LEVELS OF BELIEF AND MONOTHEISM

 
By Ahmed Kamal Khusro

 
It is a basic fact of nature that faith and monotheism are closely linked. Faith and its close cousin belief, are what drive people. Belief in a brand makes people buy it repeatedly. Belief and trust in a friend makes us rely on him for help and support. This is belief in everyday matters.

When it comes to spiritual belief, it becomes more complex. If you have authentic foundation of belief, you do a thing not because of what people think about it or what immediate benefit you may gain, and not even for name and fame. You do it because it is the right thing to do, irrespective of the consequences.

So belief becomes deeper and assumes the form of faith—a bridge from the seen to the unseen. As a Muslim you act with faith although you have not seen Almighty Allah, or his prophets and angels and the underlying mystic laws that govern the universe. These acceptances of the text of divine laws that are ordained for man have a sub-text. The sub-text is that behaving in the right way is always a moral template that sets the tone for a person’s life. The corollary is that good will follow good and evil will follow evil. This is, in a way, spiritual determinism.

A person who believes in a certain thing and acts on that belief is more valuable in the sight of Almighty Allah than a person who sees everything with clarity at the time of death when angels come to cart him away and then says “I believe”. Now the time to act has passed from merely believing to actually seeing.

In Islamic terminology the process of faith passes through three stages: “ilm-ul-yaqeen”, “ain-ul-yaqeen” and lastly “haq-ul-yaqeen”. Ilm-ul-yaqeen is the knowledge that fire burns.  Ain-ul-yaqeen is when you see someone putting his finger in a fire and it burns. The last stage is haq-ul-yaqeen is when you yourself put your finger in the fire and feel it burn. Naturally, the last stage of faith is the strongest because it is grounded in personal experience.

As Muslims we are, at least the vast majority of us, living on the level of ilm-ul-yaqeen. This faith is neither strong enough to sustain us in adversity nor strong enough to support us in times of joy. We lose all faith when tragedy strikes, or when we suffer losses in business; we lose all hope in Almighty Allah, that either he has tested us or punished us for some wrongs that we have done. The right approach is to turn to Almighty Allah in sincere repentance and hope that he makes us strong enough to pick up the pieces and win again, what we have lost. In times of joy, we lose all thought of Almighty Allah’s help and his munificence and forget to offer thanksgiving, by word or deed, and so sometimes, sorrow enters our joy and spoils it.

This ilm-ul-yaqeen makes us complacent about all the good and bad that humankind faces which is explained clearly in religious canons—it becomes only hearsay. This does not enable us to convert our knowledge into action so the reasons for reward and punishment by Almighty Allah do not move us to act upon them and make it a lived reality. Acting, transgressing, and then correcting our moral templates enables the chosen few to reach the level of haq-ul-yaqeen.

Such persons were the sahaba (the companions of the prophet) whose duas were immediately answered as they had a direct spiritual connection with the Almighty. What is dua (supplication) actually? As someone has said, it is keeping away from all major and minor sins so when the time comes when every dua is answered.

Nowadays, libraries are filled with tafseer (exegesis) and ahadith books and every kind of explanation is offered on major and minor points of the tenets of Islam—but the imanic fervour and stick-to-itiveness is missing from our lives. We only talk about Islam but do not care to live Islam in the true sense. In the times of the sahaba, books were rare, but their hearts were attuned to Islam and they exemplified the true spirit of Islam that made them change the rules of the game.

Now coming back to our earlier comment that man was created to live monotheistically. We realise that as a householder, a husband is the one who sets the rules of the game in the house. If there is compatibility and obedience on the part of the wife and the children, then there is order and harmony in the house. If the son grows up, starts earning, he begins to share in the decisions of the family while the overall authority vests with the paterfamilias.

When the son disregards his father’s wishes and the wife also take decisions on her own, and the working daughter-in-law also plays by her own rules, then there is chaos in the house. This is because the unity of purpose that binds a household, and makes it a home, is missing.

Similarly, if in a company there are three masters, the employees will be at a loss to understand what to do. One will say, ‘do this’, another will say ‘do that’, and the third will say something else. In this way the company will flounder. Everyone knows this.

Many families, especially nuclear families, are failing nowadays because more women are becoming financially independent; so there is no incentive for them to subserve the family’s inherent unity of purpose in upbringing of children and maintaining a balance. Each one is tugging in a different direction with no one willing to give in and compromise in the interest of unity and harmony.

On the business level, the centripetal force has to be strong enough to hold the organisation together and lead it forward through commonly understood and shared goals.

When this monotheistic model is accepted in the running of a modern business company, why should it be discounted and disapproved, at the personal and spiritual level? This is especially so when man has been fashioned by nature in such a way, that monotheism is the most appropriate and suitable way for him, as man has been created to bow and obey only Almighty Allah and not anyone else. In the name of false traditions and the wrong way of the ancestors, one cannot fly against the force of nature.

Subservience to one God mimics the universal laws of nature, the symmetry of the universe, the diurnal  motion of the sun and the earth, the division of night and day and the alternating pattern of the seasons that follow the Creator’s plan. There is an immense co-ordination and symmetry in the universe that point to one Creator. If there had been more than one Creator the universe would have fallen into disarray.

In choosing to follow several masters, the most pernicious of them being the self, man has turned away from his nature and the in-built unity of the universe. He goes here and there, willy-nilly without following the straight path--that would lead him to success in this world and the next—through strict monotheism.

These false powers are mirages in the desert with no hope for the traveler for dependable sustenance. So is it not a folly to accept a central authority in our business and organisational models, but ignore it in the personal and religious spheres?

۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸۸