EYES & NO EYES
Mohammad Yaqub Khan
Editor : The Light
“What! Are those with no eyes,” says the Quran, “alike to those with eyes?” This sums up what Islam wants to do with men. Islam wants to open the eyes of mankind. Islam stands for the solid facts of life. Put still more briefly, Islam is a religion of eyes, of facts. It wants every man and woman to go about the world with eyes wide open. Over and over again it invites men’s attention to what is actually going on around us with the exhortation: Don’t you see? It tells us of by-gone peoples, their deeds and their dooms and asks us again: Don’t you see? Those who go about this life blind-folded, it condemns as so many dumb driven cattle. “Nay,” it says, “they are worse.” This is Islam, the religion of broad day-light, of hard tangible fact, of reality, of truth.
Let us turn to the other side of the picture, that is to those who pretend they live Islam. Follow the Muslim in every phase of life and what do you find? A contrast as glaring as gloomy, between Islam on paper and Islam in flesh and blood. Islam as the message of life and light in the pages of the Quran has so little in common with its counterfeit in a Muslim. In fact, it would not be far wrong to say the one is at the one end of the diameter, the other, at the other. Whereas Islam means eyes, a Muslim means no-eyes, whereas Islam stands for fact, Muslim for fancy. The one thing Islam is out to do is to bring man face to face with the bare, plain facts of life. But the one thing that forms the distinguishing feature of an average Muslim’s life to-day is that he thinks, feels, lives, moves and has his being in an atmosphere of sham, of unreality, of falsehood.
Do you want concrete illustrations? Well, they are too many to enumerate – as many as there are aspects of a Muslim’s life: We dare say you could point to no sphere of a Muslim’s 24-hour life, but it is surcharged through and through with that characteristic of unreality. He knows no such thing as looking facts straight in the face and this accounts for more than 50 per cent of his misfortunes. He says his prayers without realizing or caring to realize what he says. The Quran bluntly warns him such prayers – prayers that do not mould your work-a-day life for the better – is worth not a brass-button. And yet he piously believes he is doing a good thing. Unreality! Falsehood! The Quran plainly tells him, “No man can bear the burden of another.” Yet he fondly hopes his Pir would secure him a good place in heaven. A Punjab Pir of Indian fame once blustered to a flock of sheep around him – for what are men better than sheep who are driven by others – “Do whatever of sin you would,” he blustered, “I would see to that on the Day of Reckoning. But one thing you must not do. Never listen to an Ahmadi. That is unpardonable.” Unpardonable, no doubt, because the latter would take the wrapping off the disciple’s eyes and the Pir-ji would lose one tame lamb. This, again, we say, is Unreality, Falsehood! What is the fact the Quran wants us to take our stand on? This – “No man shall have ought but what he struggles for.” Manly struggle – that is the Islamic fact. False hope of the Pir`s intercession – that is the Muslim’s fancy. Again, the Quran explicitly lays down:
“Of a certainty, God never alters the condition of a people, until and unless they change their own ways.” A golden teaching—borne out by every page of the history of a people’s rise and fall. Yet how does the Muslim want to get rid of his present miserable plight? In his usual fanciful ways. Rather than see in the broad daylight of this Quranic flashlight, he only gropes in the dark, he catches at every passing drifting straw. Now he looks to the sister community for help, now to a foreign Government, now to a far-off Khilafat, again to an invasion from the North, and yet again to a Messiah from Heavens. False atmosphere again! Even Moses could not help his people out of their degenerate condition, when his people refused to fight, God’s definite promise as to the conquest of the Promised Land notwithstanding. There is no royal road to the temple of glory, no short-cut, no open-sesame, method. An uphill task all along – the task of self-purification, self-reformation, self-edification. Everyone must be his own Messiah. That is the fact, all else is fancy.
Let us take the latest craze of Muslim India – we mean the Qubba craze. What does it reveal on analysis? The same no-eyes mentality – the same atmosphere of falsehood, of sham, of unreality. The Qubbites say, we have great love for the Prophetﷺ and must break the head of one who dare break one brick of the Prophet’s tomb. Let us examine their love. What was the cause that was clearest to the Prophet’s heart? Admittedly, the solidarity of the Brotherhood of Islam. If we really love the Prophetﷺ, that must be the dearest thing to our heart too. How has the Qubbite’s love manifested itself? They have smashed that Brotherhood to pieces. They have set one Muslim against another. At the recent All-India Qubbite Conference held in Lahore, presided over and patronized by men with high sounding theological names and titles, the first question that every visitor was required to answer was whether, he considered lbn i-Saud to be a Kafir or not, contrary to the clear dictum of one of whose love it was supposed to be a demonstration, ”Do not call one of your own Qibla a kafir! ” If you hesitated you were to “right-about-turn,” and to consider yourself lucky if you could escape without socks. Is this love, we ask, for the Prophet ﷺ, who said “All Muslims are brothers.” What “brotherly” treatment that the so-called lovers of the Prophetﷺ accorded to their fellow Muslims! Is it love or self-delusion, love or deception, love or a race for leadership? Whatever else it may be, love for the Prophet ﷺ, it certainly could not be. Assuming for argument’s sake if the Prophetﷺ re-appeared that night and sought admittance into the Bradlaugh Hall where the Qubbites were holding a demonstration of love for him, he would have been the last person to find a welcome. For not only would he have refused to call Ibn-i-Sa’ud or any other Muslim a Kafir; he would have bitterly denounced the Qubbites for their foolish suicidal feud. False love! Faked love! True love must mean to be and to do as the Prophetﷺ was, as He did. To be anti-Prophet like in our ways and yet claim to “love” the Prophetﷺ – again a case of no-eyes, of shirking a look at facts straight in the face.
At the very time that the Qubbites were making a display of their love for the Prophetﷺ in the Bradlaugh Hall by abusing brother-Muslims, the Prophet’s person formed the topic of discussion in the highest court of the province. The Rangila Rasul, the publication of an Arya Samajist which depicts the Prophetﷺ as a personification of lust was before the High Court to decide whether the character of a man who commands the spiritual allegiance of millions, as depicted in that book might be dragged into an open court and discussed. The Court ruled that it might. Do you realize what that meant? It involved the very honour of the Prophetﷺ. The Court permitted an open discussion of the foul and filthy things said of the Prophet’sﷺ character in that book and there was an organised party backed up with brainpower as well as money, to have these obscene things established. The Prophet’s ﷺ very honour was and is at stake. Not one Qubbite however was or is seen raising his little finger to save that honour. And yet their tall talk of love for the Prophetﷺ. Are a few pieces of bricks more we ask, than the honour of the Prophetﷺ? False Love! Absolutely false!
Such is Islam – out and out a matter of Fact, of Reality, of Light and for the matter of that of Life and Prosperity. And such are Muslims – through and through pervaded with an atmosphere of Mystery, of Darkness, of Self-delusion, of Unreality, of Falsehood. If Muslims earnestly seek after a better lot, if they mean business, the sooner they realize this rule, the better. Be all eyes! Shake off no-eyes mentality. Prosperity is bound up with Islam and Islam means wide-open-eyes.
M.Y.Khan
(The Light – December 16,1925)
