Living The Quran
From Issue: 512 [Read full issue]
Al-Baqarah (The Cow)
Chapter 2: Verse 185 (partial)
Ease & Tolerance
"Allah wants your life to be full of ease (yusr), not hardship."
Yusr (ease, tolerance) consists of accepting the desires until the establishment of their undesirableness. It protects the Muslim from self-closure to the world, from deadening conversation. It urges him to affirm and say yea to life, to new experience. It encourages him to address the new data with his scrutinizing reason, his constructive endeavour, and thereby to enrich his experience and life, to move his culture and civilization ever forward.
In religion - and there can hardly be anything more important or prior in human relations - tolerance transforms confrontation and reciprocal condemnations between the religions into a scholarly investigation of the genesis and development of the religions in order to separate the historical additions from the original revelation. Yusr also immunizes the Muslim against any life-denying tendencies and assures him the minimum measure of optimism required to maintain health, balance and a sense of proportion, despite all the tragedies and afflictions which befall human life. That is what God has assured us in the above verse.
Compiled From:
"Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life" - Ismail Raji al Faruqi, pp. 46-48