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THE
INTRIGUES OF HUMAN AND SATANIC DEVILS
AND
STRUGGLING AGAINST THEM
This
part has been written in order to warn
the pupils and servants of the Wise Qur’an
against delusions.
In
the name of God, the Merciful, the
Compassionate
Do
not incline toward those who do
wrong lest Fire should touch you.
(11:113)
What
follows brings to nothing the six
intrigues of human and Satanic devils
and blocks up six of their routes of
assaults.
Love
of post and position and struggling
against it
Human
devils desire, based on the lesson they
learn from Satan, to delude the
self-sacrificing servants of the Qur’an
through the love of post and positions
and thereby to cause them to give up
that exalted service and spiritual holy
struggle.
Every
worldly individual suffers some degree
of ambition for fame, some love of
position and, through that fame and
show, the desire to acquire a status in
the eyes of people. He is so fond of
fame that he may even sacrifice his life
for its sake. However, this desire,
perilous for the people of the
afterlife, is also destructive for the
worldly-minded; it is the origin of many
bad morals, and the weakest point in
human character. By exciting this desire
for public recognition, by working on
this weak point in human character, the
human devils can subdue a man and make
him attached to themselves. What I fear
most for my brothers is that the
heretics are most likely to make use of
that weak spot in them. It troubles me
greatly. They have deceived a number of
my poor friends and put them in danger.
O
my brothers and companions in the
service of the Qur’an, say to the
intriguing agents of the worldly people,
and the heralds of misguidance and the
disciples of Satan:
God’s
approval, the compliments of the
All-Merciful, the acceptance of
the Lord is so great a station or
position that, when compared with
it, the favor and commendation of
people mean almost nothing. If God
likes and approves us, then the
approval or commendation of people
may be accepted provided it is a
reflection of God’s approval.
Otherwise, it should not be
desired, for it is of no use at
the gate of the grave.
If,
despite this, you are not able to
overcome the love of position and the
desire for status in the eyes of people,
you can channel it into another
direction, as will be explained below:
Such
desire may be permissible if directed to
gain a spiritual reward or founded on
the intention of earning the prayers of
people and of securing the influence of
the service on others. The following
comparison will clarify the point:
Let
us suppose that the mosque of Aya Sofia
is full of pious worshippers, and there
are some idle boys and vagabonds at the
gate or the antechamber and foreign
lookers-on, fond of amusement, at the
windows. If a man entered the mosque and
recited beautifully a page of the Qur’an,
the hundreds of the pious, truth-loving
worshippers in the mosque would welcome,
approve and commend him, and, by calling
God’s blessing on him, cause him to
gain spiritual rewards. Only those
urchins, and sinful vagabonds, and the
few foreigners would disapprove of him.
If, by contrast, that man were, instead
of reciting the Qur’an, to chant
obscenities and dance violently in the
mosque, he would amuse the idle boys,
delight the sinful tramps by inciting
them to more indecencies, and attract
the ironical approval of foreigners, who
take pleasure in witnessing the misery
of Islam and Muslims. However, he would
be disliked and condemned by every
member of the huge blessed congregation,
and seem to them among the lowest of the
low.
The
mosque in the comparison corresponds to
the Muslim world in general, or Asia in
particular. The believers and people of
truth are the congregation. The idle
boys represent foolish people, and the
immoral vagabonds stand for the
irreligious and heretical imitators of
the West. As for the foreign lookers-on,
they are the journalists who spread the
foreign ideas. Every Muslim, especially
the one of piety and perfection, has,
according to his degree of practicing
his religion, a place in the mosque and
a position in the eyes of Muslims. If he
does deeds and acts in compliance with
the sacred truths and commandments of
the Qur’an, with sincerity and for the
good pleasure of God, which is the basis
of Islamic life, and the meaning of the
Qur’anic verses is demonstrated
through his conduct, he is included in
the supplication, O God, forgive all
the believers, male and female,
always said by all the world Muslims,
and establishes a brotherly relation
with all of them. He is only disapproved
by some people of misguidance far below
the rank of humanity, or by the
single-minded who may be regarded as ‘bearded
children’, that is, adults in
appearance but children in mind and
character.
If,
on the other hand, that man breaks away
from all his ancestors, whom he
recognizes as the means of honor and
pride, and breaks from the illustrious
way of the righteous precedents, which
he takes as a spiritual source of
support, to become, instead, engaged in
whims and fancies, and occupied with
irreligious novelties for show and fame,
he will be degraded to the lowest of the
low in the eyes of the people of faith
and truth. However ignorant and ordinary
a believer may be, nevertheless,
according to the Prophetic judgment, Fear
the insight of the believer, for he
looks with the light of God,1
he unconsciously turns away in
disgust from such vainglorious people.
Thus,
the one who acts to please and indulge
the worldly and the heretics for the
sake of fame or to gain a position in
their eyes, falls to the lowest of the
low in the eyes of a huge congregation,
the great majority of the Muslim
community. He achieves only a transient
and inauspicious position in the eyes of
a small minority of people suffering
delirium and derision - according to the
Qur’anic verse, Friends on that day
will be foes one to another except those
who fear God and avoid evil, (43:67)
he finds only some false friends,
harmful in this world, a means of
torment in the Intermediate World of the
grave, and foes in the Hereafter.
If
a man, influenced by a desire for public
recognition, acts like the one in the
comparison above who prefers to recite
the Qur’an in the mosque, he achieves
a kind of spiritual position, both
considerable and harm-free, to gratify
that desire for fame and position -
provided that he acts in sincerity and
for God’s good pleasure, and does not
see the fame and position as his main
aim. In comparison with what he gains,
what he loses is quite insignificant. He
may lose a few snake-like people, but
will find so many blessed friends that
he receives, through their
supplications, numerous Divine blessings
like the water of life flowing to his
soul from all over the Muslim world, and
those blessings are added to the record
of his deeds.
When
a public figure once took a very
important worldly post and became a
laughing-stock in the eyes of the
Muslims of the world because of the
grave errors he indulged in to obtain
fame, I preached this lesson to him most
forcefully. It shook him, but since I
was unable to rid myself of the love of
position, my warning did not suffice to
rouse him from it.
Fear
and struggling against it
Fear
is one of the most basic human emotions.
The intriguing wrongdoers, the agents of
the worldly, and the heralds of
misguidance, make much use of this weak
spot of ordinary people and particularly
of religious scholars, inculcating in
them fear and anxiety. Suppose an
anxious, fearful man is on the roof, but
then an intriguer goads him by
increasing his groundless suspicions and
anxieties till, finally, he falls head
first and breaks his neck. Similarly,
the worldly people cause Muslims to
sacrifice many important things by
arousing in them groundless fear and
anxieties.
There
was a significant man - may God’s
mercy be upon him - who was afraid of
traveling by boat. One evening, we came
down to the bridge together to go to
Ayub by boat. He did not want to get on
the boat.
-
I fear I will drown, he said.
-
How many boats are there in this
Golden Horn? I asked him.
-
As many as one thousand, he
answered.
Our
conversation continued as follows:
-
Roughly, how many boats sink in a
year?
-
One or two. There are years when
no boats drown.
-
How many days are there in a year?
-
365 days.
-
Then, the chance of drowning is
one out of 365 thousand. What on
earth should a man fear from so
unlikely chance? Besides, how many
years more do you expect to live?
-
I am an old man. I may live at
most ten more years.
-
The appointed hour of death is
unknown to us. That is, you may
die at any time; death may come to
you on any of three thousand, six
hundred and fifty days. Therefore,
the chance of your death is not
one out of 365 thousand, which is
(perhaps) the risk of this boat
sinking; rather you may die today
at a chance of one out of 3650.
That being so, repent of your sins
and weep, and write your last will
and testament!
He
came to his senses and got on the boat,
though trembling. On the boat, I said to
him:
God
Almighty has placed the sense of
fear in man’s nature so that he
might preserve his life, not ruin
it. He has not given us fear so
that man should make his life an
unbearable burden and a pain, full
of torment for himself. If there
is a risk of one chance out of two
or three or four, or at most, five
or six, then it may be religiously
permissible to fear and to avoid
the risk. But, to fear a chance of
one out of twenty, thirty or forty
is a groundless suspicion, a sort
of paranoia, which changes life
into a torment.
Therefore,
dear brothers! If the sycophants and the
heretics, seeking to prevent you from
your holy spiritual struggle in the way
of God, attack you through fear, say to
them:
We
are the people of the Qur’an,
and, according to God’s
declaration, No doubt We have
sent down the Qur’an and surely
We will guard it, (15:9) we
are within the stronghold of the
Qur’an. Our firm conviction is
that for us God is sufficient, and
how good a Being He is to trust in
and rely on, and our trust is a
strong citadel around us. So, by
urging us to fear of a danger, the
chance of which affecting us in
this our short, transient life is
one in a thousand, you cannot
direct us willingly to a way a
hundred per cent harmful to our
eternal life, hereafter.
When
a cruel, unjust man throws someone to
the ground meaning to trample him to
death, if that trampled man kisses the
other’s foot, he will first die
spiritually, and in addition to losing
honor and dignity, will not be able to
save himself from a degrading death. By
displaying helplessness before that
cruel man, he encourages him to crush
him to death. If, by contrast, that
wronged man spits in the face of the
cruel man, he will die as a martyr and
remain spiritually alive in honor and
dignity.
When
foreign forces invaded Istanbul and
destroyed the cannon at the Bosphorous,
a religious representative of them asked
six questions of the office of the
Shaikh al-Islam, then the highest
religious office in Turkey. I was at
that time a member of the House of
Islamic Wisdom (Dar al-Hikma al-Islamiyya).
They requested me to answer those
questions. The representative of the
foreign clergy wanted the questions to
be answered in six hundred words. I
replied:
Not
with six hundred words, nor with
six words, nor with one word even,
I will answer them with a ... .
For you see how, when a nation’s
government puts its foot on our
neck, its religious officer gets
up to ask us some questions in a
boastful way. Therefore, his due
is a single ... !
Now
I say:
Dear
brothers! Even though it was a hundred
per cent dangerous to give response in
that way publicly in the press following
the invasion of Istanbul by tyrannical
powers, the Qur’an sufficed for my
protection. It will also suffice for
your protection to a hundred-fold degree
against any danger of which there is but
a slight chance at the hands of those
insignificant people of wrongdoing.
Also,
dear brothers! Most of you have
completed your military service. Those
who have not yet joined the army must
have heard - if they have not, let them
hear it from me - that those who flee
the battlefront receive many more wounds
than those who persevere at the front.
The verse, Verily, the death from
which you flee will surely meet you,
(62:8) hints that those who flee are
actually hastening to meet death.
Greed
and struggling against it
They
deceive many because of greed. Based on
decisive proofs I have obtained from the
verses and clear explanations of the
Wise Qur’an, I have written in several
treatises that the lawful provision
comes in accordance, not with the extent
of capacity and will-power, but with the
degree of poverty and impotence. Out of
countless signs and evidences concerning
this truth, the following are only a
few:
Trees
are a kind of living creatures in need
of provision. They stand still in their
places and the provision they need
reaches them. Animals, by contrast, are
not provided with food as perfectly as
trees because they seek their food
impatiently.
The
fish are fed perfectly and usually
become fleshy though they are the least
intelligent of animal species, whereas
the animals more clever and powerful,
like apes and foxes, are mostly weak
because of insufficient nutrition. This
also shows that the means of provision
is need or destitution, not power or
ability.
Also,
the infants of both animals and human
beings are fed very well and
extraordinarily, especially with milk,
the best food and the sweetest gift of
the treasury of Mercy bestowed on them
in an unexpected way out of care for
their weakness and incapability. Wild
beasts, by contrast, have usually to be
content with the scarce food they obtain
through tiring effort. This again
illustrates how the means of lawful
provision is impotence and poverty, not
intelligence and capability.
Again,
there are no people in the world in as
passionate pursuit of worldly provision
as the Jews, who are famous for the
force of their greed. But no people in
world history have suffered privation
and shortage of livelihood as much as
the Jews, and lived in humiliation. Even
the wealthy among them live in misery
and under stress. However, the wealth
they obtain through unlawful means like
usury is not religiously sanctioned so
that it does not refute the general
argument.
Further,
the poverty of most of the literary men
and scholars as against the richness of
many ignorant people also shows that
what attracts provision is not
intelligence and ability, but it is
weakness and need, and submission to God
in reliance on Him, and petitioning Him
by tongue, disposition and lawful
effort.
The
verse, Verily, God is the
All-Provider, the Owner of the Strength,
the Steadfast (51:58) which
proclaims this truth, is so strong and
firm a proof for my argument that all
the vegetation, animals and babies
announce it. Every living family in need
of provision recites this verse through
the tongue of their disposition.
Since
provision has been pre-determined and is
supplied by God Almighty, who is the
All-Compassionate and the All-Generous,
it is extreme folly to humble oneself in
a way to deride God’s Mercy and
belittle His Generosity, to offer one’s
conscience and sacred things as a bribe
in return for some wealth, albeit not
forbidden by religion.
The
worldly people, especially the
misguided, do not pay out money except
for a high return. In exchange for some
wealth which might contribute to a year’s
livelihood, they may cause one to lose
his eternal life of the Hereafter.
Unfortunately, there are always some who
attract the Divine wrath because of that
disgusting greed and by trying to please
the misguided.
Dear
brothers! If those who fawn on worldly
people and hypocrites among the
misguided are to capture you by greed -
another weak spot of mankind - ponder
over the truth I have explained above
and follow the example of this poor
brother of yours! I assure you with all
my strength that it is thrift and
contentment, rather than wages or
salaries, with which you can preserve
your life. Moreover, in return for the
money given to you unlawfully, they will
demand from you a high repayment. Your
involvement in their world may also
hinder your service of the Qur’an,
each hour of which can open for you the
gates of an eternal treasury-house.
Being deterred from this service is so
great a loss that no salaries or wages,
however high, can compensate for it.
Negative
nationalistic feelings and struggling
against them
Instigated
by Satan and inspired by the people of
misguidance, some heretics who occupy
certain high positions attack me with
false accusations and, in order to
deceive my brothers and stir up their
national zeal, say to them:
‘You
are Turkish. There are among Turks - God
bless them - scholars in every field and
men of perfection; your master is
Kurdish. How do you reconcile
co-operation with a non-Turk with your
national zeal?’
Answer:
I
am - praise be to God - a Muslim. My
holy nation - it is the Muslim nation -
has long had hundreds of millions of
members. I take refuge in God a hundred
thousand times from sacrificing for the
sake of racism and negative nationalism
those hundreds of millions of brothers
between whom and me there is eternal
brotherhood and who help me through
their prayers, among whom are the great
majority of the Kurdish people. I also
take refuge in God from securing,
instead of those countless blessed
Muslim brothers, the support of a few
atheists or heretics considered as
belonging to the Kurdish race. O
unfortunate heretics! According to your
corrupt logic, the eternal brotherhood
of a huge, illustrious community
composed of hundreds of millions of true
brothers should be sacrificed for the
sake of the temporary, useless
friendship of few westernized and
apostatized Turks or Hungarian or
Bulgarian unbelievers who are considered
as belonging to the Turkish race.
I
have a deep and true connection with the
believing people of this country through
a genuine brotherhood and belonging to
the same Muslim nation. I support and
love, and take pride in, in the name of
Islam, the children of this country, who
carried the flag of the Qur’an
victoriously throughout the old world
for nearly a thousand years. As for you,
O hypocrites, who falsely claim Turkish
nationalism! With ulterior motives you
make show of feeling a short-lived
brotherhood with the Turkish people in
order to make them forget their true
national honors! I ask you whether the
Turkish nation is made up of only
fanciful and heedless young men between
twenty and forty years of age? Does your
nationalism require that they should
adopt for their national interests a
West-imposed kind of education which
increases their heedlessness, habituates
them to immorality and encourages them
to commit religiously forbidden things?
Does your service of them mean amusing
them in a way that will make them, in
old age, wail and repent over their sins
of youth? If your nationalism requires,
and progress and happiness consist of,
all these, and if you are Turkish
nationalists of this sort, then I am
infinitely far from this kind of
nationalism, and you may keep yourself
away from me. If you have some trace of
conscience left and true national zeal,
and if you are at least a little
fair-minded, consider the following
discussion and then answer me:
The
children of this country - the Turkish
nation - comprise six groups of people.
The first group are the people of piety
and righteousness. The second group are
the afflicted and the ill. The old form
the third group, and children the
fourth. The fifth group consists of the
poor and weak. The sixth and last group
is the youth. Are the first five groups
not Turks to be offered your kind of
national zeal? Is it true nationalism to
wound their feelings and deprive them of
their means of consolation in order to
amuse the sixth group? According to the
principle, The majority is considered in
giving the judgment, something harmful
to the majority comes from enmity - not
friendship - so your nationalism is
enmity for the nation.
I
ask you: Does the interest of the people
of piety and righteousness lie in
blindly imitating Western civilization
in its corrupt aspects? Or does it lie
in finding true consolation in following
the way of the truth to which they are
passionately attached because of their
belief in eternal happiness? The way of
those misguided people who, like you,
falsely claim national zeal, would
extinguish the light of pious believers,
deprive them of their means of
consolation and present death as
absolute annihilation and the grave as a
gate to infinite separation.
Does
the interest of the second group
comprising the afflicted and the ill and
those hopeless of their life lie in
imitating Western civilization in its
irreligious and immoral aspects? Rather,
those wretched people hope for
consolation and desire some return for
their suffering. They seek vengeance
upon those who have wronged them and
wish to enter the grave happily.
Nevertheless, through your false
nationalism, you wound the feelings of
those afflicted ones in dire need of
care, hope and consolation, you keep
them under restraint, and drive them
without pity to absolute despair. Is
this what national zeal really requires?
The
old, who comprise the third group, are
one third of the total population. Every
day, they are more and more far away
from this world and approaching death.
In preparation for emigrating to the
other world, they are gradually breaking
with this life. Does their interest or
consolation lie in listening to the
dreadful adventures of certain tyrants,
supposedly belonging to the Turkish
race, and in the present direction of
your movement which you claim as
progress but is, in reality, neglect of
the Hereafter, and attachment to this
world, and therefore spiritual decay?
Can a man find in a cinema the light
with which to illuminate his other
world, or find true consolation in the
theatre? If to deceive those poor old
people (who expect due respect from
national zeal), into believing that
death is absolute annihilation and the
grave, which they believe to be a gate
to mercy, is like the mouth of a dragon
into which they are going to be thrown,
is national zeal, I seek refuge in God a
hundred thousand times from such kind of
national zeal.
The
fourth group of people consists of young
children. They expect mercy and care
from national zeal. Since they are
feeble and impotent, it is only through
recognizing an All-Merciful and Powerful
Creator that they can be spirited and
develop their potential. They can look
at life lovingly and hopefully only by
being inspired with belief in, and
reliance on, God, and Islamic submission
to Him. That will enable them also to
resist the awful circumstances and
calamities of their future in this
world. That being so, does their
interest and happiness lie in attaching
themselves to the material progress they
are only lightly interested in, and to
the principles of materialistic
philosophy which will demoralize and
dispirit them? If man were no more than
a biological entity, like the animals,
one devoid of intellect, that
West-imposed education, which you call a
national education for civilization,
might provide certain of their worldly
interests and temporarily amuse them as
a new toy amuses a child. But, since
those innocent infants are human, and
since they will find themselves in the
tumults of life, they will certainly
cherish long-term desires in their
hearts and have great objectives in
their minds. That being so, in order to
compensate for their weakness and
impotence, we should establish in their
souls, as a requirement of our care of
them, belief in God and the Hereafter as
a strong point of support and an
inexhaustible source of help. This is
what mercy and care for them really
demands. Otherwise, like an insane
mother slaughtering her child with a
knife, we will kill them spiritually,
intoxicated with national zeal. Or we
will commit a great, pitiless crime like
taking out their brains and hearts and
offering these to them as food in order
to fatten their bodies.
The
fifth group consists of the poor and
weak. Surely national zeal should not
ignore the poor, who are crushed,
because of their poverty, under the
heavy burdens of life, and the weak, who
are very much affected by the terrible
convulsions of life. Does your national
zeal require that you should move, under
the name of nationalism, to a shameless
and tyrannical kind of civilization
which must increase the grim
hopelessness of their situation, which
serves as a game to satisfy the fancies
of certain, dissolute wealthy people,
and as a means for some tyrannical,
powerful individuals to gain notoriety
and commit crimes? The remedy for the
poverty of the poor does not lie in the
notion of racism; rather, it is to be
found in the sacred ‘medicine store’
of Islam. The source of the resistance
and strength to endure of the weak lies
in Islamic zeal and sacred Islamic
nationalism, not in a materialistic
philosophy which attributes everything
to blind coincidences and chance
accidents.
The
sixth group is the young. Were youth
permanent, the ‘wine’ you offer them
through negative nationalism might be of
temporary use for them. But when they
recover in old age from the drunkenness
of youth, when they awake in the morning
of old age to the pains and realities of
life, the troubles that drunkenness has
caused will make them weep bitterly, and
the pain coming from the end of that
sweet dream will drive them to regret,
saying:
‘Alas!
Youth has gone, life almost ended, and I
am approaching the grave bankrupt of
good deeds. I wish I had collected
myself earlier!’
That
being so, does national zeal require
that this group should lament in regret
for a long time in exchange for a
transient merriment? Or is it that the
happiness, even the pleasure, of their
lives lies rather in spending their
youth, not in dissipation, but on the
Straight Path so as to thank God for the
blessing of youth, to be enabled to use
their transient youth to gain permanence
through worship, to secure an eternal
youth in the World of Happiness by
spending youth in faith and good deeds?
In
short: If the Turkish nation were
composed of only the young, if youth
were permanent, and were it not for
another world, your imitation of the
dissipated life-style of certain portion
of the West, behind the veil of Turkish
nationalism, might be considered as true
national zeal. You might have a right to
say of me - a man who gives little
importance to worldly life, considers
the idea of racism as a disease like
syphilis, and tries to prevent the young
from indulging in religiously forbidden
pleasures, and who was born in another
province - ‘He is Kurdish, so do not
follow him!’
However,
since the people of this country, called
the Turkish nation, consist of six
groups, it is not friendship, but sheer
enmity, for this nation, to harm and
trouble five out of the six groups in
exchange for amusing the sixth for a
limited period, for intoxicating them in
a way that must drive them to regret and
despair in old age.
They
do not consider me as belonging to the
Turkish race. However, I have been
striving with all my strength and
perfect zeal, and with deep affection
and brotherly feelings, for the good of
the righteous among the Turkish people,
as well as for the old and the
afflicted, for the poor and weak, and
for the children. I have also been
trying to prevent the youth from
religiously forbidden acts which poison
their worldly life and will cause the
ruin of their next life, and which cause
one to weep for a whole year in exchange
for an hour’s pleasure. The works I
have had published in the Turkish
language, not over the last six or seven
years, but over the last twenty years or
so, are all in the open. All praise be
to God that, through those works which I
have derived from the source of the Qur’anic
lights, the old are offered the light of
which they are in such dire need. The
most useful remedy for the afflicted and
the ill is shown to be found in the
sacred ‘medicine store’ of the Qur’an.
The grave is demonstrated as a gate
opening to infinite mercy, not to
eternal annihilation. The children are
offered, from the treasure of the Qur’an,
a very strong point of support against
countless misfortunes of life, and a
source of help to satisfy their
innumerable desires and ambitions. And
the weak and the poor are relieved,
through the Qur’anic truths of belief,
of the heavy burdens of life under which
they are crushed.
As
for the youth, I feel a heart-felt
brotherhood with the good among them.
Nevertheless, I do not recognize as
Turks those who have fallen into heresy
and want to break with the Muslim
nationality, which is the real source of
all the national pride of Turkish
people; I regard them as some hostile
foreigners disguised as Turks. They
cannot deceive the people of truth even
if they claim a hundred thousand times
that they are Turks and Turkish
nationalists. For their acts and
attitudes contradict their claim.
Now,
O you who try to make my true brothers
chilly in their relations with me! What
use do you have for this nation? You
extinguish the light of the people of
piety and righteousness. You deepen the
injuries of the second group, the ill
and afflicted, who deserve compassion
and attention. You deprive the third
group, the old, of their means of
consolation and drive them to despair.
You completely demoralize the fourth
group, the children, who are in such
need of care, and extinguish their
humanity. By bringing to nothing the
hopes of the fifth group - the poor and
weak - who are in such need of help and
consolation, and by drying up their
source of help, you change life in their
eyes into something more dreadful than
death. Lastly, you intoxicate the sixth
group, who should be warned and awakened
to collect themselves, from the sleep of
youth, with such a ‘wine’ that the
resulting drunkenness is extremely
painful and dreadful. Thus is your
national zeal of a sort that you would
sacrifice for its sake many sacred
things of this nation! Does your Turkish
nationalism benefit the Turks in the
ways mentioned? I seek refuge in God a
hundred thousand times from your Turkism
or Turkish nationalism!
Human
egotism and struggling against it
Supporters
of the misguided desire, by making use
of human egotism, to separate my
brothers from me. Indeed, the most
dangerous temperament common to all,
which is also the weakest spot, of a
man, is egotism. By exciting this
sentiment, they urge men to do very bad
things. Dear brothers, take care that
they do not captivate you through
egotism. Know that the people of
misguidance, carried by their ego,
wander in the alleyways of deviation.
Therefore, the people of truth have no
way other than to forsake ‘ego’ in
order to serve the truth - even if they
are sometimes right to make use of ‘ego’,
since this will make the people of truth
resemble the others, making them seem as
egotists like the others. For the
service of the Qur’an, around which we
come together, does not accept ‘egotism’;
rather it demands co-operation in
sincere brotherhood. You must have been
convinced that this poor brother of
yours did not come forward to satisfy
his ego or to invite you to serve it;
rather, he showed himself to you as a
servant of the Qur’an with no feelings
of egotism. He has chosen self-denial
and altruism as the way to follow. He
has also proved to you that the works
put forward for the benefit of people
were derived from the Qur’an and
belong to everyone. No one can claim
ownership of them, attributing them to
himself. If we were to suppose the
inconceivable that they belong to me,
then - as a brother of mine said - once
this gate of the Qur’anic service has
been opened, the people of perfection
and knowledge should not hesitate to
follow these works, giving no
consideration at all to my defects and
shortcomings. However great a treasury
useful for everyone and a cure for every
intellectual or spiritual disease the
works of the righteous precedents and
scholars of truth are, it sometimes
happens that a key can open several
treasure-houses. I think that those who
have a forceful ego based on knowledge
have also understood that The Words are
each a key to the truths of the Qur’an
and a ‘diamond sword’ with which to
strike those who try to deny these
truths. Those people of knowledge and
perfection boastful of their knowledge
should know that, by following my works,
they will become the disciples of the
Wise Qur’an, not of me, and that I am
their fellow-student.
Supposing
I were doing this service, as claimed by
our enemies, to satisfy my egotism, even
then does this brother of yours have the
right to request you to forsake egotism
and form a strong unity around the
truths of the Qur’an, seeing that
numerous people forsake their egotism to
come together for worldly aims around a
Pharaoh-like man with utmost loyalty and
work in a strong solidarity? Are even
the greatest of your scholars not wrong
not to accede to this request?
Dear
brothers, the most harmful aspect of
egotism is envy. If one’s service is
not purely for God’s sake, envy
intervenes and adulterates his service.
In the way the hands of a man are not
envious of each other, and his eyes
feels no envy of his ears and his heart
does not compete with his intellect, so
every one of you is like a member or a
sense of our collective body. So, it is
a duty of conscientiousness to take
pride, and take spiritual pleasure, in
each other’s merits, not to enter into
rivalry with each other.
Laziness
or fondness of comfort and struggling
against it
This
concerns making use of laziness, the
fondness for comfort and ease, which is
to be found in a man, or giving new
duties to those who are really dutiful.
Indeed, devils of humankind and jinn
attack from every direction, and when
they see those among our friends who are
steadfast, faithful, sincere and zealous
and persevering in service, they adapt
their strategy. In order to interrupt
our service and abate the zeal of our
brothers, they choose to exploit
laziness, the desire to live an easy
life, which is naturally to be found in
every person. They resort to such tricks
in their efforts to prevent our service
that they find such jobs for some of our
brothers as leave them no spare time to
assign to the service because of
overwork, or they give them extra work.
They show some brothers of ours the
attractions of the world to stir up
their worldly desires and aspirations so
that they feel indolence in the service.
It
will take a long time to note all their
methods of attack. Cutting the matter
short here, I refer the rest to your
insight and understanding.
Dear
brothers! Be alert! Your duty is sacred,
and the service is exalted. Each of your
hours spent in the service is as
valuable as to gain for you the reward
of a whole day’s worship. Be aware of
this so that you do not let the
opportunity slip.
O
you who believe! Be patient, and
vie you in patience; be steadfast,
and fear God; haply so you will
prosper .
(3:200)
Do
not sell My revelations for a
trifling price.
(2:41)
Glorified
be Your Lord, the Lord of Glory,
above that they describe! And peace
be upon the Envoys; and all the
praise be to God, the Lord of the
Worlds!
Glory
be to You; we have no knowledge save
what You have taught us. Surely, You
are the All-Knowing, the all-Wise.
O
God, bestow blessings and peace upon
our master Muhammad, the unlettered
Prophet, Your beloved, most esteemed
and noble, and of the highest rank;
and on his family and Companions.
Amen!
1.
Sunan al-Tirmidhi, ‘Tafsiru sure 15:6’
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