Ghulam Ahmad has been accused[by whom?] of plagiarising, and altering the words of Arab linguists to appear as his own. He claimed that his book Hujjatullah [Convincing Proof from God] was of superior Arabic. However, his critics allege that several sentences and paragraphs in this text are taken directly without alteration, from Maqamat al-Hariri, the best known poetry collection of the Arabic scholar and poet Al-Hariri of Basra.[citation needed] For this reason, his claim to divine instruction in Arabic is not accepted in Islamic Orthodoxy[citation needed]. Ahmadis, however, claim[citation needed] that the alleged instances of plagiarism are not true because Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had deliberately inserted the writings of Al-Hariri with his own and then openly declared that he had done as such as a challenge to his critics to compare and separate the two. His followers claim that as clearly stated by him in the beginning of his book Hujjatullah[88] it was only after his use of Arabic was labelled inadequate, ungrammatical and 'unchaste' by his opponents that Ghulam Ahmad deliberately amalgamated his own writings with that of Al-Hariri's in order to expose his adversaries; whom he called upon to distinguish between his writings and that of Al-Hariri’s. Ghulam Ahmad stated:
Thus the method which will free the people from his deception is that we present to him paragraphs from our writing and some other paragraphs from the writings of a great Arab writer while concealing the names of the authors, and then call upon him to tell us which paragraph out of this is ours and which is theirs, if you are truthful. Then if he recognises my sayings and theirs and distinguishes between them as between a shell and its kernel, then we shall give him fifty rupees as a reward.
– Hujjatulla, pg. 4-5
