Good Life

 

14.  WHAT IS REAL GOOD LIFE

 

Perhaps the greatest obsession, increasingly so, of modern man is living a good life as he and most of his contemporaries see it. It was of course the same in the past, but not for everybody. All civilised, that is to say more or less settled and law-regulated societies could only be ‘democratic’ only in a limited sense if at all they could be democratic. To see what I mean let us go to about 5th century BCE and take two nations, Egypt and Greece. Egypt was a very rich, advanced and sophisticated empire run on priestly oligarchic lines where at the top we find an absolute monarch wearing three hats simultaneously: that of chief living god, that of the chief priest and that of the king. He came from a dynasty so exclusive and sacred that princes had to marry their sister princesses in order to keep the dynastic blood pure. Otherwise they had any number of concubines they could choose. This man with three hats was called the pharaoh. This term to this day stands for tyranny thanks to the Biblical and Qur’anic accounts of the adventures between a certain pharaoh and prophet Moses with his people Israel. At the time there were other empires around like the Babylonian and the Persian and the social structure in them was not too different than in Egypt. In all such societies the royals, the priests and the urban and rural rich classes aspired at living as pleasurably as they could get although the priests had to go through some  periods of ascetic life as we Muslims shadow during Ramadan fastings and especially when some of us practice i’tikaf (seclusion in a mosque) during the last ten days of Ramadan. Like us, the priests were free to enjoy themselves with anything they could afford and find while the rich in general lived luxurious lives having at their disposal the  services of many domestic slaves which were only be basically fed and clothed.

 

The second kind of civilised society was tribal democracies. Both Athens and Rome were this type of society. Each consisted of a federation of tribes which were not nomadic but settled. Tribal elders constituted what we may call a parliament in today’s language but they differed from our parliaments by their membership being not elected but made of tribal chiefs. This type of ‘democracy’ lived on in all tribal-based yet settled societies and in Islamic history their two examples were in pre-Islamic Mecca and Medina, especially the first. The parliament of the Meccans was called ‘al Nadwa’ which derives from the verb ‘nada’, to shout: the Meccan ‘parliamentarians’, i.e. clan elders  were shouting out their ideas and votes without much writing down of things, for most were illiterate. The class the ‘parliamentarians’ came from were freemen of clans and tribes and under them in all three places, namely Athens, Rome and Mecca were a vast class of slaves who toiled day and night to keep their masters well-served.

 

In both the priestly aristocratic societies like Egypt and ‘oligarchic democratic’ (i.e., citizenship rights confined to indigenous land-owning tribal members) societies like Athens any ‘good life’, that is to say a life of good food, good dress, good habitation, entertainment and of course personal freedom applied only to the oligarchs or elites as we call them today. The slave class as well as any ‘foreigners’ who were like today’s immigrant communities in Western countries had no citizenship rights and while the foreigners could enjoy some prosperity and moderate hedonism the slaves could have, if they could have any at all, their share of good life by the favour they held with their masters. Some slave women being very beautiful could join the good life of their masters thanks to the masters’ infatuation with them while exceptionally intelligent male slaves could gain so much favour with their masters that they could be appointed as managers of their masters’ affairs, end up freed and marry the master’s daughter. In Rome, some exceptionally bright and able slaves climbed the imperial throne which phenomenon was also repeated in Islamic empires and kingdoms later on. A whole class of domestic royal servants called the mamluks ruled Muslim Egypt for several centuries until sultan Selim I of Turkey wrestled Egypt from them (1516). But these were exceptions. All-in-all, the societies we described so far gave the opportunity of a ‘good life’ only to its natural or conquering elites while left the majorities they were ruling over to live barely more than like the domestic animals were living.

 

Today ‘good life’ as most people see it is available only to the citizens of the North American and West European countries and their extensions in Australia and New Zealand and their imitators in Japan. In the rest of the world, only rich elites can have the good life they want while the majority can have lifestyles ranging from the modest prosperity of an artisan or land-owning village man to non-descript street people who apparently live on what they can scavenge from any refuse bins in the streets. But are those who appear to be living good lives living really good lives? That is the million dollar question.

By all evidence available to more perceptive and experienced men (among which I humbly hope I am) the good life the good-livers appear to enjoy is not as good as it may look and may often be a sham or pretence. Rich, their lives certainly are. Full of physiological pleasures like good food and plenty of sexual indulgence their lives are. Expensive entertainments like watching top sports and theatrical and musical shows they have plenty of. Being invited to most prestigious gatherings they do have. Mentioned in the media frequently and enviably they certainly are. Late princess Diana was one of such supposed good-livers; yet by all insider accounts and much of popular evidence her life was hell, at least occasionally and then eventually. She (the poor unfortunate woman servant of Allah) was not alone in living in Hell while looking like living in Paradise. Almost all perceived

Paradise residents in this world are in fact Hell-residents. Why? Let me explain.

Worldly goods are capable of delivering great joys and even ecstasies. That is why Allah is promising us superb dwellings, furnishings, clothes, jewellery, superb foods and also superb sex in His Paradise. But in this world these same things (or rather their worldly analogues) are inseparable from their opposites or rather spoilers. To begin with such worldly goods have to be worked for or competed in getting. When two tycoons compete to buy out a lucrative business they have very tense days and sleepless nights and the loser may experience even suicidal thoughts. So do people compete for high offices. When two rival candidates compete for a high position one or both may resort to dirtiest of tricks to beat the other who may be much worthier than him for it. The winner’s victory will always contain an element of guilt-feeling while the loser may never recover from the trauma of victimisation. Many defeated rivals become so deflated and depressed that from then on life for them takes a downturn until they die of a mystery illness and sometimes as bankrupts as well. What do you want? Which king with a brother could sit on his throne without feeling threatened by his brother’s existence? Did not only too many kings kill their brothers to feel safe on the throne? I can assure you that today and everywhere financial, political, corporate and sexual motivated rivalries, conspiracies, subversions and  even assassinations are as running amok as any time in the past. Only recently we had the news of a dissident spy being horribly despatched by a radioactive poison. This whole things boils down to the limitedness of all specified worldly goods: there are always more desirers of any worldly things than the things themselves; the beauty of the village will always have more than one suitor. So, what can real good life be? How to find it?

 

Real good life is possible when the desired object can be obtained without competition and enjoyed without envy from others. Are there such objects? Yes there are. What about wisdom? What about good patience? What about justice? What about loving or admiring somebody or something without ulterior motives? Lastly what about sincere acts of charity which fills both the giver and receiver with the sweetest of emotions? Now please read what Allah is saying about real good life:

 

“Whoever, male or female, does good works while also a believer, then such We will make live a good life and pay his reward in terms of the very best he had been doing (16: 97)

What the good works are Allah defines. Read if you wish:

 

“Indeed the believers are conclusively saved and prosperous, (namely) those who are awe-stricken in their prayers, those who turn away from useless matters, those who pay charity, those who protect their chastity… those who keep their promises and fulfil their obligations” (23: 1- 8)

 

Why that is so? That is so because

When you faithfully and reverently perform your prayers you are given spiritual gifts which makes your heart emptier of a greed for material gifts and that promotes peace between you and others competing for material gifts.

 

When you turn away from useless matters, matters not your concern, you avoid being drawn into arguments or fights over hypothetical matters not your concern and also often almost outside your responsibility or ability. Don’t we read how silly people even kill each other while arguing about the merits of their respective favourite football teams or nationalities? (many wars have and are being fought over it).

 

When you gift some of your excess wealth or other personal items to someone who badly needs them will not your heart light up in new hopes of receiving some corresponding blessings from Allah in return? Will not you feel lighter, pleasanter than before? If you are man or woman enough you certainly will. The Messenger of Allah said repetitively that small charities you render deflect great calamities from you. Yet we see families where half of the members are spoilt for choice in their luxuries while the other half is starving. What to make of today’s world globally? Aren’t one half of the world basking in fabulous prosperity and prostituting their wealth in only too unhealthy and silly pursuits while the other half are starving often on an epic level?  Is it a wonder then that peace is never coming to this world?

 

When you protect your chastity is anybody harmed by your sexual activities? When people throw their chastity to the winds as most in rich countries are doing today how many are ending up sexually abused, degraded, made ill, seriously injured and even killed violently or by terrible chronic illnesses? When you are personally chaste, what sexual victimisation or sexually caused illness you will fear except in extraordinarily accidental cases- from which Allah will almost certainly protect. After all with all the pious acts and abstentions you are diminishing your chances of being a victim of various hurts. While also hurting nobody.

 

Lastly, those who keep their good promises and fulfil their any honourable obligations exonerate themselves from all blame in the transactions concerned and can look to a peace of mind and help or compensation from Allah in case others let them down in similar circumstances. Is not having so much peace of mind and rightful hopes of help from Allah whatever happens a good part of a good life?

 

Is this not rivalless, competitionless, safest and most lasting salvation, the most stable and enduring form of good life which is also a life of goodness? Amen.

 

15.  INNER POLICING- OUTER SUPPORT

 

All over the world one of the most often headlines in the media is: CRIME IS SOARING! In the United Kingdom the prisons are so full that many dangerous criminals including murderers and rapists are being releasing early (many re-offending soon and sometimes worse than before) while sentences are almost routinely set low in view of the fact that prison places are in over demand. Some excess illegal immigrants are almost deliberately ignored, for keeping them in custody is not a viable option. As a result black economy is booming and the tax burden is increasingly being heaped on the honest earners in the middle class. Reports are that the roads are teeming with unlicensed drivers driving untaxed, un-inspected and uninsured vehicles. Drug trade and abuse are on inexorable increase and drugs are almost openly used even on the most prestigious premises in the course of most glittering social occasions being conducted there. A few years ago, at no less a place than the Oxford University campus a government minister’s daughter died from drug abuse when attending the graduation celebrations at the university social centre. Lastly, every night, especially the weekends many parts of the towns teem with men and women, total strangers to each other, who casually couple up for a brief fix in sex and then walk away with God knows what. Throughout drink and drugs are taken and criminal activities are never far away or infrequent throughout from prostitution, drug peddling, pickpocketing, theft, mugging to occasional murder.

 

Equally worse is the spiralling corruption at all levels of business and government. In services in high demand often bribery cuts corners for those in a hurry. This is especially the case in government housing, National Health Service, social benefits and immigration. Rented houses not infrequently go to those who bribe the allotting officials; so you find a native family in need of a house waiting for one for ten years while a newly arrived immigrant family get theirs almost overnight. Not only that but some, by various devious means which include both lying and bribing get more houses by each adult asking for a separate house and hiring out these extra houses for profit while the family members live together in the first house. Immigrants jump queues and some may get quick residence and even citizenship and passports again through bribery and in the case of younger women through sexual favours. Tax evasion in the self-employed sector is almost universal as many accountants will tell you in their frank moments, which evasion they can facilitate by almost undetectable false accounting. Similarly tax inspectors are not infallible; some will turn a blind eye to such evasions for a consideration.

 

We are not claiming that high crime rates is only a recent phenomenon. Throughout history and from society to society and from time to time things improved or became worse. It is not only morally conscious historians who report us the moral ebbs and flows of given societies over ages but both the Bible and the Qur’an. By quoting just three examples from the Qur’an we can see this amply. Of the people of prophet Lot, cousin of prophet Abraham Allah says:

 

“We also sent Lot. He said to his people ‘Are you committing an indecency no other nation committed before you? You are turning to men for the satisfaction of your lust away from women. Truly you are a people gone to abnormal excess” (7: 80-81)

 

Here the crime is sexual perversion. In today’s Western society it is as bad and on the rise as well. Of the people of prophet Shua’ib Allah says:

 

“To Midian (We sent) their brother Shua’ib. He said ‘O my people, worship Allah, you have no god other than Him. An explicit proof has come to you from your Lord; therefore make your measurements and balances honest, do not steal people’s goods, do not work corruption in the land after it has been made just’…” (7: 85)

 

Here the accusation is one of corrupt business practices. Today it is worse: you may buy ‘orange squash’ which you can dilute with water to get a slightly orange tasting and smelling drink which is not very convincing. The squash in question may be a cocktail of chemically produced flavours, perfumes and colours with little and even no actual oranges in it. If any oranges are used they may be the unsaleable poorest quality oranges or just orange peels left over from juicing them or just nothing. The cocktail may even be dangerous to your health because the chemicals in it are of dubious merit. I was talking to a small industrialist who was producing table salt in carton packs. The net weight shown on the pack was 1lb (454 grams). He was actually putting into the cartons only 400 grams. “How can you get away with it?” I remarked. He foxily asked “Who will ever weigh it?” Apparently none had done so. 

 

Now a political crime. Allah says:

 

“From among people is one whose word you admire and he makes Allah witness to what (great good) is in his heart while in actual fact he is the worse of enemies (of Allah). However once he is put in power he rushes to work corruption in the land and destroy crops and generations. Allah does not like corruption (2: 204)

 

What we have here is a politician who is out to get our votes to rise to political office. To receive our votes he boasts of fabulous spiritual and moral merits and brilliant plans of action all the while trying to persuade us that his heart is full of good  intentions and God is a witness that it is so. Once he attains the power his works increasingly show us that he is a corrupt person who surrounds himself with other corrupt persons and they together harm both the economy and the upcoming generations. Isn’t this only too true in many countries today?

 

Of course there are very many similar verses in Allah’s Book and also verses about how to remedy this situation. The remedy is consistently one of faith and piety and always underpinned by guess what? Fear of God!

 

So the next thing we have to do is to see what fear of God means and involves.

Fear of God, at least as far as Islamic teachings are concerned, is analogous to the healthy fear of a parent. I cannot stress enough the word healthy. That is because there is an unhealthy fear of others or things which we may call a phobia. Phobia is the other side of the coin which also features hatred. When one hates something he also fears it. Fear of a good parent (repeat, good) is not a phobia, it is the other side of the coin which also features- LOVE! This is so true that it is not only good children who both love and fear their parents but good parents also love and FEAR their good children. Fear for what? For offending, for breaking the heart of and I can assure you that it is a mighty fear which CHECKS the party who both loves and fears another party. The only exception to this rule is the relationship between God and a believing man. While the man both loves and fears God, God only loves and never fears the man or anybody or anything else for that matter.

Which means we believers both love and fear God and as a result are expected (and we expect ourselves) to avoid offending the laws of God through which He means to regulate our feelings and behaviour. This makes necessary for us to keep ourselves conscious of the watchful eye of God at all times, remain convinced that He is seeing and hearing us and responding accordingly. In this sense God becomes a policeman inside us, a policeman who never rests or sleeps but is always wakeful, watching, hearing and taking appropriate action, albeit often with delayed results, for or against us, that is to say, rewarding in due course what good we did and punishing in due course what evil we did. This can be tested almost scientifically: help a person in need and you will soon find help coming to you from most unexpected quarters at your own hour of need, let down a rightful or hurt an innocent person and a punishment visits you not long after. Which means faith in, love for and fear of God is an infallibly working system of self-guidance and self-discipline and its ultimate and overall result is personal permanent happiness for the person having them or God in his heart.  This is what I mean by inner policing: it is the most reliable law enforcement and civilised, kind behaviour maintenance system.

 

When people first begin to (foolishly) doubt the existence of God they may do two things in response. The more foolish ones feel blissfully liberated and rush to all illegal and immoral things with a lust and thirst to be seen to be believed. This happened in the past and is happening today over vast tracts of humanity, especially in the Western countries. Here most people cannot wait to indulge their senses more; topped by that ever-present sexual insatiability, all religiously banned things must be especially pursued and enjoyed to the last drop. No doubt this cannot last too long but sometime, somewhere, something snaps and the self-indulging, self-drunken sinner finds himself or herself ruined or doomed one way or another. The robber or burglar is caught and put behind the bars, the rapist the same, the heavy drinker finds himself at the hospital with a fearful prognosis and often also the prospect of a painful death, the fornicator whimpering miserably in a venereal diseases clinic and the adulterer facing the gun of a deceived spouse, for example. If nothing else indulgers of their lower senses often face each other as hostile rivals and taste violence in the hands of each other.

 

The second thing the slightly less foolish deserters of God do is trying to find a substitute for God so that people can still be policed from the inside. The first choice in this is manufacturing an atheistic yet humane conscience. This necessitates the preaching of a Godless moral ideology which is Godless only in name. God is denied, science is brought in to supposedly prove that no god exists but subtly and imperceptibly another notion is slipped in to fill the shoes emptied by God. In the simplest and most direct cases personal ‘consience’ is hoped to fill the void perfectly well. A concept like ‘Nature’, or ‘Reason, or ‘Humanity’ is proffered; each, like God, have no objective or tangible existence but unlike God is expected to function as effective inner policemen. The whole exercise comes to nothing since man cannot psychologically function in contravention of the psychology’s cardinal law of ‘carrot and stick’ or more respectfully, the law of fear and hope. This law is most masterfully employed in the Qur’an which goes out of its ways to magnify both the terrors of Hell and the joys of Paradise. Because we have already elsewhere proven the  metaphoric  nature of the unworldly verses of the Qur’an we need no go back to it. What we can say here and now is that our Creator gave us in His Qur’an all the psychological incentives to move us away from our follies to our perfect wisdom which He calls “Rushd” or psychological maturity. In His Qur’an he first ascribes this attainment to our father Abraham when He All-Gracious says “We have indeed given Abraham his rushd before, because We had been knowing him well” (21: 51). He promises and shows the way to it to all of us when He All-Gracious says:

 

“When My servants asks thee (o Muhammad) concerning me (let them know that) I am indeed Near; I come to the call of the caller on Me, therefore let them come to My call and believe in Me in order that they are guided to maturity” (2: 186).

 

We can interpret this verse quite aptly in relation to what we have been so far saying. To be like our father Abraham and his best ever son Muhammad sallalahu alaihi wa sallam we have to attend to the call of Allah our Most Gracious Lord, our Maker and constant Sustainer, believe in Him in everything He revealed to us through His Qur’an to given to His Messenger and act on it. Once we do this and persist we will see that veil after veil shall be lifted from upon our hearts and from before our spiritual eyes and we will be seeing things as we never imagined to see before, see wonderfully illuminating and instructing and guiding things behind things which we once used to see as ordinary and even at times meaningless.

 

Among the innumerable things that we will conclusively as well as most happily and permanently realise will be the reality that Allah can and is dwelling in us, seated on the throne of our inner universe, the throne called our ‘heart’ and that He is directing us from there in all our thoughts and acts. All true believers feel this sweetest and most reassuring feeling of being guided by the Greatest Power and Loving Mercy and Wisdom in existence, or rather behind all created existence. They know from first-hand experience that they can talk to God and that God is only too attentively and mercifully listening to them and granting them what need be granted and also informing them that what they are granted is just a beginning and infinitely more and better are on the way. The last quoted verse states this only too explicitly. You can read it once more and thousands of times more: it is saying what exactly we are rendering it here.

 

This is how we can have an infallible inner policing to safeguard our best interests.

But if Allah is infallible, we are not. Despite the only too clear voice of our God-cultivated conscience we sometimes fall for the seductive voice of the sirens of the Satan in us and commit wrongs. But because Allah is not only the Inner but also the Outer of things (see Surat al Hadid v.3), He supplements His inner support by outer supports and this outer support system is al Sharia or the Law of Islam. Like all laws it provides both for rewards and punishments tied to good and bad behaviour respectively. What faith calls sin law calls crime and crimes we must try to prevent and if committed anyhow then punish. Otherwise life and rights cease to be secure.

 

It is here that balance is of paramount importance: too much dependence on faith and the inner policing it is supposed to provide and you may end up engulfed in crime. Too little inner policing and almost total dependence on external policing and crime does not only soar out of control but a day comes when almost each and every crime must be granted non-criminal status. This is what exactly happened in the West: adultery and fornication, homosexuality and partially even drug abuse have been absolved of  criminality. ‘Gay marriages’ are almost glamorised, adultery is no longer a crime and the concept fornication ceased to mean anything because sexual relations of any sort between ‘consenting adults’ are now legalised. As a result the crime statistics are benefiting from the disappearance of a large mass of former crimes from among them; if they were to be added to the statistics the crime levels would appear mind-numbing. And what have we got for the decriminalisation of so many acts which used to be illegal and criminal in the past? We got an explosion in unnecessary disease statistics. We do not need syphilis, gonorrhoea, AIDS, chlamidia and all the rest of a few dozen sexual plagues, some deadly, some crippling; they are almost entirely related to sexual activities plus accidental infection of innocents.

 

It must now have become obvious that both physical and psychological health of a society cannot be maintained by external policing alone or even external policing and some inadequate spiritual substitute for God. Since the early years of the twentieth century some less well-to-do nations opted for ideologically based totalitarian regimes or rather they were conquered by the secular totalitarian ideological groups like the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Germany; both manufactured new gods and new bibles in order to benefit from the capacity for faith and for idealism in people and only with this new religion-like mental instrument and a terribly proficient intelligence and police service could they keep their citizens in check and themselves in power. For all practical intents and purposes both comrade Stalin and Herr Hitler looked like gods and ruled like one. When one of the last brutal communist dictators, namely the Romanian president Ceaucescu was executed by the anti-communist revolutionaries many people continued to believe in his quasi-divine status and visited his grave where they applied their crucifixes to his grave and to his memory just like naïve and superstitious Christians all over the world apply to their popular saints at their shrines. The dictator’s long reign did not owe little to his officially manufactured image imposed through the school system and massive and rivalless state propaganda. You see, even the hardest-boiled atheists had to exploit the capacity for religious faith and spiritual idealism in their subjects (or victims).

 

Since morality and resultant low crime rates are a thing of the past in the Western countries while the same things are endemic also in many Muslim and developing countries (minus the sexual-related in the case of Muslims) all nations are in urgent need of re-introducing a God-based conscience and morality coupled with a good enough external policing. There can be no doubt that the more inner policing we can supply to people the less external policing will be necessary and the more moral, humane and affectionately cohesive our societies will become. Amen.

 

 

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