THE WORD OF GOD
From The Scriptures
THE Quran is the book of God. It has been preserved in its entirety since its revelation to the Prophet of Islam between 610 and 632 A.D. It is a book that brings glad tidings to mankind, along with divine admonition, and stresses the importance of man’s discovery of the Truth on a spiritual and intellectual level.
Translated from Arabic and commentary
by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
He created you from a single soul, then produced its spouse from it, and He has provided for you eight heads of cattle in pairs. He creates you stage by stage in your mothers’ wombs in a threefold darkness. Such is God, your Lord. Sovereignty is His. There is no god but Him. So what has made you turn away? (39: 6)
God made man and created woman as his mate. Through the first man and woman a generation of human beings came into existence. God also made extensive provision to fulfil their needs. In the early days of civilisation, sheep, goat, camel and cow (a couple from each totalling to eight) catered to economic and social requirements of man. As civilisation entered the next stage, man harnessed nature’s potential for his progress.
The ‘three fold darkness’ refers to the three membranes, that enclose the foetus inside mother’s womb. It was impossible for a man to give such precise description lest it were revealed to him by the Creator Himself.
If you are ungrateful, remember that God has no need of you. He is not pleased by ingratitude in His servants; if you are grateful, He is pleased [to see] it in you. No soul shall bear another’s burden. You will return to your Lord in the end and He will declare what you have done: He knows well what is in the hearts of men. (39: 7)
To accept God and be grateful to Him is sought by the soul of man. Such an acknowledgement amounts to admission of the Truth, which is the demand of rationality.
In the Hereafter, a state of perfect justice shall prevail. Every man will receive the outcome commensurate to his deeds (in the predeath period). The Hereafter will remove the shortcoming of the present world.
When man suffers some affliction, he prays to his Lord and turns to Him in penitence, but once granted a favour, he forgets the One he had been praying to and sets up rivals to God, to make others stray from His path.
Say, ‘Enjoy your unbelief for a little while: you will be one of the inmates of the Fire.’ Is he who prays devoutly to God in the hours of the night, prostrating himself and standing in prayer, who is ever mindful of the life to come and hopes for the mercy of his Lord [like one who does not]? Say, ‘Are those who know equal to those who do not know?’ Truly, only those endowed with understanding will take heed. (39: 8-9)
Every man passes through times when he finds himself utterly helpless. At this juncture, he forgets everything and starts appealing to God. In times of helplessness, every man comes to know that there is nobody worth worshipping except the one and only God.
But, as soon as he is out of trouble, he resorts to his earlier ways. Man only becomes more arrogant and starts attributing his relief from affliction to beings other than God. For some it becomes the miracle of cause and effect, while for others it is a feat of supposed gods. If a man keeps quiet after making a mistake, it involves the misguidance of only one man. But, if he starts giving false explanations in order to justify his mistakes, he becomes one who misleads others.
There are two types of people: Those who make material interest their supreme concern; the other make God their supreme concern. It is this second type of individual who is a man of God. His realisation of God is his conscious discovery. He discovers God as the most Majestic and Supreme Being, so much that all his hopes and all his fears are linked to that one and only Being. His restlessness keeps him out of bed at night. His loneliness is not the loneliness born out of unawareness, but the loneliness of the remembrance of God.
A man of knowledge is one whose mind is ignited by the remembrance of God, and that man is devoid of knowledge whose mind is ignited only by material factors. He is awakened only by material shocks and thereafter is lost, deep in slumber.
Say, ‘[God says] O My servants who have believed, fear your Lord. For those who do good in this world will have a good reward—and God’s earth is spacious. Truly, those who persevere patiently will be requited without measure.’ (39: 10)
When a man attains deep realisation of God, the essential result is that he becomes God-fearing. The realisation of the majesty of God makes him humble and he spends his life following the commandments of God. This makes him renounce everything and lead a God-oriented life.
To build one’s life on the basis of faith involves a tremendous trial. They succeed in this trial for whom faith is the greatest wealth, for the sake of which they are prepared to forego everything else. A life of faith is a life of patience. Those who are prepared to become believers at the price of patience will be the blessed ones with the superior grace of God.
