Allah’s Divine Plan in Sending Messengers – Impressionistic Vs Analytical View
By Naseer Ahmed, New
Age Islam
16 August
2024
It Is Also A Mistaken
Belief That Prophet Muhammad Was Fighting Battles Against The Disbelievers To
End Disbelief. When Allah Did Not Destroy Anyone For Merely Disbelieving,
Prophet Muhammad Could Not Have Been Fighting Against Disbelief. Indeed, No
Verse Of The Quran Commands Fighting Against Disbelief. The Only Justification
For Fighting In The Quran Is To End Oppression.
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The stories
of prophets oft repeated in the Quran during the first 13 years of the Meccan
period are the stories of Noah, Lut, Moses, Hud, Salih, and Shoaib peace be
upon all of them. What is common in these oft-repeated stories is that the
people actively opposed the Prophets and tried to harm them and their followers
or were intransigent rejecters of the Message. An act of God utterly destroyed
these rejecters. There are 86 Surahs of the Meccan period, and the stories of these
prophets are found in 32 of these Surahs, in varying detail. These are the only
stories repeated in the Quran, some of which overlap with the story told
elsewhere, and additional information not found in other Surahs or only a
summary of the story related in greater detail elsewhere.
It's
important to note that the stories of Prophet Yusuf, Elias, and Yunus, which
are told only once in the Meccan Surahs, present significant exceptions. Their
people were not destroyed. In the case of Prophet Yunus, all the people
accepted Islam. In the case of Prophet Elias, most people rejected him. In the
case of Prophet Yusuf, the story is silent on this matter, possibly because he
was not sent as a Rasool but as a Nabi. These exceptions are crucial in
understanding Allah’s Divine Plan and should not be overlooked.
However,
since the stories of the Prophets whose people were destroyed are repeated 32
times, they form the dominant narrative, from which the scholars have drawn
erroneous conclusions, ignoring the exceptions.
Javed Ghamidi’s understanding of Allah’s Divine
Plan
In Javed
Ghamidi’s Al-Mawrid publication, “Playing God: Misreading a Divine Practice”,
the author Shehzad Saleem, an associate of Ghamidi writes as follows:
“To
understand divine religions, it is essential to comprehend a particular
unalterable practice of God. This practice is a divine scheme devised and
executed by God through natural disasters or His messengers and followers. God,
through natural disasters or His messengers, punishes and humiliates in this
very world. They are the foremost and direct addressees who deliberately deny
the truth communicated to them by their respective messengers and reward those
among them who adhere to the truth. When this humiliation occurs through the
messengers and their followers, they act as nothing but divine weapons. It is
God’s retribution carried out by God Himself. This worldly retribution aims to
make mankind mindful of the most important reality it tends to forget: reward
and punishment based on a person’s deeds in the Hereafter. This reward and
punishment to take place in the Hereafter is substantiated visually by the
Almighty through the agency of His messengers so that mankind may always remain
heedful to this reality. The court of justice, which will be set up for every
person on the Day of Judgement, was set up for the nations of messengers in
this world so that the latter could become a visual testimony to the former. To
put it another way: before the advent of the greater Day of Judgement, several lesser
days of Judgement were brought about in this world in which people were
rewarded and punished based on their deeds so that they could become visual
evidence to the judgement that will take place in the Hereafter.
The details
of this practice abound in the Qur’an. Although faint references to this divine
practice can be found in the works of our previous scholars, Hamid al-Din
al-Farahi (1863-1930) was the first person to point out this divine practice
concretely. Later, his pupil Amin Ahsan Islahi (1904-1997) consolidated the
views of his mentor by providing copious references from the Qur’an in his
Tafseer Tadabbur-i Qur’an. Javed Ahmad Ghamidi (b. 1951), a pupil of Islahi,
has developed the views of his two illustrious predecessors and has enunciated
precise details of this divine practice.”
The above
is a very dramatic, impressive, and persuasive theory, except that it is not
mindful of all the facts and, therefore, is defective. What it says is that
every prophetic mission ended with the complete annihilation of the
disbelievers by an act of God and, in the case of Muhammad (PBUH), by the sword
of man. According to these scholars, it couldn’t be otherwise because this
formed Allah’s unaltering practice through the ages. Ghamidi, being a moderate,
however, warns that the killing of all the Mushrikin by the sword of man in the
case of the last Prophet should not be taken as his Sunnat to be followed by
later Muslims. Only the prophets can be instruments of God’s punishment in this
manner and not ordinary folks. He is propounding a theory of exceptionalism. He
is wrong. The Prophet did not kill any of the Mushrikin, as punishment, as we
will see later. He says:
“However,
many scholars have misread this practice of God; they have regarded it to be a
part of the Shari’ah, and as a result, think that after the departure of the
Prophet (sws), later Muslims too have the right to punish and subjugate people
who deny the truth. Due to this misreading, many other erroneous inferences
have also resulted. Matters to be left to God have been taken up by human
beings. In this manner, they are now guilty of inadvertently playing God.”
He further
describes the Prophet’s mission in three phases as follows:
i. The Propagation Phase
In this
phase (Propagation), the messengers of Allah never use force or retaliate
against any oppression or persecution encountered.
After thirteen long years of propagation and
exhortation, the leaders of the Quraysh had refused the calls of sense and
reason. Their denial was based on nothing but stubbornness even though the
truth had been revealed to them in its purest form. The last verse of the Sûrah
Al_Kafirun,” [So, now] to you your religion and to me mine.” (109:1-6) it must
be appreciated, is not an expression of tolerance; it expresses renunciation on
the part of the Prophet (sws) and a warning to the disbelievers that they must
now get ready to face the consequences of their obdurate denial.
ii. The Acquittal Phase
iii. The Judgement Phase
In this
case, a messenger and his companions subdue their nation by force and execute
them if they do not accept faith.
The Punishment
It should be remembered that as per the divine
practice discussed in the previous pages, the Idolaters and the People of the
Book had become worthy of death after intentionally denying the truth. However,
the Almighty selectively awarded death to them. While the active adversaries of
both denominations were put to death, the People of the Book were spared if
they lived in subjugation to the Muslims, and the Idolaters were not given this
option: they had to accept Islam or face death.”
Javed
Ghamidi is sure that in every case, a Prophetic mission ends with the
destruction of the disbelievers by an act of God and, in the case of Muhammad
(PBUH), through the sword of man.
My Analysis
Ghamidi and
his predecessors ignored the exceptions where the Prophetic missions did not
end in the destruction of the disbelievers. Prophet Elias’s story is a very
clear exception. Nor did Allah destroy all the disbelievers in Egypt at the end
of Moses's mission, but only those who followed him into the sea to kill him.
Neither was Moses's mission to make the people accept Islam but to free the
enslaved Children of Israel. In the case of the people of Lut, we do not even
know whether they were believers or disbelievers. They rebelled against Lut and
tried to harm him. Therefore, I analysed what was common to the prophetic
missions at the end of which those who continued defying the prophet were
destroyed. The following is the finding:
What is
common to all these stories is that the people rejected the Messenger, actively
opposed him and hindered or otherwise persecuted those who followed him. They
also mocked and taunted the Messenger, asking him to bring down the punishment
of Allah that the Messenger had repeatedly warned about. These Messengers also
prayed to Allah to deliver them and their followers from the violent rejecters.
Those who heeded the Messenger and Allah’s message were saved, and the rest
were destroyed by an act of Allah “to accomplish that of which they were in
doubt” (15:53).
It is,
therefore, not the rejection of the Messenger or any other crimes/sins that the
people practised that resulted in their destruction. It was their violent
opposition and persecution of the Messenger and his followers, culminating in
taunting Allah and His Messenger that if they were speaking the truth, they
should bring about the punishment that they had warned. Therefore, only the
people who asked for the punishment got punished. In the case of the people of
Elias, although they rejected him, they may have done it peacefully and were
not destroyed.
Muhammad’s (PBUH) Prophetic Mission
In the case
of the prophetic mission of Muhammad, the violent rejecters were only a few,
and the passive non-believers were many. These violent rejecters alone are
addressed in Surah 109 as Kafirun. The violent rejecters also asked for the
punishment to descend but Allah did not send His punishment on all the
disbelievers since many were only passive disbelievers “who could yet seek
pardon”. Allah punished the few violent rejecters with the sword of the Muslims
in battle. Most accepted Islam after their violent and cruel leaders were
eliminated and whose fear had perhaps prevented them from accepting Islam
earlier.
(8:32)
Remember how they said: "O Allah if this is indeed the Truth from Thee,
rain down on us a shower of stones form the sky, or send us a grievous
penalty."(33) But Allah was not going to send them a penalty whilst thou
wast amongst them; nor was He going to send it whilst they could ask for
pardon.(34) But what plea have they that Allah should not punish them, when
they keep out (men) from the sacred Mosque - and they are not its guardians? No
men can be its guardians except the righteous; but most of them do not
understand.
So apart
from the disbelievers daring the Messenger to bring down the punishment, the
other condition to be satisfied for their destruction was that there remain
none among them who could yet seek pardon. The following verse also confirms this:
(11:36) It was revealed to Noah:
"None of thy people will believe except those who have believed already!
So grieve no longer over their (evil) deeds.
This was
the case with the people of Lut. The decision to destroy all except Lut and his
daughters was taken even before the Messengers (Angels) sent for it reached
Lut. (11:76, 15:57-67)
It is only
when the people reach a point of no return that they are referred to as Kafir
in the Quran. The Kafirin are not every disbeliever, but those who oppose Allah
and His Deen and reach a point from where they will not return to the Deen of
Allah. Abu Lahab and his wife are examples of such kafirin on whom the
punishment of Hell in the Hereafter is declared a decade before their death in
Surah 111. The others are Abu Jahl in
Surah 96 and Walid-ibn-Mughiyrah in Surah 68, referred to indirectly and not by
name and Pharaoh in verse 10:88.
It is also
a mistaken belief that Prophet Muhammad was fighting battles against the
disbelievers to end disbelief. When Allah did not destroy anyone for merely
disbelieving, Prophet Muhammad could not have been fighting against disbelief.
Indeed, no verse of the Quran commands fighting against disbelief. The only
justification for fighting in the Quran is to end oppression.
Moreover,
it is evident from the verses of Surah Taubah that some Mushrikin remained well
beyond the Prophet’s death as jiziya paying citizens.
The End of Muhammad’s (PBUH) Prophetic Mission
The
proclamation of the severing of treaties and four months of amnesty is made on
the day of Haj. This was the last Haj in which the Musrikin were allowed in the
Sacred Mosque. The next Haj was the Prophet’s farewell Haj; he died a few
months later.
(9:11) A (declaration) of immunity
from Allah and His Messenger, to those of the Mushrikins with whom ye have
contracted mutual alliances:-
(2) Go ye, then, for four months,
backwards and forwards, (as ye will), throughout the land, but know ye that ye
cannot frustrate Allah (by your falsehood) but that Allah will cover with shame
the Kafirin.
(3) And an announcement from Allah
and His Messenger, to the people (assembled) on the day of the Great
Pilgrimage,- that Allah and His Messenger dissolve (treaty) obligations with
the Mushrikins. If then, ye repent, it were best for you; but if ye turn away,
know ye that ye cannot frustrate Allah. And proclaim a grievous penalty to the
Kafaru.
(4) (But the treaties are) not
dissolved with those Mushrikins with whom ye have entered into alliance and who
have not subsequently failed you in aught, nor aided any one against you. So
fulfil your engagements with them to the end of their term: for Allah loveth
the righteous.
(5) But when the forbidden months
are past, then fight and slay the Mushrikins wherever ye find them, an seize
them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but
if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practise regular charity,
then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.
(6) If one amongst the Mushrikins
ask thee for asylum, grant it to him, so that he may hear the word of Allah;
and then escort him to where he can be secure. That is because they are men
without knowledge…….
The
Mushrikin who had fought in contravention of their treaty were to be killed as
per verse 9:5 but were allowed four months of amnesty, during which they could
move about freely and migrate to a neighbouring country to save themselves or
accept Islam or get killed. With such a generous judgment, no one remained to
be killed.
What About the Mushrikin-Covered By 9:4?
Verse 9:28
bans the Mushrikin covered by 9:4 and 9:6 from the Sacred Mosque from the next
Haj, which was the Prophet’s farewell pilgrimage. The treaty of Hudaibiyya was
contracted less than three years earlier and had another seven years remaining.
The Prophet died less than two years after this date, five years before the
expiry of the treaty. The Quran is silent about what is to be done with the
Mushrikin at the end of the treaty because there is no need to say anything. As
per verse 9:29, they became jiziya paying citizens.
(28) O ye who believe! Truly the
Mushrikins are unclean; so let them not, after this year of theirs, approach
the Sacred Mosque. And if ye fear poverty, soon will Allah enrich you, if He
wills, out of His bounty, for Allah is All-knowing, All-wise.
(29) Fight those who believe not in
Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by
Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they
are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing
submission, and feel themselves subdued.
Going by
the literal meaning of the verses, it is clear that not every Mushrikin was to
be killed, and it would appear that none were killed as per 9:5 because they
could escape the punishment by choosing exile or accepting Islam.
Javed
Ghamidi and his predecessors have got the story wrong; they are not analytical
in their approach but are led by an impressionistic understanding of the Quran.
A defective but impressive theory proposed by Hamid al-Din al-Farahi
(1863-1930) of Allah’s unalterable practice of God has become dogma, which has
led to the false belief that the disbelievers can be killed for their
disbelief.
Why Do Flawed Theories Survive?
The
longevity of the theory of Allah’s Unalterable Plan is all the more remarkable
because it is seriously flawed. The mystery is how a theory of Allah’s
unalterable Plan that is vulnerable to such apparent counterexamples such as
the Prophetic mission of Elias and the explicit verses that show that the
Mushrikin, who were not war criminals could live as Jiziya paying citizens,
survived for so long. Daniel Kahneman calls it theory-induced blindness: “once
you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is
extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation
that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly
good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit
of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it.”
In this
case, it is more than theory-induced blindness. The theory itself is perhaps
induced by the following hadith in the two Sahihs in which the Prophet (pbuh)
is alleged to have said:
“I was
commanded to fight against the people until they proclaim, `There is no deity
worthy of worship except Allah.' If and when they say it, they will preserve
their blood and wealth from me, except for its right (Islamic penal code), and
their reckoning is with Allah, the Exalted and Most Honoured."
The
abovementioned Hadith has not only distorted the message of the Quran but made
Muslims believe in a false history of early Islam for which there is no
evidence. It is believed, perhaps by all scholars, that the Christians and the
Jews under the political authority of the Prophet (pbuh) were given the option
to pay Jizya or face war, but the polytheists had no choice but to accept Islam
or be killed. They disregard 9:28 which anticipates the presence of the
Mushrikin beyond the four-month amnesty period and as per 9:4, for another
seven years.
Many
scholars may have entertained doubts, but they did not pursue the idea to the
point of saying, “This theory is seriously wrong because it ignores the fact
that Prophet Elias’s mission did not end up the same as that of Prophets Nuh,
Lut, Shoiab and Hud and clearly verse 9:4 read with 9:28 and 9:29 anticipate
the presence of Mushrikin for another seven years. As the psychologist Daniel
Gilbert observed, disbelieving is hard work, and the analytical brain is
quickly tired.
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A frequent contributor to NewAgeIslam.com, Naseer Ahmed is an
Engineering graduate from IIT Kanpur and is an independent IT consultant after
having served in both the Public and Private sector in responsible positions
for over three decades. He has spent years studying Quran in-depth and made
seminal contributions to its interpretation.