GOD AND HUMAN SUFFERING
Mohammad Yaqub Khan
Editor : The Light
A question which is just now troubling many minds is why God has allowed all the brutality that has been going on for the last four months, to happen. There are men who, having lost their all – their near and dear ones, their homes and hearths – are heard to cry in sceptical indignation: O! Where is God?
Every religion speaks of God as most merciful. Christianity describes God as love. Islam conceives Him as one whose mercy knows no bounds. So have Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism very tender affectionate loving pictures of the Divine Being. How to reconcile this flowery picture of God with the ghastly, cruel and barbarous things that He has allowed to happen during the last four months or so? Why has the loving, merciful God allowed innocent wayfarers to be stabbed? Why has He allowed honourable ladies to be raped and lovely children dashed to the ground? Is this love and mercy? Even a decent man, if he has the power, will defend a helpless man or woman against a bully or a cut-throat. Why couldn’t God do that much? Is He so powerless as all that or is the high tribute of love and mercy paid to Him only wishful thinking?
Just now Muslims the world over have celebrated the sad memory of one such darkest chapter in the history of Islam. On the plain of Karbala Prophet’s own dear grandson, along with his kinsmen was slaughtered in cold blood. Even suckling babes were not spared. While a whole river was flowing at a stone’s throw not a drop of water was allowed to relieve the pangs of their thirsty parched throats. The noble ladies of the household were also subjected to persecutions. This was the treatment meted out to those who were so dear to the heart of the chosen, beloved Prophet of God!
We are afraid this kind of philosophising bespeaks a very superficial view, both of human life and of God. Those who conceive of God as just an agent to minister to their comfort and enjoyment must have a very mistaken notion of religion as well as of their own highest good.
Life is certainly not a name for self-enjoyment or ease or comfort. As a matter of fact, life wouldn’t be worth living if it meant nothing more than eat, drink and be merry. Life has been aptly compared to a sword. Kept quietly in plenty, ease and comfort, it is like the sword in a sheath whose blades gets rusty. It is constant action, constant rubbing and brandishing up and down that lends shine and sharpness to the edge of a sword and thereby makes it a better, more precious sword. The same of human life. Afflictions, trials and tribulations lend edge to the ego in man and thereby fulfil the real function of life.
In order to be transmuted into burnished gold or bright steel, human life must be thrown into the crucible of adversities and misfortunes or the furnace of calamities. That was the deep significance underneath the Prophet’s ﷺ profound aphorism:
“The day of tribulation is the day of purification.”
Christ must thank the crown of thorns which his enemies put on his head for the great spiritual heights he attained. Prophet Muhammadﷺ owed his tallest moral and spiritual stature to the hard course of apprenticeship in the school of adversity which his opponents had prepared for him. If only people knew the wealth of blessings that lies wrapped up in these so-called calamities, they would hail their misfortunes as friends in disguise coming to lend them a helping hand towards self-fulfilment. Rather than curse these, we should be thankful to them.
Rich food involves us in the fatal disease of diabetes. Ease and comfort has the same danger to the life current in man. It gives us spiritual diabetes. It blocks the smooth flow of that current till the water of life in us loses its sparkling purity and freshness and becomes stagnant and stinky. It is to the fighters and sufferers that mankind owes its progress and advancement in all spheres of life. All discoveries of science, all inventions, all explorations of unknown lands are the contributions to human civilization of those who put up with long arduous and trying hardships. The story of the rise of a nation to greatness and glory is the story of the heroes who have suffered in silence in the cause of the nation.
The greatest harm that modern civilization has done to mankind is to make the standard of valuation upside down. It makes wealth, comfort, enjoyment the end-all and be-all of life. And in the pursuit of this will-o-wisp of pleasure, it has only added to the sum total of discontent, mental agony and heart burning. This so-called pleasure is sugar-coated pill of poison which kills all life. True happiness lies along the path of suffering.
God fulfils himself in many ways. To find fault with His ways is to betray our own ignorance. We see only a fringe of the picture that is immediately before us: He sees the whole picture.The Quran depicts this fault-finding-weakness of the human mind in the story of Moses and his tutor. Every time the tutor did something which on the face of it, was wrong, Moses’ human understanding revolted against it and he objected to it. Every time the tutor snubbed him that he was losing patience and when he explained to him the wisdom underlying what appeared objectionable, his own short-sighted view of things dawned on Moses. And that was what God wanted Moses to learn. Those who take God to task for what has befallen us are suffering from similar short-sightedness.
Pakistan without the national purification and strength necessary to build and retain it would have been a house of cards that might have collapsed at any time. The sufferings that came in its wake were but a providential provision to tone up the dead dormant national muscles of a slave Indian Islam. Without this tonic administered to us through the lash of calamity upon calamity, our grip on Pakistan would have been feeble and fickle. And now, thanks to these sufferings, we have this greatest of boons firmly in our grip which no power on earth, God-willing, can snatch from us.
What appears to many as a hard and cruel process, irreconcilable with the merciful ways of Providence, is in reality rooted in profound wisdom. But for Pakistan, Islam was doomed to die out in India. The deep-laid plan was to wipe it off. God, however, willed otherwise. Pakistan was the only way to save Islam in India and to make Pakistan strong and stable capable of holding its own against the vast network of machinations laid against it, the course of national training in the academy of suffering was indispensable. And if the suffering has been unprecedented in history, so is the boon of Pakistan which has been vouchsafed on Indian Muslims without a parallel in history. Where is the disparity?
M.Y.K.
(The Light – Monday December 1, 1947)
