God, Floods and the Pointless Sufferings of People - 2
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“Adversity causes some men to break, others to break records”
- William A. Ward
Benjamin Blech cites some interesting examples. Imagine, we are trying to explain the theorems of Math, or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to a five-year child. He will not understand a word. It would be all Greek to him. Are we not like that child in front of God while attempting to understand how His system works?
Or look at this example: once a woman’s cat got cancer in her leg and she took her to the vet doctor. He opened up the wound and filled it with some antibiotics. He also instructed the woman to repeat the process every week. Each time the woman opened up the wound, the cat cried in pain, and looked in utter bewilderment at the cruelty inflicted on her by the very person whose hand she often would lick. The suffering was senseless for the cat, but the woman knew it was good for her. Are we not like that cat in the story?
A rich woman riding in a limo with her child stops at a shopping center. The chauffeur steps out, opens the door carefully for the child, and gives him a helping hand to get out of the luxury car. The child comes out proudly. A passerby watching the whole scene, blurts out, “What a pity! The poor child is so handicapped that he can’t even come out of the car and walk”.
The mother chides the man. “Why should he walk when he has people like you to open the door for him”. Mother’s excessive love had been registering a negative and crippling effect on a budding child. Learning to walk without falling is not a good idea. Adversity has a tonic effect because it elicits talents which otherwise in better circumstances would have remained dormant, says Horace. God’s love has many facets. The worst scenario could be when God totally forgets a people or a nation.
Once my two grandsons, Adil and Haroon, slipped out in our Islamic Center, holding each other’s hand, and went across the road on a busy evening while we were busy in eating and talking. They escaped a terrible accident. My reaction was thus. I first thanked God. Then I held both of them firm and shook them well, I even remember spanking them both, and then I kissed them again, hugged them again, and shook them again. And as if that was not enough, I held their faces in my hand and lectured them on the rules of road safety. The two scared children looked at me in utter bewilderment, and perhaps wondered, “What on earth is wrong with grandpa today. He often takes us out every Sunday for fries and ice-cream. Why is he so mad, and perhaps so cruel. What have we done to earn all this”?
The wrong here was not with the children. It was with us. We needed to be vigilant and we were not. Perhaps we are just like these two grandsons of mine, who were unable to understand why I was so mad at them.
God also sometimes inflicts us with pain and sufferings, and we often fail to see any wisdom and sense in them. Perhaps a dose of adversity is often as needful as a dose of medicine, says John Maxwell so wisely. Pain and sufferings come, not as a punishment, but often as a call for correction for the aberrations that we commit. God wants us to rectify what is amiss and mend what is wrong.
Often our complacency, our corruption, our foul ways, begin to take firm roots. In good old days when I was a child, we often slept outside in the open on hot summer nights. The senior ones among us narrated their bragging tales to us and we listened to them with intent. People in Pakistan then were safe outside their homes, and they felt themselves safe everywhere. They were God-fearing as corruption then was deemed a big evil. People were so simple that like characters in the Shakespearean plays, they easily equated any natural disorder or disaster, or the occurrence of any evil act to the displeasure of God. A slight disorder in nature was thought of as a result of the commission of a grave sin. We know, the people of Madyan just short-measured, and adopted dishonest ways in business. And they got destroyed, “As if they had never dwelled and flourished there! How the Madyan were removed as were the Thamud removed”. Now we are safe from that kind of extinction through the courtesy of our Prophet, but God is vigilantly watchful. He now lets us run the show in this world. Those “punishments from God” on the previous nations were, in academic terms, just semester or bi-annual tests. The Final Test, is to take place only once.
Correction in Pakistan had been over-due. Its time has come now. Adversities can play out for us favorably, only we have to determine how?
Allah is very strict in matters of assessment and Judgment. Shafiat or recommendation may work, but the Qur’an is specific on this topic. “We have bound each human being’s destiny to his neck. On the Day of Resurrection, We shall bring out a record for each of them, which they will find spread wide open. “Read your record, today your own soul is enough to calculate your account. Whoever accepts guidance does so for his own good, whoever strays does so at his own peril. No soul will bear another’s burden, nor do We punish until we have sent a Messenger”. Al Asra 17:13-15.
The bells of corruption have been ringing loud and clear everywhere in Pakistan for some time. Religious and sectarian polarization has already put the very existence of the country at stake. Target killings, in thousands in a few months, are deemed hardly as a matter of concern. Stupid, hollow and ritualistic statements are thought of enough as a solution. Crude form of justice in the form of instant killings is becoming a norm; small girls under the age of 3 are getting gang raped by the custodians of law. It is thus not the wrath of God that is visiting us. It is man’s own acts that are rebounding on him. A person who steals is called a thief; a man who kills another person is labeled as a killer; a man who helps a helpless person is remembered as a helper. This is how the law of God works. It stands clearly defined in the Sharia of religion.
Some are even heard talking in a loud tone of a Turkey type revolution, or of a Cuban like change. Their ignorance about revolutions is abysmally poor. Of the 12 great revolutions of the world, 11 have failed. The only one that succeeded had been the American Revolution. But it also has had to pass through a civil war just about 75 years after its taking place. Yes, the time is ripe for a change in Pakistan. Democracy is a good system because it facilitates a quick process of accountability; it carries in its folds a scope for a change. Dictatorship or imperialism does not.
Get aside if you cannot deliver or perform. Why stay on the crease when you cannot score. Japan is experiencing two changes in its government in one year. South Korea is known for such changes. Democracy safeguards people against a long-term, inept, corrupt and incompetent government. Bangladesh went through that; Taiwan would not accept a leadership that is not world-class; Singapore believes in nothing else but meritocracy. India has learned to have leaders who can outshine the Nehru saga. Manmohan Singh is one such example. Pakistan’s social, economic and moral ailments come from its leadership, and not from God. For God’s sake, do not put your own failings on God. Floods and earthquakes are not a manifestation of God’s wrath, or a curse from Him. The real curse is the presence of a corrupt and inept leadership in the country. It was not God who ordained the people of Pakistan to vote in favor of leaders whose very academic credentials are fake. It was their own choice. Wrong choices have their consequences as well.
Dump the corrupt leadership the way Kamal Ata Turk dumped them. But where is the Pakistani Kamal Ata Turk? Defeated in World War I, Turkey would have disappeared from the map of the world. It was Mustafa Kamal who saved it from total annihilation. The Ulema, oblivious of the national aspirations and the changing order, fought over Sharia and over the head-gear as ferociously as they are now fighting for hijab.
Finally, Kamal Ata Turk’s patience gave away and he rose in the Grand Assembly, and spoke to them thus, “Sovereignty and Sultanate are not given to anyone by anyone because scholarship says so… if those who are present see the problem in its natural light, I believe they will agree. If not… only some heads will be cut off. As for the academic side of the matter, the learned gentlemen need be in no doubt or anxiety”. These learned gentlemen, the religious leaders and the members of the parliament, agreed instantly.
The Muslims of Turkey scarcely lifted a finger to preserve the Caliphate when Ata Turk abolished this institution in November, 1922, (It were the Indian Muslim leaders and Ulemas who felt its loss rather more acutely than the Turks themselves), but they, the Turk Muslims under Ulema guidance, fought like tigers to keep their traditional head-dress, says Dr. Afzal Iqbal in his book, “Contemporary Muslim World”, pg 435. “ Not a few hocas (Mullas) were hanged for preaching against the new law. With ruthless efficiency the new regime pressed on with the reforms…. By the time Mustafa Kamal died, in his fifty-seventh year, on 10 November 1938, Turkey was securely on its way to becoming a dynamic modern state. Kamal never for a moment swerved from his aim: Turkey was to become a Western state, a European state. His watch words were, “Peace at home and peace abroad” . Those who talk of Turkey like revolution in Pakistan, they must keep in mind that some heads that are rolling may need to be cut-off.
In Mystic terms, affliction and sufferings are like fire to gold. They offer you an opportunity to purge yourself of what is dross and base. Grief, as would say Rumi, cleans up the house of the heart. It shakes off the yellow leaves from the branch of the heart, so that new green leaves may grow there. The Greeks believed in Catharsis, a process in which our tears give vent to our inner pent up feelings, and we feel relieved after they have been shed. Affliction and sufferings, thus, bring maturity. The ginger tasting cider must pass through a pressing machine, and must ferment first; the nutshells need to be cracked first before one can reach their kernel; the soil needs to be furrowed with a sharp blade before a rich crop can be harvested. No higher development; no healthy change; no improvement in life can be accomplished without some temporal destruction, without pain and without some loss. The Prophet himself has said, “die before ye die”. The candle shines better when its wick is cut; man has to witness winter before he can hope to see the coming of the Spring. “ O, wind, If winter comes, can spring be far behind”. Shelley said so convincingly.
The people of Pakistan have now witnessed the worst of everything. Clouds have shed enough tears in Pakistan; blue skies must open up now. If nature has given them a lemon in the form of this flood disaster, let them not whine over its tangerine and sourly taste. Let them add a little sugar to it, and convert it into a lemonade. As the saying is, “Even if someone gives you a snake as a gift, let us learn to keep it for its beautiful skin”.
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