In the Name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful, the Ayas we recite today (also written down in the copies you have in your hands), show some two or three characteristics of faith or being faithful. The first and foremost is that faith is an outstanding characteristic of the prophets of God and their followers. The great difference between the divine leaders and the world statesmen and politicians is the fact that those politicians have no faith in what they say.
It has been reported that, after India gained independence, one of the atheist leaders of Soviet Union, who visited India on this occasion, had pointed the figure of one of India’s spiritual leaders on his forehead to impress the religious masses of India!
By the way, for your information, I may add that most of the leaders of India’s independence movement were Indian religious authorities as well as Muslim maulanas such as Maulana Shah-Mahmoud Dehlavi, Maulana Mahmoud-al-Hassan, Maulana Abol-Kalaam Azaad, Maulana Muhammad Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali. By mentioning the Independence Movement of India, I meant to stress how important the role of spiritual leaders was; they practiced what they believed in and fought for it, and I believe that in their action and behavior you do find very special, spiritual and metaphysical aspects.
Now, as we said earlier, the divine prophets do practice what they preach; they were the very first to act upon what they advised the people and their followers; it would have been unfruitful if they did otherwise. But many worldly politicians and leaders do not practice the advice they give to others. If you and I are a group who is dying of thirst due to certain condition and I keep saying to you: ‘there is a wonderful fountain up on the mountain with refreshing, drinkable water, so make haste, run fast to reach it’, but I myself sit down in the shade of a tree and don’t make a move, then you would be justified to object: ‘ you’re as thirsty as we are, so if you’re telling the truth that there is such a fountain up there, why aren’t you running for it with us? So we think you’re lying, you don’t believe in what you say.’
This is the reason that divine prophets were always the first to move towards their goal, they were the vanguards and the carriers of divine flags who firmly and steadfastly paved the way and went ahead. The Prophet Abraham says ‘my God, I was the first person to submit to you, then others followed. A divine prophet should behave like that. The Prophet of Islam also behaved like that; he was always the one who welcomed the most dangerous events of early Islam. It is true that some of his most sincere followers went through intolerable hardships: Abdullah Mas’oud was badly beaten, Khabbab was brutally tortured and Ammar Yaaser was the target of many scourges, but he was the one who suffered most and was the target of all sorts of tortured, violence and insolence.
True faith is one of the characteristics observed in divine prophets and here faith means a firm, unshakable belief in what you aim at, and the sign of this belief is that you move forward before others. That’s why the Quran says: “The Messenger has faith in what has been sent down to him from his Lord”. And those who joined and followed the Prophet also enjoyed such a firm belief for the same verse goes on: “…and so do all the men of faith; each one believes in God, His angels, His book as well as in all His messengers.” All prophets of God and their true followers had such firm beliefs in God, in His angels, His revelations and made no difference between His prophets as in the same verse uttered by believers: “…and we make no distinction between a single one of His messengers.” This is because they all were treading the same godly path. We, as Muslims, do the same today; we respect and revere them all: Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Jesus, and Jerjees. They all were apostles of God; they all gave us the same good news to win God’s paradise. I will give you a brief account about the question of prophethood in coming days.
And now listen to this ‘they say we heard and obey’; this confirms what we have already said, that is what all prophets and all the faithful people declare. This ‘we heard’ means we understood the message; hearing is different from understanding, now that I am talking to you, say, ten meters away, of course you hear me but what those believers said was different, they meant we received the message, we understood it and we shall obey it. Our obedience is based on conscious understanding not a blind following. What we want from you, our God, is your ‘Pardon’ because ‘to you is our final return’. And about this ‘return to God’ there are interesting things to say and, God willing, I shall briefly explain them if these meeting continue and if I am still alive by then!
Up to here what we understood from the Quranic verses was that our faith really depends on our firm belief in what Islam calls us to. Those who have no faith but have only followed others as a precautionary measure, cannot be included in the sphere of Islamic thought; no need to stand on ceremonies: Faith means a firm belief, clearly understanding and following the attraction of the Quran and our Islamic religion and if these have not found their place deep in your hearts, that is, if the faith is not rooted in the hearts, those hearts are dead, because our hearts beat through the energy of Islam.
The next topic-marked 2 in the copied papers you have in your hands- is the fact that we observe two different kinds of faith. The first is the kind of faith based on imitation and prejudice. This means believing in something because our parents and elders so believed or just because something is written in the books we read, we follow it without deep thinking. Many among ordinary people are like that. If you ask them: How do you know that our Prophet was right and truthful, they don’t have an answer; they may only say: ‘Because our parents said so or our teachers so taught us’; such people just follow others; they do have some kind of faith in the holy Prophet, let’s admit it, but this faith is blindly imitative.
The faith based on prejudice is similar to the faith based on imitation. Such people sometimes are disrespectful of other prophets of God because of their intense love of our holy Prophet! Some such people think that, even in the kingdom of God, there are disputes and differences among the prophets of God! I’m afraid to say that such prejudices are even witnessed among some intellectuals from whom we do not expect such opinion, which I don’t wish to elaborate upon! In short, such faiths are not based on logic and reason. This kind of sentimental, prejudiced opinion that everything they do in other divine religions is wrong, does not stand to reason.
I should tell you, dear audience, that this sort of prejudiced or imitational beliefs is not valuable in Islam. This kind of faith may as easily be done away with as it was ignorantly acquired in the first place. A faithless generation may succumb in the face of material attractions of the world. Some think that this is true about the young generation but I say: hail the young generation who search for religious facts on the bases of logic and rationality. I’m actually addressing the generation before our present-day youth whose faith resembles the faith of the blind followers; of course many of them attend mosques, go to mourning ceremonies and are often present at Friday Congregational Prayers but because their faith is not based on logic and reason, they may even, under certain circumstance, set fire to a mosque, forget about Imam Husain (AS) and commit other incredible vices. Today one of our misfortunes is the beliefs of this former generation who lack the knowledge and consciousness of our youth and are divorced from the firm beliefs of the two generations before them. Many among this former generation lack the religious common sense not to be attracted by money, status, false popularity and temporary welfare; they don’t even enjoy the imitational faith of Muslims before them.
True faith must be based on clear thinking, knowledge, understanding and correct evaluation. If so, people would not be constantly worried about their faith and belief. If we desire to witness firm beliefs and if we don’t want to worry about beliefs being shaken, we ought to try constantly to be more conscious, more informed and help others on this path, and when such cognition is rooted in the hearts and minds and souls of the people, then their faith cannot be taken from them by any means, and as our elders used to say: ‘machine-guns cannot overcome their faith’. And as we understood through those verses quoted from the Sura House of Imraan, faith must be based on consciousness and cognition.
Now let’s go over those verses again: “In the creation of the heavens and the earth and in the alternation of the nights and days, surely are Signs…”. Well, we ask ‘for whom are these Signs’? Are they signs of God to those with confused minds, to the ignorant, to those who never think?! The Quran answers this question ‘Li-Ulil-Albaab’ meaning the wise, the thinkers, those who see with open eyes and those who ponder over God’s creations. But who are those wise thinkers? They were not born with such higher intellects. Billions of people in the world do have this intellect; only they have to use it, so ‘the wise thinkers’ are those who employ their faculty of reasoning and their intellect to acquire a higher thinking and to become ‘wise thinkers’. If you own a certain machine or apparatus but you leave it at home for long and never oil it or use it, then through the passage of years, it rusts, it no more operates properly and is of no use. Well, whose fault is it, isn’t it your fault who never use it? This is true in the case of your intellect, your mind, your intelligence and common –sense: you never used it, so it has rusted!
So, who are the sagacious, intelligent or wise persons according to the Quran? The answer to this question is one of the most delicate points in the Quran. Let me explain. When ordinary people say someone is wise or intelligent, they usually mean that the person is successful in all his affairs, that he may never be fooled or duped, that he is cleverer than any rivals and that he always has the upper hand in dealing with others. The Quran does not approve of such definitions because, according to the Quran, the real value in a person is his connection and spiritual proximity to God. The intelligent person who possess certain values in the highest form are “those who remember God, standing, sitting or lying down”, this means always remembering God but remembrance of God is not a Sufi-like state of ecstasy or constantly uttering Hou (meaning ‘He’) as dervishes do which some people are proud and happy about. The Quranic remembrance of God is an active kind of remembering, that is, practical remembrance. How is this? The Quranic verse goes on: “…and who reflect on the creation of heavens and the earth”. These are the people who ponder over God’s creation, who are always thinking about these phenomena and, as a result of this in-depth thinking, they say: “…O our Lord, You have not brought about all this in vain”. This means ‘You are far from doing something vainly and with no divine purpose; this is the most crucial point in Islamic ideology.
All life-building ideologies claim that they intend to bring about better individual and social lives, whether their philosophies have their essence in the existence of God or not. Those who believe in God say: ‘O our Lord, you did not create everything in vain” and “Your Glory is over and above doing something in vain”. So the believer in God says: ‘then I do have some responsibility, I must tread a certain path within this great, astonishing order God has created, I have a certain position in this creation, and if I don’t fulfill my responsibilities and obligations properly and rightly as you have directed, I will be guilty of working against Your immense creation’. There we read in the same verse: “…so pray deliver me from the scourge of Fire. This fire of Hell, though a reality, also symbolizes the wrath of God for lack of appreciation concerning His perfect creation and bringing everything into existence.
Please pay attention, what I said so far was an introduction, an introduction to understanding the conscious faith and intelligent belief which is understood by pondering over the Quranic verses we read. Now listen to the next verse: “Our Lord, whomever You will cast into the Fire is disgraced forever, and such wrong- doers shall never have any helpers.” This means that the wrong-doers, the despots, the cruel, the hypocrites and the infidels whom you cast into fire, will have no helpers; no invisible hand may be stretched towards them, they will have to suffer there forever.
Let us now say a few words about the sagacious, intelligent people, the thinkers about the heavens and the earth, those who have found out that they have not come into the world in vain or without purpose, and so we read the next verse relating to proper faith and belief. According to the Quran, they call on their Lord and say: “O our Lord, we heard a crier plead for Faith ‘Believe in your Lord’ and so we did believe.” These believers say ‘we heard and we believed’; this crier may apparently be a prophet but in fact it could be their wisdom, their insight and their thinking that has addressed them and called them to have faith in God, therefore they received the call but it was their own wisdom and spiritual insight that helped them to become conscious believers. This is the kind of faith approved by Islam.
There is a third point which I explain briefly as we haven’t got much time left. Well, as God Almighty, according to the Quran, only approves of people’s conscious faith and does not value imitational, blind and ignorant beliefs, we do notice that in many verses the Quran harshly rejects this sort of false belief. Let us cite an example here in this respect: “When it is said to them come to what is sent down by God”; the addressees of the verse are the disbelievers and reactionary-minded persons and they are asked to come and listen to God’s revelations and what the Prophet teachers, come and use your brains and see if the holy Prophet has something to teach you, what is their reaction? Instead of accepting the invitation to come, to think, to understand and choose their ways, they say: “…the ways we found our fathers and fore-fathers on are quite enough for us…”! This means that our traditions are sufficient for us, we don’t go after new thoughts or concepts! According a Quranic researchers, such ignorant imitators and reactionaries are a group distinct from the rest of unbelievers; these people hate any new, intelligent and truthful advices. The holy Prophet of Islam is the most enlightened personality, but they don’t want to even listen to him and they say ‘our fathers and mothers behaved in certain ways and we are not going to change them’. The Quran comments on them in the same verse: “what if their fathers knew nothing and had been far astray”! Although their fossil fathers were ignorant people and could not distinguish between good or bad and right or wrong, they still follow them. That’s why the Quran admonishes them and blames them for their blind imitation. Now I invite our dear Quran reciter, Mr. Fatemi to come and recite the same verses we discussed for our further deliberation.
