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RECONCILIATION.
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conversion of jinns. But Meraj only goes to suggest the penetration into the Upper Mental Plane ; and the
W. St. Clair Tisdall thinks (The Sources of the Qur'an) that Mahomed borrowed the idea of Meraj from Zoroastrianism. Mr, Mohammad Ali, M. A., whose book, The Divine Origin of the Qur'an,' is an attempt at the refutation of Mr. Tisdall's opinion, makes the following comment on the subject :
" The description given by the Holy Prophet of his spiritual ascent to heaven was, according to Rev. Tisdall, borrowed from the following passage of Arta Viraf Namak, a Pehlvi book written in the days of Ardashir, some 400 years before the Hejira: Our first advance upwards was to the Lower heaven...and there we saw the Angel of those Holy Ones, giving forth a flaming light, brilliant and lofty.' We are then told that Arta extended similarly to the second and third heavens and to many others beyond. "At the last,' says Arta, my Guide and the Fire-angel having shown me paradise took me down to hell.' *
"The truth is that God has been raising prophets in all lands. They brought the same teachings and had similar experiences. Hence if certain passages of the Holy Qur'an correspond to certain contents of the ancient Zoroastrian scriptures, and if the Holy Prophet of Arabia had experiences similar to those of an ancient Prophet of Iran, this does not show that the Holy Prophet had found access to ancient Zoroastrian scriptures or had found means of communicating with men learned in Zoroastrian scriptures. On the other hand, such parallelisms and such analogies, in the absence of there being any means of communication, are a clear proof of the fact that all these books had originally come from a common source, and that all these teachers were the messengers of the same Being. These parallelisms are not confined to Islam and Zoroastrianism alone; they exist in all the great religions of the world."
We agree with Mr. Mohammad Ali as to the possibility of similar experiences being gained by different prophets independently, but not when he denies, in his book, the familiarity of Mahomed with the traditions, the mythological lore and the general tenets of Zoroastrianism and certain other creeds. We shall give reasons for our opinion later on, when we come to deal with the subject of revelation,
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