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RELIGION
AND MAN
At birth
man has no conscious knowledge about himself or about the environment around him;
nevertheless, he is not an alien but fitted for the world into which he is born. To begin
with, his body is made up of the same elements as exist in nature: the building blocks
that make up the mineral, vegetable and animal elements of the earth also constitute the
sperm and the egg which, when they are joined, marked the first moment of his earthly
life. And yet, how the inanimate matter is converted into living forms defeats all our
inquiries: it is a direct gift of the Creator. Man is thus a ‘child of nature’
and aware of himself as a creature of the Creator’s making. That awareness
distinguishes the second aspect, the ‘heavenly’ side of being human, beside the
merely ‘natural’ aspect.
A
human child is born into a welcoming environment
A human
child is, typically, born into a welcoming environment, and knows the embrace of parents
and a wider family of relatives. Moreover, the baby is immediately provided with the most
perfect nourishment, exactly adapted to its needs in the form of the mother’s milk.
The world, as the child grows, will be experienced as an environment fully
ordered—with sight and sounds, with heat and light and rainfall, with an infinite
diversity of plants, fruits and animals—to enable, exercise and enlarge all the
faculties of sense and feeling and intellect that the Creator has created in the child.
Likewise, the body in which the child’s life is held functions without his conscious
effort or decision—brain, heart, lungs, stomach, senses, limbs, and so on. All this,
minutely arranged and coordinated, is the gift of the Creator, the apparatus that He
gives when He gives life to a human being, to support and mature that life. Very little of
what man has is his own doing—if he was left to manage only his own body, unaided by
the Creator, he could not do it and so could not survive.
The One
Who created the universe and subjected it to man’s stewardship is also the One Who
created man. It behaves us, then, to consider what our responsibility is, considering all
that we have been given, to reflect on how we will answer for ourselves and for what we
have in our care. Human responsibility before the Creator is voluntary, whereas every
other creature carries out its particular duties without reflection but also without
defect in its duties.
Relative
impotence and vulnerability of man
Because
the apparent efficiency of modern technology obscures it from us, we need to remind
ourselves of the relative impotence and vulnerability of man. Man cannot create so much as
a leaf or a fly, though he is free to tamper with God’s creation to the extent He
wills. Man has no dominion over even the operation of his body, let alone over the world
as a whole. He cannot prevent himself from getting hungry and thirsty; he has no part in
determining his parents, or his time and place of birth, nor his physique or physical
structure, nor does he know when and where he will die. We affirm that man needs to use
the natural world to sustain and enlarge his life. The One Who subjected nature to man has
also created in man the necessary means to use nature, namely his intellectual faculties.
By exercising his intellect man obtains some knowledge of the orderly operations of
natural phenomena; the uniformity and reliability of these phenomena enable him to
formulate ‘laws’. Such ‘laws’ are our imperfect, human intimations of
the supreme laws according to which the Supreme Being has created what He has created.
‘Humanity’
lies in the spiritual aspect of man
Humanity,
that is the quality or the being fully identified as human, does not come from man’s
natural, material aspects but from the immaterial and spiritual. His spirit and intellect
do not originate in his physical structure. When he dies or, in different words, when the
spiritual part of him leaves his body, he is reduced to something that will decompose into
the earth. He no longer has senses, even though, for a short time, his body is still
there. This means that it is the spiritual part of him that uses the body. It is life that
gives the body meaning. The relation between man’s body and spirit can be understood
somewhat by analogy with a factory and electrical power. It is of no value how complex,
sophisticated and excellent a factory is unless there is electrical power to put it into
operation, without which it is no more than a piece of mechanical junk. We do not
therefore mean to imply that the spirit is everything by itself, that the body is
‘junk’; on the contrary, spirit needs matter or a corporeal form to express its
powers and functions.
Just as
the future life of a fruit tree is encapsulated in its seed, and the worth of the tree is
in the worth of the fruit it yields, so too the life-history of man is also recorded, and
his life is worthwhile in proportion to his good deeds and virtues. Again, just as the
tree increases by means of the seed in its fruit, so too does man prosper by his good
deeds, all of whose weight and consequence will become known to him. This world is the
field where man scatters his deeds to be harvested in the next. So the All- Majestic,
All-Powerful, All-Wise Creator, Who brings man into existence from non-existence, and Who
brings him to life by breathing the ‘spirit’ into the body that he fashioned
from the ‘clay of nature’, will quicken him again after his decomposition in the
earth. This is as easy for Him as bringing day after night, spring after winter, and
making what looks, at the end of autumn, like dry wood, yield grapes the following summer.
The
three principal drives or powers of man
Man has,
in addition to the faculties and means we have mentioned, three principal drives or kinds
of energy. These are the desires, anger and intellect. He desires or lusts after the
opposite sex, he desires and loves his children, and worldly possessions such as houses,
money, and cars. His anger is directed at what opposes him, and by means of it he also
defends himself against all antagonistic forces. His intellect enables him to make
‘right’ decisions. These powers in man are not restrained by the Creator;
rather, man is required to seek perfection by disciplining himself against misuse of them.
It is this struggle for discipline which determines his ‘humanity’. Otherwise,
there would be no purpose for him in the universe, seeing that all other creatures lead
relatively untroubled lives without causing any organized disorder in nature.
Man is
the creature who matures spiritually and intellectually
Man is
the creature who matures spiritually and intellectually; the other creatures have no
freedom of will and so do not evolve or mature in this way, their whole lives being wholly
determined within nature. Only man has freedom of will which he must apply to his energies
in order to keep them within the correct limits. If he does not recognize any limits to
his desire he may, for instance, usurp the property of others, seek illicit sexual
relations, and so on. If, again, he does not recognize limits to the use of intellect, he
may exploit it to deceive others. That is why man’s powers must be held in check: his
intellect must be exercised with ‘wisdom’, and his desire and anger restrained
by lawfulness and moderation. We should remember too that man is a social being: if he
does not restrain himself, certainly wrongdoing, injustice, exploitation, disorder, and
revolutions will occur in the society.
But what
is lawful and right; what is moderate and wise? Who will decide the criteria, and how will
these criteria be accepted by people? This is where the essential problem of human life
lies.
The
changeable and uchangeable aspects of creation and man’s life
It is
rare for even two or three people to agree on the truth of even a single subject. If the
rich and powerful decide what the truth is then their ‘truth’ will exclude or
disadvantage the poor and vice versa. Nor if the truth is truth can it be decided by
majority vote: for the truth as truth will be compelling no matter how many or how few
people vote for it. The truth is, and can only be determined by the Truth, that is, by God
Who has created man and the universe. What falls to man to do is to discover that truth
and abide by it.
No one
doubts that there are some verities that are universally recognized—such as honesty,
generosity, altruism, truthfulness, helpfulness, compassion, etc. These are essentially
reflections of man’s true nature. Created by the One, Who is All Wise, All-Generous,
All-Compassionate, every man has an innate inclination towards these virtues and it is the
God-revealed religion which confirms and establishes these truths, showing the straight
path out of man’s psychological and social problems. This religion was revealed
through God-chosen men revered as ‘Prophets’.
While
constant change is observed in nature, there is an underlying aspect of permanence in
everything. For instance, a seed germinates under the earth and grows into a tree, without
the laws of germination and growth changing. Likewise, human beings, no matter the changes
in clothes, houses, vehicles, etc., in the material or form of their lives, have remained
unchanged in respect of the essential purposes they serve and their impact on our lives
and environment. We all share as human beings, certain general conditions of life and
value; we are all born, mature, marry, have children and face death; we all possess some
degree of will and common desires; we share also certain values—we all know the
meaning of honesty, kindness, justice, courage, and so on. All the Prophets, peace be upon
them all, sent by God were therefore sent from first to last, with the same message. This
message, whether preached by the Prophets Moses, Jesus or Muhammad (peace be upon them
all) is based upon the Absolute Oneness and Absolute Transcendence of God: He does not
beget, nor is begotten, being Eternally Self-Existent. Each created being naturally
depends on its Creator, only the Creator Himself is Self-Existent, unique, single, nor
composite, not subject to change, not contained by time or space. Belief in such a Divine
Being constitutes the primary foundation of the Divine Religion, as preached by all
Prophets. The other pillars of Divine religion are belief in the Resurrection, in all the
Prophets without distinction, in the angels, the Divine Scriptures, and the Divine Destiny
which embraces human free will. Through sincere faith and worship and by adhering to the
pristine teachings of the Prophets, mankind can obtain the highest degree of elevation,
even be worthy of heaven. Certainly there is no other escape from the snares of the
worldly life, nor from the oppressive ignorance of false, man-made systems, or the tyranny
of self-appointed priestly authority.
Man
between being a slave of his passions and being and a servant of God
Man, when
he does not employ his free will in the right way, to discipline his energies, can be too
obedient a slave to his passions. They will incite him to wrong his fellow human beings in
order to satisfy his desires. Since the Divine religion does not allow such wrongdoing,
those whose desires lead them from the straight path seek to corrupt the religion in order
to shape it to their whims and fancies. This results in disorder, oppression, unending
conflicts and destruction on the earth. God wills mercy for His creation, not oppression
or injustice. He wills that human beings should live in peace and, accordingly, that
justice should prevail amongst them. It is a fact of history that the followers of
Prophets who preceded the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, split into
opposing factions, with the result that the religion was corrupted to serve the local
cultural preference (or the interest) of one or another sect.
The
Israelites deviated from the straight path. They broke with the original Torah and finally
gave in to their materialistic desires. The followers of Jesus, after the first
generation, followed the footsteps of the earlier people. They split up into many
factions. There were at one time as many as three hundred Gospels. One faction allied
itself to the Roman Empire and so was able to prevail, more or less, over the others. The
Nicene Council imposed the Christian creed throughout the Empire, and eventually a
‘canon’ of accepted texts was established as a new ‘Scripture’.
Christianity deified Jesus and the Holy Spirit, thus introducing a mysterious, irrational
trinity into the pure teachings of Jesus. Having deified Jesus, some of the more
irrational of his followers, following their own reason, found themselves obliged to deify
Mary, the mother of Jesus also. These dogmas were combined with other beliefs such as
blood atonement and original sin.
The
reason for sending all the previous Prophets was the same reason for sending the Prophet
Muhammad, upon him be peace
The
reason for sending all the previous Prophets including Moses and Jesus one after the other
was that the religion needed to be returned to its original purity after the introduction
of innovations and deviations by its adherents. For this reason the Prophet Muhammad, upon
him be peace and blessings, was sent after Jesus. He came with the same pillars of faith,
and God revealed to him the Quran which contains eternal principles for man’s
individual and collective life. Because, by Divine Decree, the Quran is, above all
Scriptures, preserved absolutely and permanently, the Prophet Muhammad is the last of the
Messengers. No other is needed by mankind and, by God, no other will be sent. Unlike any
other religion, Islam honors the religious experience of mankind before Islam, because
Islam confirms and completes what is true in the religions before it. This is expressed by
our saying that, for example, the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) was a Muslim. This is why
Islamic civilization was, from the outset, tolerant, plural, inclusive—regarding the
whole of mankind as its proper constituency—and why, with the rarest exceptions, has
always remained so. There is but one religion which recognizes as a part of its own system
of beliefs that other religions exist. |
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