An-Nisa 4:32–60

Disparity, i.e. the difference between individuals in this world, is in accordance with God’s creation plan. Some are physically and mentally less endowed than others; some are born in favourable and some in unfavourable conditions; some have powerful resources and some barely exist with just minimal resources. The latter become jealous of the former, finding them in a superior position. This situation leads to envy, enmity and conflict in social life. But it is totally wrong to make an assessment of oneself or of others judging solely by externals, as these are of importance only in this world. One receives them only to leave them behind. The issues of real importance, i.e. success and achievement in the Hereafter, have nothing to do with worldly possessions. Success in the Hereafter depends rather on those actions which have been performed in this world with the sole intention of seeking God’s pleasure. It is, therefore, most wise to insulate oneself from envy, and to pray to God for strength, and to continue to direct one’s efforts towards success in the Hereafter. Wherever a group of people live together, whether as a family or as a country, it is necessary to have a leader to take charge. Authority will undisputedly rest in one single person. According to God’s plan for this world, man has been chosen to become the head of the family and has been endowed with the inborn abilities needed to discharge this responsibility. The biological and physiological differences between man and woman are in conformity with God’s creation plan. If there are some who wish to go against God’s plan, they will only cause perversion and discord. For, nature will continue to go ahead creating men and women according to the divine scheme of things, whereby men will be endowed with the qualities needed as protectors and guardians and women will have the quality of submission to be able to assist them without prejudice to the faculties that nature has endowed them with. But, if men and women are given opposite and conflicting roles to perform in social activities, the result will be nothing but perversion in social life.

A good woman is one who, conducting herself according to God’s plan, accepts the role of man as leader. Similarly, a good man is one who, discharging his role, does not forget that God is always watching him. The divine court of judgement does not differentiate between man and woman. The gender-based difference is meant only to ensure the effective management of worldly life and bears no relation to the requital and rewards of the Hereafter. Man should try to discharge all his responsibilities towards woman, and if there is such a woman who does not recognize the administrative capacity of the man, it must not lead to a revengeful attitude in the man, nor should he start maligning her with allegations. However, under specific circumstances, if the man finds her guilty of immoral conduct, he should try to reform her. The process of this reform has to start with counselling, then if need be, he may cease to talk to and relate with her and lastly, he may reprove her with light punishment. When two persons have differences between them, their minds become prejudiced. They do not think about each other objectively. In such a situation, the best way of resolving the matter is to bring in an arbiter who is not involved with the issue personally, and who will be able to think without bias and reach a decision based on the facts of the case.

Literally ‘what your right hands possess’.

Whatever man possesses is provided by God. This reality demands that man should surrender himself to God and become His worshipper. Such a person naturally becomes humble and his humility is expressed in his relations with the other human beings interacting in his life. He behaves decently with his mother and father and feels the watchful presence of God while dealing with all those who come into contact with him. He pays everybody’s due in accordance with his relationship and need. To overlook a person, in whatever capacity he has to deal with him, appears to him as if he himself is taking the risk of being overlooked by God. One who does not surrender to God, develops an overweening sense of pride. He thinks that whatever he possesses is the outcome of his labour and intelligence. Consequently, he considers that his earnings belong to him alone. To become associated with poor relatives and destitutes becomes a matter of degradation for him. He spends lavishly to satisfy his desires and serves his own interests, but becomes mean about such expenditure as does not satisfy his ego. He is very generous in matters which give him publicity, but quite a miser in the case of unpublicized religious causes.

Those who become proud instead of humble after receiving the bounties of God and those who spend their God-given wealth on making selfish investments instead of on good causes as approved by God, are fellow travellers of Satan. Having been lured by the fleeting gains of this life, they lose interest in the eternal gain promised by God. For such persons, there shall be nothing but severe punishment in the Hereafter. Man declares unimportant that which he does not practice. This is self-centred theorizing and an effort at self-justification. All such endeavours are futile and worthless in the eyes of God.

A dayee or a messenger of Truth happens to be just an ordinary person at the start of his mission. He is not surrounded by any pomp and show. That is why he is rejected by the prominent leaders and intellectuals of society: they fail to apprehend that a man devoid of any outward splendour could be so important that God might choose him to communicate His message to mankind. But when Doomsday approaches and the divine court is ready to deliver its verdict, they will be bewildered to see that that very ordinary man, whom they had rejected as being of no value, has been given the honour of becoming God’s witness and has been set above the nations. In that court the rejecters will stand in the enclosure of the accused, while that ordinary man rejected by them will occupy the seat of God’s spokesman. It will be such a terrible and hard moment for the defaulters that they will wish that the earth would rend itself asunder and swallow them up. But their repentance and sense of humiliation will not at that point serve any purpose. The whole record of their speech, actions and thoughts will be with God and they will be told that their rejection of truth was not due to ignorance but pride, that they considered themselves superior to the preacher of truth, and that the acceptance of reality, despite its having been laid before them, appeared to them like setting their own greatness at naught.

This verse appears here to underline the initial prohibition of intoxicants or wine, but it also reveals an important reality about prayer. Prayer does not mean the mere repetition of certain words and motions with accuracy; it must also reflect the concentration of the mind. The individual must say his prayers sincerely. When he is submitting himself to God with his utterances and his body, his mind and intention should also be in submission to Him. Along with his physical obeisance, his consciousness should inhere in his prayer. Islamic law has granted exceptional relaxations under exceptional conditions. Sickness, travelling and non-availability of water—these are three exceptional conditions for man. It has, therefore, been permitted that, if there is any risk to health, one may perform dry ablution (tayammum). The purpose of ablution is to create the spirit of purity: Tayammum is a way of maintaining that spirit when the usual ablution is not possible.

They took the words of their divine Book and recited them to solicit blessings without trying to understand their meaning or applying them to their lives.

The book of God is given to a community so that it may rectify the thinking and conduct of its people. But when the bearers of the Divine Book, like the Jews, suffer from decline, they begin to take misguidance in place of guidance from it. The commands of God become the subject of futile hair-splitting discussions; concocted philosophies are produced in the name of theology, and wrongdoers alter the divine book to justify the religious validity of their actions. They detach the words of God from their context and interpret them on the basis of their own assumptions. The Jews having received a portion of the Book means that they were able to read the words of the Book, but could not mould their actions according to those words, thereby defeating the real purpose of the Scriptures. They remained the bearers of the Book so far as its words were concerned, but in the matter of practice they adopted the ways of other worldly communities. Moreover, while the others practised worldliness in the name of worldliness, the Jews adopted the same worldly ways but had the audacity to try to justify their practices by misquoting the Divine Book.

The Jews were thought to be the representatives of the religion of God. Hence, when non-Jewish Arabs started supporting the Prophet, the Jews became his opponents to save the facade of their religiousness. In this way their being misguided did not remain confined to themselves and they began to raise controversies about the life and teachings of the Prophet. This was to confuse people and to prove that he was not the Messenger of God but a self-proclaimed proponent of religion working towards fulfilling his ambition of becoming a leader. God is, however, not indifferent in this matter: He will surely side with the faithful and make them successful against misguided opponents. Accursedness is, in fact, the extreme form of man’s insensibility. When he becomes too insensitive to distinguish between right and wrong, this has been called the state of being accursed. An individual often hears something without its registering upon him. This happens at a time when he is not serious about heeding the divine message. As this attitude becomes more established, the person becomes irresponsive, as if the features of his face had been obliterated and he is seeing and listening with the back of his head where there are neither eyes nor ears. Such blindness and deafness to the truth and reality indicate that God has deprived that person of His blessings due to his constant negligence of truth and reality. God had provided him with ears, but he could not listen; God had given him eyes, but he failed to observe. God, therefore, made him exactly the same as what the individual had actually turned himself into. This extreme stage of insensitivity takes the form of ‘maskh’, that is, a metamorphosis from a superior state to an extremely inferior state; man, the most superior form of creature, is degraded to the level of the beasts.

The Jews, thinking that they belonged to the race of prophets, projected their community as a sacred one. In consequence, they laid claim to honour and privilege which they justified by the invention of numerous stories and parables. By their own lights, everyone who was Jewish by faith was destined for deliverance and would not be consigned to the fire of Hell. Clearly, their lives were dominated by wishful thinking. The Quranic statement that ‘it is indeed God who purifies whoever He pleases’ rejects such notion that ‘those who consider themselves pure’ are actually and necessarily so. It clarifies that no one may have honour and privilege on the basis of his links with a race or community; these things depend on the divine law of justice. One who, adhering to the divine law, proves himself deserving of honour, will have honour confered upon him, but one who, by his actions, fails to do so, will never be honoured—no matter which race or community he belongs to. The belief in community-based salvation, whether created by the Jews or any other group, is totally without foundation. To invent such a belief and associate it with God is an attempt to associate falsehood with Him. He has never imparted such teaching. God does not discriminate between people on the basis of group, community or race. Such discrimination is a great injustice, whereas God dispenses absolute justice: He does not deal unjustly with anyone. When decadence sets in among the People of the Book, its adherents begin to live a life of wishful thinking instead of following the commands of God. This leads to superstition gaining ground. What can be achieved only through the performance of good deeds, they attempt to gain through sorcery, false beliefs and communion with evil spirits. Such deviators consider religion as a matter of ‘sacred words’ and ‘special relations with saintly personages,’ which may bring miraculous results merely by pronouncing those words or practising the relevant rituals. They continue to pay lip service to religion, but in practice, they follow the path of Satan.

In real life, the hypocrites tread the path of selfish desires and give in to satanic inducements, but outwardly, bearing the label of religion, they think that their actions are truly guided by God’s religion. In such an atmosphere, whenever the pure Truth is presented to them, they become its bitterest opponents. They feel that their religious status is being negated by that call. On the other hand, the existence of non-believers around them poses no such challenge and, therefore, their attitude towards them remains lax. But the preacher of truth cannot expect any leniency from them, for they become infuriated with jealousy over someone else having been granted religious representation, when they alone had formerly had a monopoly of religion. They quite forget that God chooses the representatives of His religion on the basis of purity of soul, inner piety and a sound heart, and not because of any outward show of piety. Being accursed is to be deprived of the grace and succour of God. Just as starvation and thirst wreck one’s physical existence, similarly deprivation of God’s grace and succour wrecks one’s spiritual existence. A cursed person becomes so insensitive that he loses the ability to distinguish between truth and untruth. He fails to recognize and accept explicit signs and cannot differentiate between absurd argumentation and logical argument.

Every responsibility is a trust which must be properly discharged. Our dealings with everyone should be just and fair, no matter whether they be friend or foe. Even if the way of trustworthiness and justice appears to run counter to one’s interests and worldly considerations, one has to adhere to the path of justice and truth. Our gain lies in following not the dictates of the self, but the directives of God. If there are opportunities of forming the government, the Muslims must establish a proper Islamic government, but if such opportunities do not exist, they should concentrate on leading a religious life under the guidance of reliable persons selected from among themselves. Any differences between them should be resolved in the light of instructions given by God and the Prophet. Everyone does have the right to differ, but no one is permitted to defy a collective decision. Societal order and system are the primary needs of Muslim society.