“Now it demands a critical assessment of the intellectual and historical, moral and social and political and religious conditions of the times in which the Mujaddid undertook his great task. One has to find out what undercurrents were there in operation and religious and intellectual unrest was fomenting in India and in neighboring countries? What tendencies of undutifulness to Islam and its sacred law were gaining ground among the rationalists? What conspiracies against Islam were being hatched up and what hopes were entertained after the completion of the first millennium of Islamic era by the adventurers and upstarts? What suspicions and doubts were lurking in the distrustful minds?
What mischief was played, on the one hand, by philosophy and rationalism and what was done by the esoteric and Batinites, on the other, to belittle the station and place of Prophethood by magnifying austerities, travails and self-mortification as the means of salvation and attaining propinquity to God? How the belief in Unity of Existence, the doctrine positing all reality as a borrowed fragment from the being of God, had opened the door of licentious freedom bordering on atheism and agnosticism.”
