Friday Nasiha

Living The Quran

Punishment
Al-Nisa (The Women) - Chapter 4: Verse 147

"What can God gain by your punishment, if you are grateful and you believe? God is always responsive to gratitude, All-Knowing."

God has no need to punish anyone. All glory be to Him. He has no axe to grind and He bears no one any grudge. Nor does He need to demonstrate His power and authority in this way. He has no self-interest in inflicting torment on human beings. It is only in pagan legends that we encounter such claims: It is people themselves who receive all benefit when they believe and show their gratitude to God. Hence, they are shown the good prospects that encourage them to believe and be grateful. For God knows the inner thoughts of everyone and He always responds to good action.

What would God do with people's punishment should they believe and be grateful? Punishment is only a requital for disbelief and ingratitude. It is also a threat so that people may take heed, accept the faith and demonstrate their gratitude. There is no desire here for inflicting punishment or torment, or for demonstrating power and authority. Far be it from God to entertain any such desire or feeling. It is merely a situation where people should seek protection through faith and gratitude, and then they will receive forgiveness and reward. Beyond that, God is ever responsive, well aware of what His servants feel.

God's response to gratitude has a profound effect on our hearts. It is well known that when God is thankful, then He is pleased with His servant, and His pleasure is given effect through a rich reward. But to say that God, in His glory, is grateful to His servants is profoundly inspiring. If God, the Creator, the Initiator who bestows endless favours and blessings on His creation — if He is grateful for His servants' faith, righteousness and gratitude when He needs nothing of all that, what should be their own attitude? If God Himself is thankful and grateful, what should His servants whom He has created and on whom He bestowed great favours do in return? When we hear it, our hearts tremble with shyness and response.

Compiled From:
"In the Shade of The Quran" - Sayyid Qutb, Vol 3, pp. 303, 304

Understanding The Prophet's Life

Treating Others

"The servant does not reach the reality of [or true] faith until he loves for the people what he loves for himself." [Ahmad]

This means that the denial of faith alluded to in this hadith does not imply a complete denial of faith. That is, a person does not become a disbeliever, losing all faith, by not loving for his brother what he loves for himself. What it does mean, though, is that for a person to have true and complete faith, he must love for his brother what he loves for himself. This love is a necessary component of a true and complete faith. A person who does not meet the obligatory requirements of faith is not deserving to be called a true or complete believer. This is what this hadith is referring to.

On the other hand, this hadith does not mean that if a person meets this characteristic, he has complete Iman even if he does not meet the other requirements of Iman. This hadith is simply stressing that this characteristic is an essential pillar of true and complete Iman. There is much more to Iman than simply loving for one's brother what one loves for himself.

In another hadith, the Prophet (peace be upon him) made it very clear that one of the keys to entrance into Paradise is meeting this condition. In a hadith in Sahih Muslim, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said, "Whoever loves to be saved from the Fire and entered into Paradise should die with belief in Allah and the Last Day and should treat the people in the way that he wishes to be treated by them."

In Ihya Uloom al-Deen, al-Ghazali presents a story about a man who complained that his house was infested with rats. He was told to get a cat. His reply was, "I fear that if the rats hear the cat's meow, they will flee to the adjoining houses and what I like not for myself I do not like for them."

Compiled From:
"Commentary on the Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi" - Jamaal al-Din Zarabozo, pp. 495, 496

Blindspot!

Psychosis

War has been aptly described as 'a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.' The First Crusade was especially psychotic. From all accounts, the Crusaders seemed half-crazed. For three years [on their march from Europe to Jerusalem] they had had no normal dealings with the world around them, and prolonged terror and malnutrition made them susceptible to abnormal states of mind. They were fighting an enemy that was not only culturally but ethnically different — a factor that, as we have found in our own day, tends to nullify normal inhibitions — and when they fell on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, they slaughtered some thirty thousand people in three days. 'They killed all the Saracens and Turks they found,' the author of the Deeds of the Franks reported approvingly. 'They killed everyone, male or female.' The streets ran with blood. Jews were rounded up into their synagogue and put to the sword, and ten thousand Muslims who had sought sanctuary in the Haram al-Sharif were brutally massacred. 'Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen,' wrote the Provencal chronicler Raymond of Aguilers: 'Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.' There were so many dead that the Crusaders were unable to dispose of the bodies. When Fulcher of Chartres came to celebrate Christmas in Jerusalem five months later, he was appalled by the stench from the rotting corpses that still lay unburied in the fields and ditches around the city.

When they could kill no more, the Crusaders proceeded to the Church of the Resurrection, singing hymns with tears of joy rolling down their cheeks. Beside the Tomb of Christ, they sang the Easter liturgy. 'This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation,' Raymond exulted. 'This day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, the renewal of faith.' Here we have evidence of another psychotic disconnect: the Crusaders were standing beside the tomb of a man who had been a victim of human cruelty, yet they were unable to question their own violent behavior. The ecstasy of battle, heightened in this case by years of terror, starvation, and isolation, merged with their religious mythology to create an illusion of utter righteousness. But victors are never blamed for their crimes, and chroniclers soon described the conquest in Jerusalem as a turning point in history. Robert the Monk made the astonishing claim that its importance had been exceeded only by the creation of the world and Jesus's crucifixion. As a consequence, Muslims were now regarded in the West as a 'vile and abominable race,' 'despicable, degenerate and enslaved by demons,' 'absolutely alien to God,' and 'fit only for extermination.'

The Muslims were stunned by the Crusaders' violence. By the time they reached Jerusalem, the [Crusaders] had already acquired a fearsome reputation; it was said that they had killed more than a hundred thousand people at Antioch, and that during the siege they had roamed the countryside, wild with hunger, openly vowing to eat the flesh of any Saracen who crossed their path. But Muslims had never experienced anything like the Jerusalem massacre. For over three hundred years they had fought all the great regional powers, but these wars had always been conducted within mutually agreed limits. Muslim sources reported in horror that the Franks did not spare the elderly, the women, or the sick; they even slaughtered devout ulema, 'who had left their homelands to live lives of pious seclusion in the holy place.'

Compiled From:
"Fields of Blood" - Karen Armstrong, pp. 214 - 216