Page 8 - New English Book L

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Foreword [1]

The Prophet (pbuh) of Arabia, as described in the Bible

“The Burden upon Arabia”- Isaiah XXI.13.

The present barren period of classical scholarship,
together with the increasing paucity of our knowledge of
ancient languages, has crippled modern taste in its efforts
to appreciate any such attempts as I intend to make in that
direction. The following pages have produced a series
of most able articles from the pen of the Rev. Professor
Abdulahad Dawud, but I wonder if there are many, even
among the hierarchy of the Christian Church, who could
follow the erudite exposition of the learned Professor. Even
more, do I wonder when he seeks to carry his readers into
a labyrinth of languages, dead and done with thousands
of years ago! What about Aramaic, when very few even
among the Clergy are able to understand the Vulgate and
the original Greek version of the New Testament? More
especially when our studies are based simply on Greek
and Latin etymology! Whatever may be the value of
such dissertations in the enemy’s eye we, nowadays, are
absolutely incapable of appreciating them from the angle
of erudition; for the oracular ambiguity attached to the
prophetic utterances to which I allude makes them elastic
enough to cover any case. The “least” in the prophecy
of St. John the Baptist (pbuh) may not be the son of Mary,
though he was looked upon as such contemptuously by
his own tribe. The Holy Carpenter came from humble
parentage. He was hooted down, mocked and discredited;
he was belittled and made to appear the “least” in the
public estimation by the Scribes and Pharisees. The
excess of zeal displayed by his followers in the second
and third centuries A.D., which was ever prone to jump
at anything in the form of a prophecy in the Bible, would

[1] This forward is taken from the Qatari edition.