WRONG CRITERION

Leading Man Astray

The Prophet of Islam is said to have remarked that in this world there are only few rights of a person—a house to live in, a piece of cloth to cover his body, a loaf of bread and water. (Tirmidhi)

FROM this Hadith of the Prophet we learn what the criterion  for determining the necessities of life.  It tells us what things we need, to live adequately. If we do not abide by this standard, and instead, think that in order to live, we need, for instance, a palace, we won’t ever be satisfied with a small but adequate house. We will be obsessed with acquiring a palace, driven by the belief that as long as we don’t have a palace we are homeless.

The same applies to entire communities, in just the same way as it does to individuals. If on its own a community starts imagining that for its communal life it is absolutely essential for it to wield political power, it will never be satisfied with anything but a status of political dominance. Even if by remaining without political dominance the community can access and enjoy many facilities, members of the community will continue to be resentful because of the lack of the dominance that they hanker after, and which they feel they are deprived of. For the sake of achieving this self-created criterion of theirs they may take to violence, even if the result of this would be nothing but a further exacerbation of their own destruction.

Muslims today are, generally speaking, victims of precisely this wrong sense of deprivation. This is despite the fact that today they can easily access and enjoy many facilities and opportunities, for which they should have been grateful to God. The only cause of the condition in which they find themselves is that they have formed, on their own, a wrong standard of Islam. According to this self-styled criterion, they imagine that Islam will live if Muslims acquire political dominance, but that otherwise it will not live. In this mistaken zeal of theirs they have gone to such an extent that today there are more than 50 countries where Muslims enjoy political dominance but still they do not perceive this obvious reality and continue with their negative activities.

Justness
Objectivity requires a person
'not to deviate' from the path of justice,
even when it concerns one's opponent.