“We will win these hearts with love and affection. And when people realize this is the reality of our ways, they will join us.”
Source/Credit: New York Post
By Joseph Mancini | August 9, 1976
The following article in New York Post in August 1976 reported on the visit by the late Hazrat Mirza Nasir Ahmad, Khalifatul Masih - III to North-America.
An elderly, turbaned man with a Santa Clause beard and an almost perpetual smile says he has come from Pakistan to convert every American to the religion of Islām.
Hazrat Mirzā Nāsir Ahmad, spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islām Inc., held a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria the other day, to announce his arrival and declare his movement’s mission “to win every heart which beats in the United States.”
The Khaki-clad 60-year-old Oxford graduate, whose evangelical Muslim sect claims more than 10 million followers worldwide, admitted it might take many years to accomplish this “long-range goals.”
But Ahmad added that he was a patient man.
‘Love and Affection’
“We will win these hearts with love and affection,” he said, pausing to smile between phrases. “And when people realize this is the reality of our ways, they will join us.”
Surrounded by a handful of followers and a dozen reporters in the 33d-floor hotel suite, Ahmad sat on a velvet couch beneath a pastoral oil in gilded frame and fielded questions for more than an hour. Communism, Capitalism, and Christianity have all failed, he said, and the religion of Islam "is a perfect and positive answer to the spiritual, social and political problems" of the western hemisphere.
Ahmad – reputedly the grandson and third elected successor to Hazrat Mirzā Ghulām Ahmad, who founded the movement in India in 1889 – is scheduled to preach these writings in several cities in the US and Canada over the next three weeks.
He reported undertook the journey, his first ever to the West, at the invitation of U.S. Ahmadiyya communities in more than 20 North American cities.
The sect with national headquarters in Washington, D.C., was introduced into this country in 1920s, according to pamphlets distributed by the group, but there are only estimated 1,000 U.S. adherents. The movement’s word center is in Rabwah, Pakistan, and it claims hundreds of mosques, hospitals, and schools around the globe.
-- From Archives: "Look Out, He Wants YOU" - 1976
This content-post is archived for backup and to keep archived records of any news Islam Ahmadiyya. The views expressed by the author and source of this news archive do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of Times of Ahmad. Times of Ahmad is not an organ of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, nor in any way associated with any of the community's official websites.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comments. Any comments irrelevant to the post's subject matter, containing abuses, and/or vulgar language will not be approved.