Ar-Ra'd

The Quran enjoins the acceptance of the one and only God. Those who do not believe in God advance the argument that if God is in existence, He should be visible to everyone. But our known universe shows that a thing’s invisibility does not prove that it has no existence at all. An example of this is the force of gravity. There are innumerable stars and many planets in space. Human knowledge claims that in between these astronomical bodies there is an ethereal and intangible force of gravity (or force of attraction) which is balancing them in the vastness of space. So man believes in the force of gravity in spite of its being intangible and unseen. Then how can he be justified in denying the existence of God, simply because of His being unseen? This is the case with Revelation and prophethood. When an observer of the universe studies its phenomena, he finds that everything here functions according to a system. It appears as if all things are bound by a special order. This ‘order’ does not exist in the things themselves. Certainly, it comes from outside. In other words, the whole universe seeks instruction from ‘outside’ for its working. This external instruction in the case of our world (leaving out of account its human population) is generally referred to as the Law of Nature. In the case of human beings, this external instruction, or guidance, comes in the form of revelation and inspiration. The Universe is, so to say, a machine and the Quran is its ‘Guide Book’. The former is the example of God’s regulation of affairs and the latter is the example of God’s detailing of signs. There is perfect consistency between these two. Whatever exists in the universe in physical form, exists in the Quran in verbal form. This consistency simultaneously proves two things—first, that there is a Creator of this universe and second, that the Quran is the Book of that Creator and not the creation of the limited mind of a human being.

When we observe the earth, we will find that the conditions here appear to be most suitable for human settlement and growth. The earth is spread out beneath human beings like a natural floor. Deep oceans cater to human needs on the one hand and on the other there are the mountain ranges, so that both of them together help in maintaining a balance on the earth. The plants and trees could have grown independently, but they have been paired off, and pollination must play its part between them so that flowers, fruits and seeds will grow. The position of the earth is that, apart from its annual revolution around the sun, it rotates continuously on its axis. This rotation is completed in twenty-four hours, resulting in the creation of night and day. Anyone who seriously gives consideration to signs of this kind will be forced to accept that this earth is under an authoritative and powerful Lord. And He, by His own will, has made it subject to purposeful planning. Without conscious planning, this meaningfulness on earth would not have been at all possible.

‘Abdullah ibn ‘Abbas says that one strip of land is fertile while another is barren. One strip of land produces crops while one nearby does not. Mujahid says that the same is the case with mankind. There are good people in this world and also bad, though the origin of all is one. There is a strange phenomenon on this earth: the soil in different places may be similar and may be watered by the same water, but in one place it will produce a tree whose fruit is sweet, while in another place it will produce a tree whose fruit is sour. One tree may have a high yield and another a low yield. This is a parallel in nature to the human condition. It is like all human beings, although cast in the same mould, showing a marked difference from one individual to another when it comes to deriving any benefit from the divine guidance which is consistently offered to all. One will receive the full benefit of such guidance, and thus have his entire life enriched by it, while another may avail of only a part of it or even reject it altogether. In other words, the same ‘seeds’ of guidance when ‘sown’ in different individuals will produce outcomes as different as the sweet and sour fruits of our analogy.

The case of those who deny the life after death is very strange. While accepting the occurrence of an event once, they deny the occurrence of the same event on future occasions. Those who do not accept the occurrence of life after death, or a second life, express their surprise at those who believe in a second life. They think that acceptance of a second life is irrational, whereas the position is just the opposite, because an unbeliever can only reject second life. As far as the first life is concerned, it is not possible for anybody to reject it, because it is evident to everybody as a real event. So, if the occurrence of the first life is possible, why should the occurrence of a second life be impossible? There are few who would actually reject the existence of God. Mostly people believe in a Creator, but they do not accept the Hereafter. But after the denial of the Hereafter, the acceptance of a Creator has no value. God is not only the Creator of this universe, but He Himself is the Truth. God’s Being necessarily warrants that whatever He does, should be done with Rectitude and Justice. The Hereafter is, in fact, a manifestation of God’s attribute of Justice. Acceptance of God is acceptance in the real sense only when it is followed by acceptance of the Hereafter. Belief in God remains incomplete without acceptance of the Hereafter. People’s rejection of the straightforward and true message of Truth is mostly due to their being victims of bias, prejudice and egoism. They are slaves of their own ideas. Thus mentally shackled, they are unable to give due consideration to any external reality. This condition has been described as being ‘chained by the neck’ – the chain being the symbol of slavery. Those who are bent on making prisoners of themselves in this world can expect nothing other than remaining prisoners in the Hereafter.

The Prophet Muhammad used to tell the people of Makkah to follow the guidance of God, otherwise they would be seized upon by Him. In reply to this they would say, ‘O, God! If whatever Muhammad declares is true, then shower pieces of stone on us from the sky.’ Apparently this prayer was addressed to God but, in fact, it was directed at the Prophet. At that time he appeared to be worthless to the people of Makkah. It was very difficult for them to believe that God would punish them on their rejecting such an ordinary man. Any imposition of punishment for their rejecting ‘Muhammad’ appeared to them such a distant possibility that they used to say, quite ridiculously, ‘We want that the punishment with which you are threatening us to actually be meted out to us.’ God says that His punishment is definitely going to overtake them due to their rejection of Truth. It is due to their being misguided that they wanted it to happen earlier. In fact, they should have spent this period of respite in giving careful consideration to the call of the Quran, rather than invite the punishment of God before time. People want to see the punishment of God with their own eyes and then accept it. But this is a demand made in sheer blindness. If they have observing eyes, then whatever happened with others should be enough to teach them a lesson. Many communities have passed before them who, like them, rejected the prophets of their age and finally they had to face punishment for this. By the law of God man is allowed respite to perform certain deeds. Unfortunately, this law of respite has made people arrogant. But there is a limit to respite. After this limit nothing awaits them except a horrible punishment from which they will not be able to save themselves.

Today, throughout the world, there are more than a billion people who accept the Prophet Muhammad as a prophet of God. But in his lifetime the people of Makkah could not understand that God had made him His prophet. The reason for this was that in the preliminary stage, his prophethood was a controversial issue. But now, in this advanced stage of history, his prophethood is no longer controversial. It is now as easy to believe in the prophethood as it was difficult to believe in it at an earlier, controversial stage. The standards by which the people of Makkah lived were those of wealth, power and popularity. By these standards the Prophet Muhammad did not appear to them to be in any way exceptional, so they wanted him to have some extraordinary sign which would be a definite proof of his prophethood. In response to this it was said that these people demanded something which was not in accordance with God’s plan and as such it would remain beyond human reach. The present world is a place of trial. Here guidance is not available in the form of such clear signs that there is no scope for human doubt, because if that were so, the purpose of the divine test would be defeated. Here the only possibility is for man to take guidance in the shape of ‘information’ and accept it after examining it. One who does not pass this test will never have his share of guidance. God raises in every community a man from among them so that he may deliver the message in a language familiar to them. This arrangement was made for the convenience of the different communities. But it often happened that the communities were affected in the opposite manner: they rejected God’s prophets. Their vision was clouded by the ordinary nature of the messenger. Their eyes could not see the extraordinary nature of the message itself.

The womb of a mother is a wonderful factory. The wonderful aspect of the human produce is that it conforms to a ‘fixed proportion’. There is a constant balance between ‘demand and supply’. For instance, this wonderful plant which has been working for thousands of years, produces men as well as women, but a constant proportion is maintained between these two sexes. It never happens that this plant produces males only or females only. An event like war sometimes temporarily disturbs this proportion. But it has been observed, strangely enough, that after a certain period this original proportion is soon restored. The same is true of the balance of talent in the men and women coming out of this plant. Research has shown that those being born are not of a uniform capacity. There is a great diversity in their talents. This diversity is of importance in civilization, because persons of diverse capacities are required to manage the affairs of a civilization. The plant of mothers is quietly and successfully producing persons with different talents, as if it were receiving ‘orders’ from outside which led to how the persons in the womb were constituted. If there had not been this diversity in the production of human beings, the whole system of civilization would have descended into chaos and all development would have ceased. The existence of this planning in the working of the mother’s womb clearly shows that there is a Planner behind it. Without conscious planning, a system marked by such regularity could never exist. This also proves that the Creator and Lord of this world is a Being Who is aware not only of whatever is plain for everyone to see, but also of what is unseen and hidden. Whatever happens in a woman’s womb is apparently a secret matter. But the above-mentioned details show that God is completely aware of it. Then this Being Who is aware of the open and hidden aspects of everything is bound to know the hidden, and open aspects pertaining to human beings. Belief in angels is also proved by this, because it is an extension of the present system of keeping ‘watch’.

The rise and fall of the communities of the world do not happen at random, but rather under the care of and by the decision of God. When God blesses a community with His bounties, He continues this blessing so long as that community keeps its competency intact. After losing this competency, that community necessarily loses God’s grace also, for example, after losing internal unity, its impact on the world, is lessened. Whatever a community achieves in this world, it achieves by the law of God and whatever a community loses, it loses it by the law of God. There is nobody here who is capable of giving or capable of taking away except God.

When there is lightning, sometimes it carries the message of pleasant weather. But sometimes it falls on the earth like a thunderbolt and burns things down. Similarly, when the clouds gather, they sometimes shower beneficial rains upon the earth. But sometimes they are the forerunners of storms and floods. This means that in this world, one and the same thing can have the aspects of both fear and hope. The One who manages the affairs of the world sends His blessings to the people of the earth by means of various phenomena. He can turn an ostensibly beneficent thing into the most destructive punishment. This state of affairs warns man that he should never consider himself to be safe from God’s scourge. Heedless human beings always wait for some unique and magical sign. But those whose consciousness is alive are successful in finding every kind of sign—of an inestimable value—in the daily affairs happening around them. They feel their hearts beat faster with the roll of thunder and the flash of lightning and when they look at the raindrops, a flood of tears flows from their eyes. The condition which the angels face on seeing the power of God directly, are one and the same as those faced by true human beings, even when they have not seen the power of God directly.

If you spread your hands and call upon the ocean, it will never happen that it responds to your call and its waters come out of the depths to quench the thirst of your fields and gardens. But, by the laws of nature, the waters of that same ocean rise into air in the form of water vapour, leaving behind the salt. Then under the influence of heat, gravitational pull and the force of the winds, it spreads over town and country and pours down in the shape of fresh, sweet water and irrigates the land. This shows that the ocean, in spite of being gigantic, is really helpless. It has no innate power either to act on its own, or to respond to another’s call. This is the condition of all the things of this world. As such, the wise person is one who worships the Creator and not the creations—one who concentrates on the Lord of the things and not on the things themselves.

God expects man to bow down before Him. This ‘bowing down’, is the religion of the whole universe. Everything in this world is totally subject to God’s command. A physical sign of this subjection is the casting of shadows towards the west in the morning and towards the east in the evening. This daily happening is the material symbolising of that self-prostration which man is expected consciously to perform. A study of the universe in all its vastness reveals that all of it is bound by one universal law. This proves the fact that its Creator and Lord is one and only one. Rational and intellectual studies do not in any way prove that more than one power is active in this universe. In view of this, the notion of an additional god other than the one and only God is an absolutely baseless presumption. Observation with the help of the ‘eye’ indicates the existence of one and only one God. So, those who believe in the existence of more than one God, only prove their ‘blindness’, that they have assumed the existence of many gods due to their blindness and not on the basis of knowledge and observation in the real sense.

God has created this world in such a way that here material events have become the symbols of moral realities. Whatever Almighty God expects from man at the level of consciousness is being demonstrated in the rest of the world at the material level. In the Quran two events of nature have been mentioned here. One is that when there is rainfall, its water flows and reaches rivers and streams. At that time a great deal of foam surfaces on it. In the same way when silver and other minerals are heated in order to clean them their impurities appear in the shape of foam, but immediately thereafter the foam, which is useless for man, evaporates in space and the water and minerals which are useful for man remain intact. These are the events of nature through which God shows symbolically what principles He has laid down for the success or failure of life. One principle is that, in this world, only that person has a place who proves useful to others. The individual who has lost his capacity to benefit others has no place in this world created by God. The same is true of communities and groups.

It is the law of God in this world that dirt and foam may emerge and surface for some time, but finally what receives a place here is that which gives benefit. In the Hereafter also, the same is true of human beings. In the world some people may be prominent due to some skill but, in the Hereafter, only those who possess real qualities will receive a higher status. People do not respond to the call for the Truth in this world because they always feel that, by advancing towards unadulterated Truth, they will lose worldly benefits. The rewards for ignoring the Truth which such people receive are invariably honour, popularity and prosperity in this world. They appear to be occupying seats of high status by rejecting the Truth. In the Hereafter, all these people will have been thrown out as like fast disappearing foam. And only those people will figure as prominent who surrendered themselves to the Truth, ignoring timely benefits. People give so much importance to worldly status and worldly benefits that they ignore the truth. In the Hereafter these things will appear unimportant to them, so much so that they would want to give this whole world and one more world equal to it, to ransom themselves from divine punishment.

There are always two kinds of human beings—one who use their reason granted by God and give serious thought, with an unbiased approach, to the matter of truth. Finally when their minds are addressed they adopt the truth by their conscious decision. The other kind of human beings think within the sphere of their social traditions. They view things in the light of customs and not in the light of reasoning. And then they adopt as truth whatever appears to them to be popular with the masses. According to the Quran, the first type of person is one who has become a believer in the light of knowledge; as opposed to this the other type of man is blind. The first knows truth and falsehood by his own realization, while the other is swayed only by hearsay. He considers that thing false which others consider false and he believes that thing to be true which others generally think of as true. The call for the Truth seeks out those who are able to take decisions using their wisdom. Such a call does not benefit those who are blind, in spite of having eyes.

God created man; He provided the best world for him to live in; at all times He looks after him. All these things bind a man with his Creator and Lord by a natural bond. This bond demands that man should not become arrogant but should accept the realities and bow down before God. Man’s life in this world is marked by different types of relationships and connections. It is a requirement of man’s subordination to God that he should develop relations with those liked by God and he should cut off relations as commanded by God. His realization of God’s Majesty should be so intense that he bows down before Him: a regular form of this obedience is prayer (salat). And he should give to others from his assets as God has given to him from His assets. If he is badly treated by somebody, he should for his part respond with good treatment in order that in the Hereafter God should overlook his evil side and treat him with Grace and Mercy. All this requires constant patience. It calls for the believer to hold out against the inducement of the self, to be steadfast in the face of loss of benefit, and to stand up to the pressure of his surroundings. For the sake of paradise the believer has to exercise patience in all such cases. Patience is the price of paradise. Nobody can attain eternal paradise without paying the price of patience.

Man is bound to God by the bond of nature and to his fellow beings by the bond of humanity. Breaking both bonds leads to creating mischief on God’s earth. Living a peaceful life on God’s earth means making his life subject to the above-mentioned bonds. In liberating himself from these bonds – caring nothing for the rights of God or men—he only creates mischief. Those who act thus incur the curse of God. Such as these will not share in the Grace of God. They have fouled God’s earth, so they deserve to be pushed into the foulest of places—Hell. In this world one receives less and another receives more. The one who receives more develops a superiority complex, while the one who receives less suffers from an inferiority complex. But, in the eyes of God, neither attitude is correct. The correct reaction is that if one receives more, he should become grateful to God; one who receives less, should strive to remain patient and be contented with what he has. Worldly-oriented people invariably ignore the preacher of Truth. The reason for this is that a worldly person recognizes only worldly glories. As the preacher is in possession of only sublime truths, he is not recognized and is ignored as an unimportant person. But, when the veil over reality is torn asunder, man will come to know at that time that the apparent glory which he considered everything, was absolutely valueless. The truly valuable thing was reality which, because it was unseen, could not claim his attention.

The reason for the rejection of the preacher of truth is generally that the people do not find any tangible glories around this person. But this amounts to being unsuccessful at the very point where a man has to prove successful. God wants man to recognize the truth in its absolute shape and to surrender himself to that truth. Now, one who insists that he will not accept the Truth without tangible feats will be fated in this world never to find the truth according to the law of God and he will always be deprived of God’s guidance. This world is a testing ground. Here man can find God at the level of remembrance; he cannot find God at the level of ‘observation’. Those who agree with this godly plan will find God and those who do not will be unsuccessful in finding Him, just as one who insists on seeing the sun with his naked eyes will be unsuccessful in doing so. In this world only that person succeeds who accepts God’s plan and who moulds his life according to it, because it is God who is the Creator of this world and not man.

Signs having been shown to those who asked for them, a final verdict should be pronounced upon them. Now, if at the instance of human beings, God did show any tangible signs and if, even after that, they did not accept Him, they would deserve immediate destruction. But God, ignoring human demands for tangible signs, goes on, in His special Grace and Mercy, conveying the Truth through His messengers in the language of advice and reasoning. In this way people have a longer period in which to reform themselves and become entitled to God’s Grace. In view of this, it is necessary for the missionary not to be disturbed by the foolish demands of his addressees. He himself should be agreeable to God’s plan and should continue to call upon them to accept it likewise.