Virtue Pays
Those who happen to be sceptically minded and given to scoffing at the call of religion towards the good way and shunning evil should find an eye-opener in the overnight calamity that overtook the corrupt, anti-social elements in this country. Most of them would give away all their ill-gotten hoards if only it could bring them freedom from the clutches of the law.
Modern man, with all his education and knowledge, happens to have his eyes blinded to this daily experience in his own life how moral wickedness robs one of all peace of mind, dumping him all of a sudden in mental anguish and torture, which in religious parlance is described as hellfire. If it is sound logic to deduce conclusions on the premises of certain known facts about the unknown, the thesis of religion that evil-doers are bound to be overtaken by Nemesis, that there is no running away from the consequences of our deeds, which, in the words of the Quran, cling to our necks, that evil doers will rue the day When, under the spell of self-made false values, they gave themselves up to a life of self-indulgence, regardless of the inexorable law of Nature that someday we must reap what we sow today – this thesis of religion stands fully vindicated. The hoarders, black marketeers, the smugglers, the corrupt officials, the self-seeking politicians all have met their Waterloo. Their money, their influence, their high positions could not save them from the hellfire they had been preparing for themselves with their own hands.
The worldly-wise, as we said above, would laugh at this kind of talk about right and wrong, good and evil, the day of reckoning, heaven and hell, which is the simple plain theme of religion. They can please themselves. But they cannot deceive God or the numerous invisible agencies that faithfully, do the recording of our deeds. That is how evil doers have always behaved, the Quran tells us.
They were warned again and again that evil and suffering are inter-changeable terms, that suffering must come in the wake of evil as unerringly as night follows day. They dismissed these warnings as fairy tales, till one morning they rose to find themselves in the grip of their doom. Can any man who has not altogether lost all capacity for deciphering the writing on the wall deny that so far as the antisocial elements are concerned, the recent tight grip of the hand of the law came to them as their day of reckoning? We who happen to be safe and secure may not yet be able to realise this. But those who have their necks in the noose will be able to tell you how they feel about it. It would be sheer stubbornness to refuse to look this hard fact of life in the face and regulate our lives accordingly. This alone is the sum and substance of religion – nothing more, nothing less. We can ignore this universal law at our own peril. How beautifully the Quran drives home this fact of life:
”Whoever does an atom worth of good shall have the reward of it; whoever does an atom worth of evil shall pay the penalty for it”
فَمَن يَعْمَلْ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ خَيْرًا يَرَهُ
وَمَن يَعْمَلْ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ شَرًّا يَرَهُ
(Az-Zalzalah (The Earthquake) 99:7 & 99:8)
True transformation is always an inward process. It must spring from within. That is what religion aims at. Indeed, so far as moral transformation is concerned, religion alone can deliver the goods. It provides the only practicable basis by making inner change a paying proposition. The teaching of religion, shorn of all external trappings and boiled down to its hard core, may be summed up in two sentences:
That evil breeds its own hell, that we can run away from this unerring law of life no more than we can from our shadow.
We are not unmindful of the fact that religion, as commonly understood, has become a matter of form, an escape from the realities of life, a seeking of short-cuts to Heaven. But that is not the concept of religion as presented by the Quran, which is, indeed, the most profound philosophy of life rooted in the very nature of man. What is religion? The Quran answers the question in the words: ”It is the very nature in which God has made man.” And since it is the voice of human nature, it is both universal and inexorable, the Quran goes on to say in the words: ”There is no altering of what God has made”. The universal law of that nature is that virtue is conducive to growth and prosperity and mental equipoise and happiness whereas evil defaces that nature for which hellfire is but another name. It is in this sense that Islam claims to be a universal religion, applicable as much to the white man as to the coloured man, to the Hottentot as to the Eskimo, since the underlying nature in all is one and the same.
The Quran employs the very terminology of gain and loss to drive home the consequences of good and bad deeds. It equates good with gain, and evil with loss – in this life as well as in the Hereafter. ”Shall I guide you to a business”, says a Quranic verse, ”which should save you from torturous punishment?” The deeds of virtue enumerated after these words are described as, a good business proposition, a paying investment. Likewise evil is described time and again by the word Khusran, Khasiroon, Khusran-ul-mubeen and so forth (i.e., loss).This is no fairy tale. It is a hard fact of life. The recent rounding up of anti-social and corrupt elements should dispel any misgiving on this point. Evil leads to suffering, good leads to gain and happiness – this is as much a reality as the law of gravitation, as the arithmetical rule that two and two make four.
Inner change can come only through living conviction in the inexorability of this law of life. Fear of the policeman’s baton may temporarily restrain a miscreant’s hand; but if we want abiding results the restraint must spring from within – from the conviction that our real good lies in following the paths of virtue and avoiding evil as deadly poison. That is the inner voice which religion aims at awakening within each one of us. And unless that change comes, we cannot claim to have attained true wisdom, and all our pretensions to enlightenments and civilisation are an illusion.
To illustrate our point, we have cited the instance of the corrupt people now hauled up for their misdeeds. Let us supplement that by another instance on the positive side – how virtue brings its own reward. This moral is furnished by the experience of a high government official whose career has been one of scrupulous honesty. Some time ago, he was offered a bribe to the tune of a good few lacks in a murder case, which he refused. Today he is the happiest man to find that whereas so many corrupt officials are facing the music of their evil ways, he, having his hands clean throughout his career, has nothing to fear, and goes about as care-free as a lark, unhaunted by any fear and worries which is the lot of the corrupt these days.
M.Y.K.
(The Light – November 16, 1958)
