The Qur'anic Guidance on True Happiness
maulana
shah muhammad abdul aleem siddiqui
It is a well-known fact that man possesses the faculty
of perception and distinction, under which works the power of the will.
It is this power of the will, this power of thought
combined with emotion, which plays the most important part in our life. The
power of thought fixed on a certain point assumes the form of
belief, which effects our whole activity.
If a person thinks he is feeling feverish, even
though he may have no actual attack of fever, his physique will begin to give
way under the pressure of that thought until the feverish condition will
actually come into existence. In fact, the effect of our mental attitude on our
physical life is a matter of common experience.
We realise it in the ordinary turns and twists of
our life. It should not, therefore, be difficult to understand that it is the
fundamental beliefs of man concerning his destiny and the universe around him
which play the greatest part in making or unmaking his life.
Consequently, the first lesson which is taught in
the school of Islam is that, when your innate feeling and your reason leads you
to realise that there is a Creator of this universe Who is All-Powerful,
All-Knowing and All-Seeing, you should not stop at that formal belief, but
should move towards Him with all the intensity of your love, regarding Him as the source of all Life and Light and
Perfection, and considering Him as the
Bestower of all Blessings, and believing Him to be close to you every moment, watching
you not only in your actions but also in the most secret thoughts running
through your mind, and sustaining you at every stage.
This consciousness, this belief and this
concentration of thought will endow you with a new life and will create in you
a new power. Let me illustrate it by an analogy. In your day-today life, you will
experience the fact that if you come in close relation with any human being who
possesses any attribute of power, you begin feeling a new power within
yourself. What, then about the effects of closeness to Him who is the Source of
all Life and Light and Perfection and Power?
Here a question might arise in your minds:
"How can we actually come close to God, and how can we know that we are
close to Him? I have just told you that God is Infinite, and He can neither be
confined in the bounds of Space nor in the limitations of Time.
Time itself is a dimension of physical existence.
And Space as a dimensional fact is, of course, well known to all. We are
accustomed to think of closeness always in terms of Space and Time. But God as
the Infinite Being cannot be conceived in those terms. He is certainly close to
us, as religion teaches us and as we ourselves realise when we concentrate on
Him rightly.
God Himself tells us in the Holy Qur'an:
"And when My servants question thee concerning Me,
then surely l am near; I answer the prayer of the suppliant when he crieth unto
Me..."(2:186)
But the question may be asked: How is it that most
of us remain un-conscious of that closeness? Let me explain it by an
illustration. Suppose you have in your pocket near to your heart something
which is very dear to you. But during your moments of absorption in other
things you totally forget its closeness to you, nay, even its existence. In
actually, it exists and remains close. Only your thought wanders away and
creates a distance and a gap between you and the thing.
Similarly, without attempting per-fect analogy, we
can say that so far as God is concerned, He is near to us every moment, but so
far as we are concerned, we are either conscious of His nearness or unconscious
of it in our thought. It is, thus, by the effort of our thought that we can
realise His nearness, and it is by remembering Him constantly that we can make
that realisation permanent.
The more permanent that realisation is, the more at
rest will be our heart, and the more shall be the happiness that we shall
achieve. The lesson, therefore, which the Holy Qur'an teaches us, is: -
"Verily, in the remembrance of God do hearts find
solace" (13: 28)
True Happiness is born of the remembrance of God.
But is there any special way for making that remembrance truly efficacious? Has
God Almighty, Who loves us more than a father or a mother, and Who has
therefore, taken upon Himself the obligation of guiding us through His chosen
Messengers, has He taught us the best way of remembering Him also? Are the
symbolic forms of worship, or worshipping once in a while, fruitful or
sufficient? These are the questions which arise in our minds and which the Holy
Qur'an has answered. We have been told there to keep up the institutional
prayers five times a day and to maintain God's remembrance in every moment of
our life.
Now this remembrance has two forms. Firstly, we
have to remember at the turn of every moment that all power and all goodness
proceeds from Him, and we are but recipients. Secondly, we have to remain
conscious on the occasion of every action of ours whether or not that action is
in accordance with the Laws revealed by God and taught by His Messengers.
Such a comprehensive and constant remembrance will
serve as a feeder of the soul until the human personality will gain
extra-ordinary and ever increasing strength from within and will attain that
vision where all weaknesses and miseries fade into oblivion, and the heart
becomes the repository of True Happiness and Abiding Peace.
The lesson
which I have expounded to you is only a theory for you. But, just as in the
case of science, the theory does not provide a complete understanding unless it
is supplemented by practical experiment, so too in the present case I would
appeal to you to test it practically by practising it.
Such a procedure will by itself prove to you the
truth of the theory. When you will build the structure of your activity on the
foundations of God's remembrance, you will soon find your life being moulded in
a harmonious pattern in accordance with the Divine Will. You will feel its
sweetness and you will realise that you are in a realm where bitterness and
frustration continuously diminishes.
There you will hear with your own ears of the soul
the glad tidings given by the Holy Qur'an in these words: -
"Lo: those who say: Our Lord is Allah, and
afterward are upright, the angels descend upon them, saying: Fear not, nor
grieve, but hear good tidings of the paradise which you are promised. We are
your protecting friends in the life of the world and in the Hereafter. There
you will have all that your souls desire, and there you will have all for which
you pray: a gift of welcome from One Forgiving, Merciful" (41:30-31)
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