IS RELIGION A SPIDER’S WEB?
Mohammad Yakub Khan
This morning at the bus stop the writer, in order to make the best of his time, entered into a casual talk with a young journalist about the prospects of new elections, if they are really going to be held in the near future, in this province. The idea whether things would not improve if instead of common politician or the election-hunters, men from the religious order were returned to the Assembly. Religious people were more crooked, came the retort from this young and apparently Communist-minded journalist, than laymen. The lengthier the prayers they said, he went on to say, or the more flowery the oratory with which they entertain people, the more dangerous type they were and must be shunned as deadly vipers. Barring a sprinkling of noble exceptions here and there, the rank and file of these religious divines were only exploiters of the name of God and Prophet and Islam and the rest of religious paraphernalia. And he gave us a concrete illustration of how these religious-mongering folks should be dreaded and kept at arm’s length. Only yesterday, he said, a well-known Shariat-walla MLA (now ex-MLA) stepped into his office to enlist his paper’s support for his party. “We Shariat-wallas,” he pleaded, “are going to fight the next elections on the issues of Shariat Law and Jihad and you must uphold such a noble cause.” The journalist informed him that he would not touch with a pair of tongs that so-called noble cause of his which was nothing but a spider’s cobweb which they had spun around their own minds as well as around those of their dupes, that they were a back number and must make room for younger people with mind unfettered by these self-spun webs. He had hardly finished when the bus arrived and cut short this instructive and illuminating talk.
“Is religion really a spider’s web?” we mused within ourselves as the bus jolted along and people within jostled one another. “Are God and Prophet and Islam and Salat and all these religious things mere names and forms without any external objectivity or reality or utility? Is prayer to God that goes out of a heart in dire distress after all nothing but wishful thinking, a kind of self-deception or self-hypnotism?
What about the concrete categorical narrations in the Quran of how the Prophet Zakariya and the Prophet Younus, when they found themselves in a state of utter helplessness, poured out the distress of their hearts to God and how God answered their prayers? Not only that God answered their prayers. God promises similar response, the Quran goes on to reassure man, to every man and woman who has faith in God and turns to Him for succour. Are all these idle consolations without any foundations in reality? This is how we pondered within ourselves till the bus dropped us at our destination and put an end to this interesting reverie.
Is religion really nothing more than just a spider’s web of our own weaving, as the young Moskowite would have us believe on the authority, apparently, of Marx and Lenin and Stalin? Is it we who have spun a spider’s web or is it the Communist who is spinning a utopia of his own fancy and luring the masses of men with a sweet fool’s paradise of his own creation? Who is really exploiting the common man – the man of religion who warns him point-blank that there is a God to Whom he is answerable for whatever he does and that any lapse from the moral law is bound to recoil on his head or the Communist who tells him that all this is just a spider’s web and that like the bird of the air or the beast of the jungle he is free from all moral obligations? Where does the spider’s web really lie – in religion which puts a rational, scientific and moral interpretation on this universe and its working or in Communism, which conjures up before men’s minds an imaginary utopia both inadvisable and impossible of realization? Communism accuses religion as the opiate of the masses. Is it religion, which warns and awakens man to the existence of a moral order and puts him on the alert, that sends people to sleep or Communism which holds out before him the vision of a cheap heaven and a short cut to that heaven?
Marxism is the most fine-spun, most complicated and most abstruse philosophy that only a handful of intellectuals can comprehend. The common man is only lured away with the prospect of a world overflowing with bread and butter and milk and honey. It is simply beyond the mental reach of the common man, even of the man of ordinary education. Religious truths, on the other hand, are obvious to the meanest intelligence, writ large on every particle in the universe from the gigantic heavenly orbs to the tiniest blade of glass. No books are here needed, no high-spun philosophy, no complexities of systems, no elusive abstractions. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west day in and day out. It follows a well-set route which it dares not deviate from by a hair’s breadth. The same is the story told by everything else in Nature. Such is this open book of Nature whose sermons in stones even an unlettered man can read and understand. Which way lies the spider’s web – in this open clear unambiguous book of Nature with the reality of God written in big block letters on every particle therein or in the voluminous Capital of Marx with its mushroom of self-made theories and counter theories, grounded in abstraction and subtleties which it must take a lifetime to unravel and decipher?
But O Propaganda, thy name is communism. With unabashed audacity it turns round and accuses a shining self-luminous Truth like God and His laws as an opiate and a spider’s web! The custodians of religion must however bestir themselves betimes if this false and debasing philosophy of life, painted in fascinating hues is not to sweep the youth of Pakistan off their feet. Divines of Islam must put their heads together and supply an effective anti-dote to this fast-spreading poison. Above all, the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha’at Islam Lahore, which has already done yeoman´s service in the defence of Islam against all inroads, must take up this new challenge to the Faith and address itself to the smashing of his latest icon which human weakness has set up for the worship of the ignorant masses.
M.Y.K.
(The Light – Tuesday, February 1, 1949)
