Inequality And Suffering
Muhammad Yakub Khan
RELIGIONS other than Islam are based on the philosophy of escapism. They provide back-door escapes from life, its struggles, its sorrows and its sufferings. They are the product of fear-complex. Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, three main religions of the world, all owe their genesis to this false negative approach to the problem of existence. They all extol monasticism. This worldly life is nothing but sin or suffering to them. The highest ambition of man’s life must be to run away from such a dirty, troublesome thing and lead a life of renunciation, of suppression of the self, of abstract impotent contemplation in the solitudes of the woods or on the banks of rivers and peaks of mountains, away from the haunts of man. What they claim to achieve through a life of such ascetic isolation from life, its temptations, its worries and its problems is a worthless intellectual repose – the repose of the graveyard and a false sense of mental satisfaction.
Not so Islam! Islam is not a religion in this sense of the word. If religion means escape from life, a negative attitude towards life or, to borrow an expression from Mahatma Gandhi’s typically Hindu attitude towards life, non-co-operation with the forces of life, Islam is certainly not a religion at all. It is a positive attitude towards life, a yea-saying attitude, as Nietzsche puts it. Islam means unquestioning, voluntary, cheerful acceptance of the game of life along with all the rough and tumble that it involves. That is the correct attitude, teaches the Quran, to the problem of life. It is the law of all life, observed by the entire universe.
أَفَغَيْرَ دِينِ ٱللَّهِ يَبْغُونَ وَلَهُۥٓ أَسْلَمَ مَن فِى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ طَوْعًا وَكَرْهًا وَإِلَيْهِ يُرْجَعُونَ
(Al-Imran (The Family of Imran) 3:83)
“To Him submits whatever is in the heavens and in the earth”, says the Holy Quran. That alone is the correct healthy attitude of man towards life. Islam, unlike all other religions would have us play the game, not boycott it. In the light of this clarification, it should not be difficult to understand the difficulties of Buddhism to which a correspondent from Ceylon calls attention through a letter and a newspaper cutting, both reproduced elsewhere, containing exposition of the Buddhistic philosophy by a Buddhist scholar.
As everybody knows Buddhism derives its inspiration from the same negative factors mentioned above. Gautam saw a sick man, an old man, and a dead man. His princely mind unused to such sights was overwhelmed. He gave himself up to sad melancholy broodings:
“Is this life, after all? Shall this be the end of my life too and of my lovely co wife? Damn it all! It is not worth living at all – this kind of life, so short-lived, so full misery, so tragic. It is all moonshine.” As the story goes it was under this obsession that he bade good-bye to his palace and stole off one night from his wife and child to seek into wilderness the peace of mind which palace life could not give him.
This is the background of Buddhism – a dread of life and its sorrows and sufferings. It is at this point that the whole error in the conception of the problem of life creeps in. Other theories such as Karma and re-birth are mere explanations that have sprung up as a result of this basic error – the product of a diseased mind. A man whose imagination is haunted by stories of ghosts and evil spirits and hobgoblins mistakes every bush on a dark night for one such bogey or the other. Karma and re-birth are the hobgoblins of the terror-stricken minds which, unable to read any better lesson in the problems of life, put them down as a punishment visited upon us for our past sins by some inexorable law a known as Karma.
The truth of the matter is that the very starting point of this philosophy is wrong and the superstructure which is meant to support that basic error is therefore equally wrong. According to the teachings of Islam, there is nothing wrong in the phenomena of inequality and suffering. They are in fact essential for the fullest growth and development of the highest powers with which every human personality has been endowed. Jesus without his crown of thorns would not be half as glorious and Divine as he now is. The cross to which he was condemned constituted the crowning glory of his life. Prophet Muhammad ﷺ shines at his best in moments of darkest vicissitudes. Calamities, like earthquakes, bring out the hidden treasures that lie buried in the nature of man. But for apprenticeship in the school of adversity no one can hope to win the crown of greatness. According to a saying of the Holy Prophet ﷺ :
یوم الابتلائ یوم الاصطفائ
“The day of tribulation is the day of purification”.
Suffering is a necessary course of training for everyone who would attain to the fullest stature of human dignity. The common ass who has plenty of green grass to fill his belly with on the village pasture may be the most contented and self-satisfied creature under the sun. But certainly, no man will be found anywhere who would exchange his own life full of sorrow with the contented care-free life of the ass of the rich village green. Everyone would rather be a Socrates having a cup of poison to drink than this kind of perfectly satisfied contented ass. But this is exactly the kind of mental calm and content which non-Islamic religions teach.
Suffering is no dread to Islam. Islam stands for the conquest both of sin and suffering. Christianity makes a surrender to sin and as a compromise strikes a bargain with it by sending a sinless man in the person of Jesus to become the scapegoat for the sins of humanity. This is condoning one sin by a greater one – the crucifixion of an innocent man like Jesus being itself a very heinous sin. Buddhism has its fear-complex in the phenomena of inequality and suffering and finds a way out of it through Karma and re-birth. Islam does not adopt this kind of sneakish attitude. It takes up the challenge of sin, grapples with it, and tries to overpower it. Likewise, about suffering. It hails it as an opportunity. Says the Holy Quran:
وَلَنَبْلُوَنَّكُم بِشَىْءٍ مِّنَ ٱلْخَوْفِ وَٱلْجُوعِ وَنَقْصٍ مِّنَ ٱلْأَمْوَٰلِ وَٱلْأَنفُسِ وَٱلثَّمَرَٰتِ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلصَّـٰبِرِينَ
ٱلَّذِينَ إِذَآ أَصَـٰبَتْهُم مُّصِيبَةٌ قَالُوٓا۟ إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّآ إِلَيْهِ رَٰجِعُونَ
Al-Baqara (The Cow) 2:155 & 156
“And We shall try you with something of fear, and hunger and loss of property and fruit of labour. Give glad tidings to those who when a calamity befalls them say: For the Lord we live and unto Him we return. These are the people who, according to their Lord are on the right track and they indeed are the people who attain the highest perfection.”
To Islam, adversity is thus a message of true happiness and true greatness in disguise. Conquest of suffering is the only path that leads to true happiness. Inequality likewise is dreaded by other religions owing to this basic miscaption. In Islam it is the law of life. Take any phenomenon in nature and you will find, the same law of inequality working there. Inequality is really not the correct word. The correct word would be diversity. But for diversity, life would lose all its charm. If all people were to get ready-made dishes of chicken and roast meat and savoury pudding every morning and evening, that would constitute ideal equality. But do you really think one would enjoy this kind of indulgence for long? It will become a bore and sickening. No amount of luxuries and dainties that a hotel de-luxe may provide free of charge is worth the dry piece of bread earned by the sweat of the brow.
Islam stands for the conquest of sin and suffering. It sees in diversity the very charm of life. In fact, it aspires to make man play the role of Conqueror on this globe – subjugating the whole of the universe, within him or without, harnessing it to his own service. Says the Quran:
﴿وَسَخَّرَ لَكُم مَّا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَمَا فِي الْأَرْضِ جَمِيعًا مِّنْهُ ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِّقَوْمٍ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ﴾
Al-Jathiya (The Kneeling) 45:13
“To you (man) have We subjugated whatever is in the heavens or in the earth.”
Islam converts sorrows and sufferings into levers for progress. Such is the Islamic conception of life. The problems therefore which constitute the main headache of Buddhism and other religions does not arise in Islam. And hence the solutions that are offered for these imaginary fears, such as atonement in Christianity and Karma and re-birth in Buddhism are equally imaginary. They have no foundation in fact.
(The Light – Saturday, October 8, 1949)
