Praise belongs to God, and blessings and peace be upon our master, the Messenger of God.
To proceed: alongside disputes over the concepts of community, state and homeland, Muslims were confronted by various forms of political thought and their applications in government and administration. Many became fascinated with them, to the point that Islamists began searching for parallels, models and events in which these systems intersected with Islam. Some even attributed them to Islam or Islam to them, describing it in turn as democratic, socialist or the first advocate of individual freedom and women’s liberation. Islam has nothing to do with all this. Many naive people imagined that this invented relationship would endear Islam to a generation captivated by imported systems, surrounded by extensive, energetic propaganda portraying them as the solution to people’s grievances. Under them, it was said, life would improve, injustice, poverty, illness and deprivation would disappear, and people would live happily without distress.
Injustice, poverty, illness and deprivation are afflictions people sometimes face under any system, because they are among God’s laws governing His creation. Through them He tests, refines and purifies people. Believers experience, endure and resist them while accepting the decree of the All-Knowing, All-Wise God and acknowledging the inadequacy of their own knowledge and judgement beside His knowledge and wisdom. They suffer without their souls being thrown into turmoil and without the psychological conflict experienced by those affected by propaganda that urges rebellion against such conditions while promising an illusory happy paradise free of them under one system or another.
Most of those deceived by this propaganda are young people with innocent hearts, fertile imaginations and idealistic aspirations, or an inclination towards the desires of youth. They are enchanted by its idealised pictures because their imagination is stronger than their reason and their limitless hopes exceed their experience and practical knowledge; or because youthful impetuosity and overwhelming desire dominate their behaviour more than patience and reflection on consequences. In their ambition, imagination, expansive hopes and appetite for desire, they may not care whether the systems captivating them accord with Islam or oppose it. Either way, they regard them as correct and desirable.
They may try to escape the crisis caused by this inner division by attributing these systems to Islam, or telling themselves that Islam seeks only people’s good and welfare and therefore cannot conflict with any system aiming to make them happy.
This confusion arises because people, particularly the young, do not know, forget or pretend to forget that their knowledge is limited and therefore so is their perception of good and evil. Knowledge of good and evil, benefit and harm, requires complete understanding of things’ realities beyond the limits of time and place, their first cause and ultimate end.
Human knowledge is confined by time and place. Even within those limits, it is restricted to what is available and not hidden in the unseen, which neither the senses perceive nor thought can reach. People are also barred from knowing the first cause and final end, except through conjecture that cannot replace truth.
How can someone so limited in ability and perception justify opposing God’s will as revealed to His messengers, blessings and peace be upon them, and the boundaries He established to distinguish good from evil, benefit from harm and lawful from forbidden, on the grounds that they do not know the reality or perceive the benefit and harm involved?
Among the finest examples is the story in Surat al-Kahf of Moses and the righteous servant. [1]
The righteous servant damaged the boat, and Moses objected because, outwardly and within the knowledge available to any human being, the act was pure evil containing no good. It was not so, however, to someone to whom God had revealed the boat owners’ past and true circumstances: they were poor people working at sea, relying on the boat for their livelihood and unable to buy another.
Nor was it so to someone shown what would happen: they would encounter a tyrannical king who seized every boat by force, and damaging it would make it defective so the king would leave it to its owners. The assessment is then reversed, and good appears in what outwardly seemed pure evil.
The righteous servant killed a boy without any apparent cause, and Moses condemned the act because he did not know what the righteous servant knew: the boy’s parents were believers. Nor did he know the future of the boy and his parents: that the boy would burden them with transgression and unbelief, and that God would replace him with someone purer and more tender in affection.
Moses and the righteous servant became hungry in a town whose people refused them hospitality. Yet the righteous servant rebuilt a wall on the verge of collapse. Within the knowledge available to an observer, this looked like kindness bestowed in the wrong place: the unjust townspeople did not deserve it, and he should have taken payment. The kindness then appeared properly placed when he disclosed what God had taught him of the hidden circumstances. The wall belonged to two orphan boys in the town and covered a treasure that would be exposed and plundered if it fell. The hidden past was that their parents had been righteous servants, and the hidden future was that the boys would retrieve their treasure when they reached maturity.
Some things may appear entirely evil, leaving no place for good, while God knows that they contain good hidden from creatures and that the flourishing of the world depends upon them. Thus God says: “Fighting has been prescribed for you, though you dislike it. You may dislike something that is good for you, and love something that is bad for you.” [al-Baqarah: 216.] The reason for this ignorance of good and evil appears at the verse’s end: “God knows, and you do not know.” God knows, while people do not, that the world’s flourishing lies in the competition arising from His checking people by means of others: “Were God not to check some people by means of others, the earth would be corrupted. But God is gracious to all the worlds.” [al-Baqarah: 251.]
The good hidden from people need not be immediate or show its effects in this worldly life.
Nor is good confined to food filling bellies, clothing adorning bodies or pleasure engulfing the senses. Good may not be immediate or connected with our perishing bodies.
Islam works for the entirety of existence:
Its smallest and least significant part is earthly, worldly existence and the needs of bodies connected with it.
Its most lasting part is what accompanies a person into their extended existence, which our knowledge cannot encompass and our imagination cannot reach.
If the objectives of politics and economics are satisfying desires “for women, children, heaped-up treasures of gold and silver, fine horses, livestock and cultivated land” [Al ‘Imran: 14], Islam’s objective is God’s pleasure.
If people’s ambitions are confined to satisfying the soul’s desires, Islam aims to purify and refine the soul by requiring the striving it dislikes in peace and war and removing it from its preference for ease and idleness. It thereby leaves its narrow, self-enclosed prison for a broader, more expansive world oriented towards God.
Moreover, everything earthly political programmes seek falls short even of their immediate objective of making people happy in this world. Happiness is an inward condition in which the soul rests and feels comfort, reassurance and tranquillity, untroubled by deprivation of what it lacks.
Religion is better able to lead the soul to this goal than all the policies of politicians and philosophers. God has nevertheless placed acquisitiveness and avarice in His creatures so that worldly life is developed and ordered, people check one another and He tests some through others. Only a small elite escapes this after long, arduous struggle.
Source: Azmat al-‘Asr, by Dr Muhammad Muhammad Husayn, may God have mercy on him, Dar ‘Ukaz, Riyadh, 1399 AH/1979, pp. 63–66.
[1] This was al-Khidr, peace be upon him. Scholars differed over whether he was a prophet or a righteous servant. The sound, established view held by the majority is that he was a prophet receiving revelation. This is supported by God’s description: “They found a servant of Ours to whom We had granted mercy from Us and whom We had taught knowledge from Our presence.” (65) [al-Kahf: 65.] Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 852 AH), in Al-Zahr al-Nadr fi Hal al-Khidr, p. 66, quotes al-Tha‘labi: “He is a prophet according to all the opinions.” Ibn Hajar, may God have mercy on him, then said: “Some leading scholars used to say: the first knot of heresy to be undone is believing al-Khidr was a prophet, because heretics use the claim that he was not a prophet to argue that a saint is superior to a prophet.” (The centre’s comment.)