duality of gods," or, in other words, the
Principle of Good and Light, and the other the Principle
of Evil and Darkness; and that these eternal beings were
eternal enemies. It will be observed that among the four
beasts the Persian Power is represented by the figure of a
bear, less ferocious than, and not so carnivorous as, the
other three; and what is more: inasmuch as it can roam
upon its hind legs it resembles man - at least from some
distance.
In all the Christian theological and
religious literature I have read, I have never met with a
single statement of phrase similar to this article of the
Muslim Faith: God is the real author of good and evil.
This article of the Muslim Faith, as the contrary, is
extremely repugnant to the Christian religion, and a
source of hatred against the religion of Islam. Yet this
very doctrine is explicitly announced by God to Cyrus,
whom He calls His "Christ." He wants Cyrus to
know that there is no god besides Him, and declares: -
"I am the Fashioner of the light,
and the Creator of the darkness, the Maker of peace, and
the Creator of evil; I am the Lord who does all
these" (Isa. xlv. 1-7).
That God is the author of evil as well
as of good is not in the least repulsive to the idea of
God's goodness. The very denial of it is opposed to the
absolute Oneness of the Almighty. Besides, what we term or
understand as "evil" only affects the created
beings, and it is for the development and the improvement
of the creatures; it has not in the least any effect on
God.
Now let us examine and find out who the
Little Horn is. Having once definitely ascertained the
identity of this eleventh king, the identity of the Bar
Nasha will be settled per se. The Little Horn springs up
after the Ten Persecutions under the reigns of the
emperors of the Roman Power. The empire was writhing under
four rivals, Constantine being one of them. They were all
struggling for the purple; the other three died or fell in
battle; and Constantine was left alone as the supreme
sovereign of the vast empire.
The earlier Christian commentators have
in vain labored to identity this ugly Little Horn with the
Anti-Christ, with the Pope of Rome by Protestants, and
with the establisher of Islam. (God forbid!) But the later
Bibical critics are at a loss to solve the problem of the
fourth beast which they wish to identify with the Greek
Empire and the Little Horn with Antiochus. Some of the
critics, e.g. Carpenter, consider the Medo-Persian Power
as two separate kingdoms. But this empire was not more two
than the late Austro-Hungarian Empire was. The
explorations carried on by the Scientific Mission of the
French savant, M. Morgan, in Shushan (Susa) and elsewhere
leave no doubt on this point. The fourth beast can,
therefore, be no other than the old Roman world.
To show that the Little Horn is no other
than Constantine the Great, the following arguments can
safely be advanced: -
(a) He overcame Maximian and the other
two rivals and assumed the purple, and put an end to the
persecution of Christianity. Gibbon's, The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire is, I think, the best history
that can instruct us about those times. You can never
invent four rivals after the Ten Persecutions of the
Church, other than Constantine and his enemies who fell
before him like the three horns that fell before the
little one.
(b) All the four beasts are represented
in the vision as irrational brutes; but the Little Horn
possessed a human mouth and eyes which is, in other words,
the description of a hideous monster endowed with reason
and speech. He pro- claimed Christianity as the true
religion, left Rome to the Pope and made Byzantium, which
was named Constantinople, the seat of the empire. He
pretended to profess Christianity but was never baptized
till a little before his death, and even this is a
disputed question. The legend that his conversion was due
to the vision of the Cross in the sky has long since -
like the account about Jesus Christ inserted in the
Antiquities of Josephus - been exploded as another piece
of forgery.
The enmity of the beasts to the
believers in God was brutal and savage, but that of the
rational Horn was diabolical and malignant. This enmity
was most noxious and harmful to the religion, because it
was directed to pervert the Truth and the faith. All the
previous attacks of the four empires were pagan; they
persecuted and oppressed the believers but could not
pervert the truth and the faith. It was this Constantine
who entered in the fold of Jesus in the shape of a
believer and in the clothes of a sheep, but inwardly he
was not a true believer at all. How poisonous and
pernicious this enmity was will be seen from the
following: -
(c) The Horn-Emperor speaks "big
things" or "great words" (rorbhan in the
Chaldean tongue) against the Most High. To speak
blasphemous words about God, to associate with Him other
creatures, and to ascribe to Him foolish names and
attributes, such as the "begetter" and
"begotten," "birth" and
"procession" (of the second and the third
person), "unity in the trinity" and
"incarnation," is to deny His Oneness.
Ever since the day when God revealed to
Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees until the Creed and the Acts
of the Council of Nicea were proclaimed and enforced by an
imperial edict of Constantine amidst the horror and
protests of three-fourths of the true believing members in
A.D. 325, never has the Oneness of God so officially and
openly been profaned by those who pretended to be His
people as Constantine and his gang of the unbelieving
ecclesiastic! In the first article of this series I have
shown the error of the Churches concerning God and His
attributes. I need not enter into this unpleasant subject
again; for it gives me great pain and grief when I see a
Holy Prophet and a Holy Spirit, both God's noble
creatures, associated with Him by those who ought to know
better.
lf Brahma and Osiris, or if Jupiter and
Vesta were associated with God, we would simply consider
this to be a pagan belief; but when we see Jesus the
Prophet of Nazareth and one of the millions of the holy
spirits in the service of the Eternal raised equal to the
dignity of God, we cannot find a name for those who so
believe other than what the Muslims have always been
obliged to use - the epithet "Gawun."
Now, since this hideous Horn speaking
great words, uttering blasphemies against God, is a king -
as the Angel reveals it to Daniel, and since the king was
the eleventh of the Caesars who reigned in Rome and
persecuted the people of God, he cannot be other than
Constantine, because it was his edict that proclaimed the
belief in the trinity of persons in the Deity, a creed
which the Old Testament is a living document to condemn as
blasphemy, and which both the Jews and Muslims abhor. If
it is other than Constantine, then the question arises,
who is he? He has already come and gone, and not an
impostor or the Anti-Christ hereafter to appear, that we
may be unable to know and identify. If we do not admit
that the Horn in question has come already, then how are
we to interpret the four beasts, the first of which is
certainly the Chaldean Empire, the second the MedoPersian,
and so forth? If the fourth beast does not represent the
Roman Empire, how can we interpret the third, with its
four heads, as the Empire of Alexander, split into four
kingdoms after his death? Is there any other Power
succeeding the Greek Empire before the Roman Empire with
its ten potentates persecuting the believers in God?
Sophistry and illusion are of no use. The "Little
Horn" is decidedly Constantine, even if we may deny
the prophecy of Daniel. It is immaterial whether a
prophet, priests or a sorcerer wrote the seventh chapter
of the Book of Daniel. One thing is certain, that its
predictions and descriptions of the events, some
twenty-four centuries ago, are found to be exact, true,
and have been fulfilled in the person of Constantine the
Great, whom the Church of Rome has always very wisely
abstained from beatifying as a Saint, as the Greek Church
has done.
(d) Not only does the "Little
Horn," which grew into something of a more
"formidable vision" than the rest, speak impious
words against the Most High, but also it wages war against
the "Saints of the Most High, and vanquishes
them" (verse 25). In the eyes of a Hebrew Prophet the
people who believed in one God was a separate and holy
people. Now it is indisputably true that Constantine
persecuted those Christians who, like the Jews, believed
in the absolute Oneness of God and courageously declared
the Trinity to be a false and erroneous conception of the
Deity. More than a thousand ecclesiastics were summoned to
the General Council at Nicea (the modern Izmid), of whom
only three hundred and eighteen persons subscribed to the
decisions of the Council, and these too formed three
opposite factions with their respec- tive ambiguous and
unholy expressions of "homousion" or
"homoousion," "consubstantial," and
other terms utterly and wholly strangers to the Prophets
of Israel, but only worthy of the "Speaking
Horn."
The Christians who suffered persecutions
and martyrdoms under the pagan emperors of Rome because
they believed in One God and in His worshiper Prophet
Jesus were now doomed by the imperial edict of the
"Christian" Constantine to even severer tortures
because they refused to adore the Prophet Jesus as
consubstantial and coeval with his Lord and Creator! The
Elders and Ministers of the Arian Creed, i.e. Qashishi and
Mshamshani - as they were called by the early Jewish
Christians - were deposed or banished, their religious
books suppressed, and their churches seized and handed
over to the Trinitarian bishops and priests. Any
historical work on the early Christian Church will give us
ample information about the service rendered by
Constantine to the cause of the Trinitarian Creed, and
tyranny to those who opposed it. The merciless legions in
every province were placed at the disposal of the
ecclesiastical authorities. Constantine personifies a
regime of terror and fierce war against the Unitarians,
which lasted in the East for three centuries and a half,
when the Muslims established the religion of Allah and
assumed the power and dominion over the lands trodden and
devastated by the four beasts.
(e) The "Talking Horn" is
accused of having contem- plated to change "the Law
and the times." This is a very serious charge against
the Horn. Its blasphemies or "great words against the
Most High" may or may not affect other people, but to
change the Law of God and the established holy days or
festivals would naturally subvert the religion altogether.
The first two commandments of the Law of Moses, concerning
the absolute Oneness of God - "Thou shalt have no
other gods besides Me" - and the strict prohi- bition
of making images and statues for worship were directly
violated and abrogated by the edict of Constantine. To
proclaim three personal beings in the Deity and to confess
that the Eternal Almighty was conceived and born of the
Virgin Mary is the greatest insult to the Law of God and
the grossest idolatry. To make a golden or wooden image
for worship is abominable enough, but to make a mortal an
object of worship, declare him God, and even adore the
bread and the wine of the Eucharist as "the body and
blood of God," is an impious blasphemy.
Then to every righteous Jew and to a
Prophet like Daniel, who from his youth was a most devoted
observer of the Mosaic Law, what could be more repugnant
than the substitution of the Easter for the Paschal Lamb
of the great feast of the Passover and the sacrifice of
the "Lamb of God" upon the cross, and upon
thousands of altars every day? The abrogation of the
Sabbath day was a direct violation of the fourth command
of the Decalogue, and the institution of Sunday instead
was as arbitrary as it is inimical. True, the Qur'an
abrogated the Sabbath day, not because the Friday was a
holier day, but simply because the Jews made an abuse of
it by declaring that God, after the labor of six days,
reposed on the seventh day, as if He were man and was
fatigued. Prophet Muhammad would have destroyed any day or
object, however holy or sacred, if it were made an object
of worship intending to deal a blow or injury to God's
Greatness and Glory. But the abrogation of the Sabbath by
the decree of Constantine was for the institution of the
Sunday on which Jesus is alleged to have risen from the
sepulcher. Jesus himself was a strict observer of the
Sabbath day, and reprimanded the Jewish leaders for their
objection to his doing the deeds of charity on it.
(f) The "Horn" was allowed to
make war against the Saints of the Most High for a period
of some three centuries and a half; it only
"weakened" them, made "them languid - but
could not extinguish and entirely root them out. The
Arians, who believed in One God alone, sometimes, e.g.
under the reign of Constantius (the son of Constantine),
of Julian and others who were more tolerant, strongly
defended themselves and fought for the cause of their
faith.
|
