THE JOY OF TOILING
Sit in the centre of the flames like the insect-lover
WOVEN with the fabric of toil and tribulation the pleasantness or otherwise of human life is all a matter of attitude – contented or discontented. The roughness of the life’s vicissitudes has to be encountered by all – a king or a peasant, a rich or a poor. Even so, life has a value and charm of its own provided the soul of man is fired with an urge of complete submission to the Will of God, which incidentally is the connotation of the word “Islam” and is contained in the Quranic verse:
قُلْ إِنَّ صَلَاتِى وَنُسُكِى وَمَحْيَاىَ وَمَمَاتِى لِلَّهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَـٰلَمِينَ
Al-An’am (The Cattle) 6:162
“Say:My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death are truly for Allah, the Lord of the Worlds”
To a true follower of this verse such an attitude of perfect dis-interestedness born out of a perfect faith in the Divine Being is the mainspring and motive of all his actions. It is then that one starts deriving pleasure even out of the travail of life. Else, life is no less than a veritable hell of pain and agony. Happiness is hidden neither in wealth nor in wine but in a persistent endeavour to seek the fulfilment of the transcendent end of life. Nothing is profounder that the joy of even laying down the life in pursuit of such a goal which out of all convictions is spiritual and supersensual in character, provided the endeavour is linked inextricably with a lively and positive faith. The poetic analogy of the burning of the insect-lover in the flames aptly illustrates this point. Such is life and its paradoxical import, willy-nilly. Etymologically implying excessive heat, Ramazan as an institution is a reminder of this rather hard fact of life and serves to provide for a mental training of a thankful disposition amidst the heavy odds of life.
The fact that it is in the month of Ramazan that the revelation of the Holy Quran was commenced makes it all the more blessed. “The month of Ramazan”, says the Holy Quran, “is, that in which was revealed the Quran, a guidance to men and clear proofs of the guidance and the Criterion” (Al-Baqara (The Cow) 2:185).
شَهْرُ رَمَضَانَ ٱلَّذِىٓ أُنزِلَ فِيهِ ٱلْقُرْءَانُ هُدًى لِّلنَّاسِ وَبَيِّنَـٰتٍ مِّنَ ٱلْهُدَىٰ
وَٱلْفُرْقَانِ فَمَن شَهِدَ مِنكُمُ ٱلشَّهْرَ فَلْيَصُمْهُ وَمَن كَانَ مَرِيضًا أَوْ عَلَىٰ سَفَرٍ
فَعِدَّةٌ مِّنْ أَيَّامٍ أُخَرَ يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ بِكُمُ ٱلْيُسْرَ وَلَا يُرِيدُ بِكُمُ ٱلْعُسْرَ وَلِتُكْمِلُوا۟ ٱلْعِدَّةَ
وَلِتُكَبِّرُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ عَلَىٰ مَا هَدَىٰكُمْ وَلَعَلَّكُمْ تَشْكُرُونَ
Rooted in this verse are but three implications. In the first place, it gives a lie to the modern concept of over-rationalism which has tried to make humanity complacent with its rational faculty, as if reason alone is sufficient unto mankind as its guide and mentor. It needs hardly any mention to point that it is this overdose of rationalism that has dragged humanity to the brink of disaster, and which has served to lend a support no better than a broken reed. Through this text, the Holy Quran means to point out that the benediction and grace of God is indispensable even in the materialistic pursuits of life. By this, however, the verse does not mean to completely denounce this aspect of life as did Schopenhauer (Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher, 1788-1860) in his air of pessimistic irrationalism, to whom life as a blind force of struggle is no more than a purposeless and meaningless striving that desires all but is satisfied with none and “that creates and destroys but does not attain” and whose mind “builds up a little island of apparent order in which the illusion of reasonableness and purpose has a precarious footing.” In short Schopenhauer could view nothing except vanity and hollowness in human life. But according to Islam this view of life is myopic. Islam lends due weight to the rational element. Bergson’s “intuition”, which according to him is more deeply rooted in life than reason and is the direct means of apprehending the world as it really is, seems nearer to Islam in its emphasis on the super-rational element (French Philosopher Henry Bergson 1859-1941). The truth of the matter, as propounded by Islam, is that reason and revelation are coordinative and complementary forces of life and by no means are mutually exclusive. Reason does not lose its sanctity for being a mere reflective of a superficial impression of life, because it is from the ‘concrete’ as its footing, that Islam takes a transcendent flight into the subtler realm of reality. To Hadzrat Mirza, the promised Messiah, the intellect of man gropes in darkness without the divine light of revelation just as the human eye with all its capacity of vision is inutile without the light of the sun. So also does Iqbal hit the nail on the head when he says:
i.e. Surpass the realm of reason; as it is a mere lamp-light on the path and not the destiny itself.
Coming now to the second significance of the Quranic text quoted above, the verse implies that the Holy Quran, as a revealed book from God, is complete, comprehensive and sufficient unto Mankind as a guide for all ages. In other words the revelation of the Holy Quran marks the culmination of the evolutionary process of religious development which had its origin in time immemorial. Why so? Firstly, because the intellectual maturity of humanity attained after a long and arduous process, made it able to assimilate the Quranic wisdom. This stage of intellect had itself been brought about by the gradual process of divine revelation. But while this process of revelation was blissful in this respect, it also resulted in the ramification of the world into various religious orders. With and through this finalisation was therefore intended to bring this ramified religious world into one spiritual order.
The third meaning implicit in the aforementioned Quranic text is that the Holy Quran as a guide and mentor lays before Mankind the righteous path treading along which man can reach the heavenly destiny of life – the vision of God or Reality; and away from which is the path – perverted or wrong – which leads to anywhere but the real goal of life. “Criterion” as its attribute, the Holy Quran lives up to it by laying bare this distinction between the right and the wrong.
(The LIGHT – February 8, 1962)
