DAWN - Opinion; November 25, 2005
Not quite God’s wrath
The rationalists believe that natural phenomena, like the present devastating earthquake in the Himalayan region of Pakistan and Kashmir, or Hurricane Katrina in the US are products of natural causes and nothing more. This is the Aristotelian “causationism” — the principle of universal causation, or the cause-effect relationship.
Viewed from this purely scientific angle, both the killer earthquake that swallowed men and material assets in Pakistan and Katrina that killed and maimed a large number of Afro-Americans were merely manifestations of our planet’s geological upheavals and atmospheric disturbances and no more. They were not necessarily the Almighty’s wrath or even His warning and admonition.
But, as Muslims, we can only partially, subscribe to this view. Not entirely, as the above excerpt from the Holy Book implies that landslides, earthquakes and cyclones are some of the ways in which God would have administered His warnings to the infidels of Makkah who did not respond favourably to the preachings of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and also the ways in which others before them had suffered divine wrath.
As Muslims, we cannot even think, let alone believe, that God cannot cause an earthquake, or a cyclone, whenever and wherever He wills. He is the sole Creator of the universe and, therefore, the one who has laid down the laws of nature — in Quranic terms Sunnatullah meaning ways of God that “can neither be changed nor evaded” (35: 43). The real meaning is that these laws cannot be substituted by other laws nor amended and nullified by any power beyond God Himself. Nothing can stand in the way if God Himself substitutes or suspends these laws temporarily, if felt necessary by Him.
The Red Sea waves drowned the Pharoah and his troops as they should have done according to the normal nature of sea waves, but the same waves gave a safe passage to Prophet Moses and the Israelites accompanying him because God willed it so. Jesus Christ brought to life a dead person because God held in abeyance the usual rule that once dead the person could not be brought back to life until the day of resurrection for reckoning and accountability before God. These are the instances from the Old and New Testaments of suspension of natural laws. These have been corroborated by the Quran.
It should be noted that these are the instances of things happening miraculously defying the normal course, whereas tremors and earthquakes happen normally and have happened in Pakistan and elsewhere in the world many times before. There are detailed records of the havoc and casualties they have caused wherever and whenever they occurred. Similarly, cyclones like Katrina have visited the American Gulf coast and elsewhere many times before.
Thus, natural disasters are not comparable at all to miraculous happenings that do not lend themselves to rational or scientific explanation. Natural disasters are of a recurrent nature and they are explainable scientifically; yet they are being treated by the clerics and the pseudo-priestly class as God’s vengeance on the “sinners” living in areas destroyed by the earthquake in the NWFP and Kashmir, as if “sinners” lived only in these areas of the Islamic Republic.
The theory of God’s scourge, or divine punishment, has stemmed from, firstly, ignorance of scientific reasons that cause earthquakes, and secondly, from the apparent similarity of this earthquake in respect of its nature and resultant destruction with the events of doom and devastation as associated with the punishments inflicted by God on the people of ancient prophets — Hazrat Nuh, Lut, Hud, Shoaib and Saleh, whose accounts have been given in the Quran in various chapters.
However, the clerics, conveniently forget that the Quran narrates at length how all these prophets got fed up with their people who lived in small population centres in those early days when such centres were few and far between and the number of inhabitants too was quite small, and, how, in utter disgust, they prayed earnestly and repeatedly to God to send the scourge and destroy the hearths and homes of those confirmed sinners and wrongdoers. In other words, the prophets invoked divine wrath and prayed for disastrous earthquakes, floods, or cyclones to wipe off the sinners and their abodes, when they realized that their warnings had fallen on deaf ears.
Hazrat Nuh (Biblical Noah), who was sent “to warn his people before the painful doom came unto them.” (opening verse of Surah Nuh) prayed for complete destruction of the places and population of Asia Minor (a portion of the present Middle East) where, in pre-historic times, he preached monotheism and other tenets of religion relevant for those times. His entreaties to the Almighty, as recorded in the Quran, are worth reading.
“My Lord! Leave not any one of the unbelievers in the land. If you leave them they will mislead others and beget none but lewd ungrateful souls. Forgive me and my parents and those believing men and women who enter my house” (71: 26-28).
The prayer was granted and the deluge came only after Hazrat Nuh and his family (except his delinquent son) and all the believing men and women had settled in the safety of the ark built specially for the flood under instructions given through “inspiration”. Similarly, all other prophets, who have been named above and who had invoked the Almighty’s wrath to destroy the habitat of their people who were declared beyond reform, had migrated with their family and followers to safer places before God’s punishment befell the evil folk.
The Quran, while addressing the infidels of Makkah, enunciates this very divine principle of saving the prophets and their followers before inflicting the punishment: “Do they (Makkan infidels) expect the like of the days that came in previous times before them. Till then We will save the prophets and the believers in like manner (as of old). It is incumbent upon us to save the believers” (10: 102-103).
Thus, the divine punishment (Azab-e-Ilahi) that befell the evil doers of the old days of which the clerics speak at this time was actually in the nature of miracles in fulfilment of the prayers of the prophets. They were not natural phenomena and have nothing in common with the present earthquake except in its destructive aspect. In the present case, no prophet prayed for the doom to befall the people, no warnings were given and no safe passage was provided before the earth trembled so violently as to kill men, women and children without discrimination.
God is quite capable of sending punishments from the blue without giving any warning. But, being “Kind and Merciful”, He has not done so. He has declared, through the Quran, that He will do so only when doomsday Qiamat comes.
When Qiamat comes it will certainly have that element of complete surprise. The Quran says: “They (the unbelievers) say “when will this promise (of doomsday) be fulfilled, if it is true? They don’t know that they are waiting to hear just one shrill shout which will take them by surprise while they will be disputing about worldly affairs.” (Yasin: 48-49).
Doomsday will mean the end of this world, nay, the solar system as the sun, the moon and other planets will also disintegrate. Therefore, prior warning to let the good folk escape and sinners suffer will be meaningless as neither good nor bad folk will remain alive and all will perish.
To close this discussion and to let those people reflect who might still think that natural calamities happening in today’s world (for reasons that are known and well-defined but over which human ingenuity has so far not been able to exercise any control) were and are divine punishments, attention is drawn to the following excerpt from the divinely-revealed text preserved in the Quran. It is based on plain truth and not on dogma, and appeals to everyone’s mind - that of a believer or a non-believer:
“If Allah were to take mankind to task by that which they deserve, He would not leave a living creature on the surface of the earth; but He gives a reprieve up to an appointed time” (35-45).
Since this Quranic pronouncement, made 14 centuries ago there have been and, unfortunately, will be natural disasters in accordance with natural causes, but no scourge of God, taking people by surprise and killing and destroying without discrimination. There is respite till doomsday which will wrap up the universe and when all of us will die without exception, to be resurrected for eternal existence in new environs — comfortable, or painful — depending upon how one fared in one’s mortal life.
Iraq and lessons of history
WHEN Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, no one could have imagined that two years later, a triumphant United States would be thinking that the attack on Iraq could have been a mistake. When President Bush announced on May 1, 2003, that the war had practically been won, none of his countrymen could have imagined that two years later, he would be troubled by the continuing conflict in Iraq.
Today, the most powerful country in the world is caught between the devil and the deep sea. Saner elements in the US administration are wondering whether it is time to get out of Iraq. How true is the cliche that history repeats itself for those who do not learn its lessons.
Politicians and rulers the world over belong to the only class of people who refuse to learn from history even when its lessons are clearly written on the wall. People in most other professions learn from past mistakes.
If scientists, for instance, had refused to learn from their mistakes and experiments, the world would still be as backward as it was hundreds of years ago. We may have been convinced even today that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around it.
Bohr’s model of the atom still hangs in the Cavendish Laboratory of the Physics Department of Cambridge University in England. He “discovered” that the atom consists entirely of a bunch of neutrons and protons, firmly stuck together.
Hardly a few years had passed when one of his students discovered that the most interesting and useful part of the atom is the “waves” of electrons revolving around the nucleus. Had physicists not learned from their experiments and discovered the amazing powers of the electron, which is the basis of electricity as well as the computer, the modern age of communication and information technology would not have dawned.
Politicians, too, conduct experiments, but they never learn from their results. Alexander wanted to conquer the whole world.
Indeed, he did conquer most of the known world of his times, but died of a mosquito bite at a young age. Those were different times. Alexander was given the title of “great” for his adventures that killed thousands of innocent people. No one learned from his experiment: that all the suffering and misery caused by him was for nothing. All the countries conquered by him were soon free and independent of Alexander and his successors.
Hitler was a clever politician. He mesmerized his countrymen and manouevred to become a dictator after getting narrowly elected, and even managed to fool the intelligent rulers of all the great European powers for several years, yet he failed to learn from Alexander. He ignored history’s lessons.
The Second World War was fought because politicians and leaders paid no heed to the lessons of the First World War. For half a century after the Second World War, people thought leaders of powerful countries had finally learned their lessons and were shunning war. They were wrong. Within two years of the fall of the Soviet Union, America attacked Iraq.
The absence of a big war from 1945 to 1991 was not because some lessons had been learnt. It was only because a cold proxy war was raging between the two superpowers.
Today, US leaders are once again refusing to learn from the country’s traumatic experiment in Vietnam, although the wounds of that war are still fresh. The anguish of both Vietnamese and US war veterans and their families haunt the conscience of the US to this day. It is surprising that rulers of that country are not even willing to learn from the unexpected defeat of the Soviet Union only a few years ago.
Perhaps intelligent political leaders and military strategists believe that the Soviets were defeated because of their own mistakes, or because they were not strong enough. That is exactly how history tricks us. We attribute its results to others’ follies, naively believing that we are too intelligent or powerful to commit the same mistakes.
The fact is that the Soviet Union refused to learn from Vietnam. When its tanks roared into Afghanistan, Soviet leaders explained to each other the great differences between their actions and those of the Americans in Vietnam. They were confident that owing to the contiguous border and other reasons they would not be subjected to the hazards faced by the Americans in Vietnam. They had fallen into the trap of history.
When the Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, they thought that they would not repeat the Soviet Union’s mistakes, and where Vietnam was concerned, they deemed themselves several times more powerful and technologically advanced than they were a generation ago. Again, the lesson that they did not learn was that the invasion itself was a mistake.
It took about 40 years and countless sacrifices for Israel to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. In the old, slower times, everything took much longer. The colonialists were able to hold on to their conquered territories for hundreds of years.
Ultimately, they too had to pack up and leave. Modern history teaches us that even the most powerful and advanced countries cannot hold on to someone else’s lands for long and that every day of illegal occupation extracts a heavy price. But is anyone listening to history?
Coming back to the war in Iraq. Typically, many politicians, rulers and other sympathizers of the Bush administration are trying to pinpoint the strategic mistakes which have led to America’s present predicament in Iraq.
Are they thinking that fixing these mistakes will solve all the problems? Time magazine has actually listed some of them: the time wasted in searching for WMDs, insufficient intelligence agents, shifting of General Frank’s headquarters from Qatar to Florida, the wrong focus, misjudging the enemy, making deals, disbanding the Iraqi army, etc., etc. It makes pathetic reading: a collection of petty pictures stuck together to create a colourful mosaic, while there is not even a half-hearted attempt to see the bigger picture.
Once again, no one seems to be interested in learning from history: that the attack itself was a mistake and the remedy lies only in correcting that mistake.
The best way out of a mistake is to undo it. The best way out of this mess is for the United States to simply leave which is not as complicated as it seems or is made out to be.
A government of sorts already exists in the unfortunate country. Hand it over to them and take the troops out of the country. After all, there are many countries that have admittedly worse governments and corrupt dictatorships and yet they are surviving and the world community is tolerating them.
Let Kofi Annan take care of it as he is taking care of the rest of the world. The OIC can play a part if it decides to. But all that can happen and will probably happen once the US troops have departed. Nature abhors a vacuum. When US troops leave, the vacuum will surely get filled. The UN will make sure that the bad guys are not the ones who take over.
Neighbours would also have to ensure that Iraq does not fall into the wrong hands again. The point is, the heavens will not fall if the US army leaves Iraq without making alternative arrangements.
A word about civil war. Saudi Arabia should not worry about the civil war in Iraq. It should worry only about foreign interference. As of course should the United States. Civil wars rarely break countries. If history is a witness, the blood spilled in civil wars seeps into the foundations of a country and strengthens it. The US itself suffered the agony of a civil war for years and came out a better and stronger nation. So did China and many others. Let the Iraqis fight it out among themselves if they want. Artificial solutions crumble down like houses of cards sooner or later.
The only fear in the situation of a civil war is outside intervention. If neighbours, the UN and the United States can ensure non-intervention, Iraq is perfectly capable of handling itself.
The United States has done a wonderful job for the Iraqis by ridding them of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis would be eternally grateful to them for giving them liberty when their own brethren-in-faith nearby shunned them. Why spoil it by an overkill?
If they leave now, the US will be looked up to by the world as a true protector of oppressed people. If it persists in continuing the occupation on whatever pretext, its intentions for attacking Iraq will be seen as no different from those of the erstwhile Alexanders, Hitlers and other slaves of ambition.