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CERTAIN VITAL FACT'S ExainwErr 29
followers. The events proclaim that his exposures Were
inno...ent and done without malice or prejudiee, and,
therefore, the bore in them no seeds of evils or of any '
other crime against either mankind or its Maker.
The
Satyartha Prakash
was incapable of breeding inter-
communal hatred and strife in the past, because it really
conta'n.3 no seed of hatred or strife. That again is the
reason for its continuing to remain incapable of "promoting,
feelings of enmity or hatred" in the present and in the future.
It is pertinent to remember that one of the objects of the
author in writing the XIV Chapter, as he himself declares in
the special Introduction to it, is to expose, for the purpose of
their eradication, bigotry and other pernicious vices of
mental prepossessions, which wrought many a dreadful sin
and misfortune and growing misery in the life of mankind
in the past. That curse upon humanity, the causes of
which Dayananda wants to expose in that chapter, is a solid
fact which recorded history corroborates and which no sane
person can afford to ignore. And no sensible Muslim will
ever entertain the idea that "attacks" upon bigotry and
such other moral evils are really attacks upon
Islam
or the-
preacher of
Islam.
Bigotry with all its allied vices is not a monopoly of
any
one particular tribe or sect. It is an evil common to the
generality of the followers of all the "prevalent religions,"
which, therefore, according to the saintly author, are no better
than degraded, compartmentalised schools of thoughts, walled
arenas of conflicts and clashes of outer forms and conventions,
customs and traditions and shows, divorced from the pristine
eternal Divine truth, which is the substratum of all basic
religious teachings. This is what the author says in the
Satyartha Prakash,
and this is the moral background of his.
criticisms of what he calls the
"prevalent religions." Is
it
any "attack" upon
Islam
and its great preacher to expose
bigotry when it is found in the Musalman and to seek its
eradication ?
Again, according to Dayananda, his exposures in Chapter.
XIV are intended to serve as a means of stimulating in the
Musalman a fresh re-examination, a much deeper self-