GOD IN CONVOCATION ADDRESS
FOR the first time perhaps, there was talk of God in a convocation address at the Punjab university, and of the need in a sound moral system for adjusting relationship with one’s Creator.
The credit for this “unorthodox” utterance goes to Prof. Sirajuddin, West Pakistan Education Secretary. At the highest-level credit for this changed outlook goes to the Revolutionary regime of President Ayub Khan, which, among other multiple-sided reforms, has launched a drive in right earnest to rehabilitate truly Islamic values.
The distinguished scholar re-minded the students that the commonly prevalent view of morality as the adjustment of relations between man and man was only a half-way house and did not lead anywhere unless supplemented by its two other vital aspects – adjustment of things within the individual himself and of relationship “with the power that made him”.
There was no use drawing up rules for social behaviour, said the Education Secretary, if “our greed, cowardice, ill-temper and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them”. It was not possible to bring about improvement in social and economic systems, he underlined, unless it was accompanied by a reform of the inner life of the people. “As long as men are twisters and bullies, they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system,” he warned.
Now this is an utterance which puts in a nutshell the whole essence of religion. No social morality can work unless those responsible for implementing it are themselves steeped in those high morals.
There exactly, however, lies the whole bane of modern social set-up. There is no dearth of lofty, benevolent, humanitarian schemes. The United Nations Charter is the most beautiful summing up of these new aspirations and ideals of mankind. But in every crisis that body is called upon to confront, these beautiful ideals founder on the rock of the individual factor. Unless the diplomats who make up that august body are themselves men of high integrity, sincerely devoted to the UN ideals and honestly determined to implement them, world affairs cannot make much headway towards improvement.
Here in Pakistan, we started with loud trumpet-blowing that we were going to build a State on the Islamic principles which should serve us a model to the world. In actual practice, however, a whole spate of corruption was let loose in the mad rush for grabbing more and more. The whole dream of an ideal State based on Islamic social justice, broad human sympathies, and tolerance vanished into thin air.
Prof. Sirajuddin laid his finger at the crux of the whole problem when he urged that no high-sounding systems could work unless there was a simultaneous reform in the inner life of the human agency employed to enforce those systems. But here exactly lies the weakest link in the chain: the inner reformation somehow does not come about.
The distinguished Education Secretary’s three-fold morality takes us to the third link in the chain – the adjustment of relationship with one’s Creator. But this also, somehow, just does not happen. And the net result is a whole vicious circle of pious wishes.
The three links are interdependent. There can be no social reform without inner reform of the individual, and no inner reform, without the rediscovery of God and readjustment of one’s relationship with Him, to serve as a check and a sanction behind individual conduct. But the fact remains that each succeeding link of the three is more difficult of attainment than the preceding one.
The whole question, thus, boils down to this: How to touch off the spark of light which may dispel the all-pervading darkness about the reality of any such Being as God? The predominant mood of the modern mind, and for that matter its root malady, is its scepticism about the very existence of God.
Loss of faith – that is what is basically wrong with modern humanity; that is what thwarts every attempt at building a better world. The crux of the problem, therefore, comes to this: How to take the scales off modern man’s eyes and make him realise that matter with all its wonders is not all in all, as he seems to think, that the Power behind all this wonderful universe is the real Reality and the highest abiding value?
There are three ways to do this:
1. Nature study with all its staggering immensity and wonders.
2. Chronicles of the rise and fall of nations to show how people, when they held fast to a high code of life, prospered and rose to power, and how they collapsed and were wiped out of existence when they lowered or lost hold of those high standards, and
3. the phenomenon of Divine revelation, whereby God has been revealing Himself to chosen individuals throughout the ages.
It should be the business of any really sound, healthy system of education to impart this kind of bias to teaching in our schools and colleges. Prof. Sirajuddin has set the ball rolling in that direction by venturing out of the conventional platitudes which usually make up Convocation addresses and breaking quite new ground by introducing the nation’s youth to the much-needed value of God. As Secretary of Education in this wing of the country; it should be possible for him to reorientate thinking and teaching in the classroom along these lines.
There is no subject of teaching – not even technology – which cannot lend itself to arousing appreciation of the mysteries, wonders and glories of Nature in the youth mind. History, geography, and the sciences, especially astronomy, are ideal subjects to be centred around this basic idea of inculcating the glory and majesty of God in the minds of our youth in schools and colleges.
The Wardha Scheme of Education sponsored by Mahatma Gandhi made handicraft the central pivot around which was made to revolve the teaching in all other subjects – even the three R’s. An Islamic system of education must make the inculcation of the glory of God the basis of all other forms of studies.
(The Light – Saturday April 8, 1961)
