LECTURE SEVENTEENTH : SPIRITUAL PARENTS

The holy Qur'an says, "The Prophet is dearer to the ‘Momins' than their own souls and his wives are their mothers." Since, in the words of Qur'an, the wives of the Prophet are the mothers of the ‘Momins', it automatically follows that the Prophet id their father. The Prophet says to ‘Ali, "O ‘Ali, I and you are the parents of the Momins". Most of the people knowing that ‘Ali cannot be their mother in the literal sense of the word, are carried away by their imagination and maintain that the Prophet has used these words in an allegorical sense and not in the true sense of the word.

The fact is that the Prophet passed on the divine inspiration to ‘Ali and deposited it with him with a view to produce through the depositor and the depositee of the holy communication a religious body of men to be remoulded and made fit for entry in the abode which is the goal of our journey from this world. Had these people who explain these Traditions according to their own whims known this they would have been able to distinguish between a spiritual progeny and a physical progeny. But, they, in the words of God, "are deprived of sense."

One should bear in mind that the connecting link between the father and the son which makes the latter stick to the former is nothing but a human seed. If a son sticks to his father because of this, a spiritual son, the connecting link between whom and whose spiritual father is a ‘Kalma' which is the extract of all the divine powers, should stick to spiritual father a thousand times more. In this case the knowledge is the seed, the tongue is the carrier of the seed and the human mind is the field for the cultivation of this seed. This makes the difference netween a man and lower animal. There can no better seed than knowledge and there can be no better field for the growth of this seed than the human mind.

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