ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Hussein the Saiviour of Islam Miracles- Their Value Arid Significance IF PEOPLE, PARTICULARLY the enlightened minds of the educated ones among us, only know the meaning of a miracle, its actual value and its significance in the field of guidance to humanity towards the divine truth, far from demanding it, they would never think of it.

A miracle is called in arabic ' Mo'jiza' , i.e., an act or manifesta- tion which makes the world helpless against it, i.e., none in the world other than the men of God, can work it. A miracle has three definite aspects of its indication:- The need of it relating to the mission of an apostle of God, means his helplessness to make men realise the truth or understand it through the appeal to the faculty of reasoning in the intellect of the people.

Or the unreasonable adamance on the part of the people to believe in the bonafide of the man of God being in fact an apostle of God. The demand of it on the part of the people, is an indication of the lack of the necessary strenath of the faculty of reasoning to realise, understand or recognise the truth by means of their own native endowment of the intellect, and their readiness to believe in a thing only when they are made help- less against it.

The use of a miracle in leading the people to the belief in a factor, is to somehow compel them to do it, forcing the belief on them, though they may like it or not. The power to work miracles was given to every apostle of God, and to the Holy Prophet the last one of them and along with him, every one of the Imams or the divinely commissioned guides from his Holy House, was given the power in its totality.

All the prophets, preceding the Holy Prophet, freely used the power and worked out miracles for two reasons:- 1.The people in the initial or transitory stages of their intellect, failed to grasp the truth by their limited reasoning and needed something unusual and impossible to be enacted to convince them of the bonafide of the claim of the man of God to be the apostle from God.

Since man in those ages, with his yet to develop intellect, was on the wrong track, the divine mercy willed to stop his straying, even by the force of the manifestation of the supreme power of the miracles.