Fourth aspect: It is wrong from the viewpoint of personal life.

 

Fourth aspect: It is wrong from the viewpoint of personal life. Consider the following four principles that are the basis of this aspect:

FIRST PRINCIPLE: When you know your way to be right and your opinions to be true, you may be justified in saying, “My way is right and better.” But you cannot say, “Only my way is right.” According to the principle, “The eye of contentment is too dim to perceive faults, whereas the eye of anger exhibits all vice,” your unjust view and distorted opinion cannot judge between the ways, and should not condemn another’s way as wrong.

SECOND PRINCIPLE: Whatever you say should be true, but you have no right, nor is it true, to say (carelessly and on every occasion) whatever is true. For those who are not so sincere as you may be irritated by your advice and react unfavorably.

THIRD PRINCIPLE: If you want to nurse your hostility, direct it against the enmity in your heart and try to remove it. Also, be an enemy to your evil-commanding soul and its fancies and try to reform it, for it is your most dangerous enemy. Do not nurse anger and hostility toward believers to please that harmful soul. If you cannot remove this enmity, there are many unbelievers and heretics deserving enmity. As the attribute of love deserves to receive love, enmity deserves to receive enmity.

If you want to defeat your enemy, meet evil with good, for responding with evil increases enmity. Even though outwardly defeated, such people nurture rancor and enmity in their hearts. Believers are noble by nature and so will submit to you if you treat them nobly. Even if one believer seems to be ignoble, he or she is yet noble with respect to belief. If you respond with good, they will repent and become your friends, as expressed in the couplet:

If you treat the noble nobly, they will be yours,

But if you treat the ignoble nobly, they will revolt.

If you repeatedly tell someone that he or she is good or bad, it is often observed that he or she becomes good or bad respectively. So heed the following sacred principles established by the Qur’an, for happiness and salvation are found therein:

When they happen to pass by anything vain and useless, they pass by it with dignity. (25:72)

Yet, if you pardon, forbear, and forgive, God is All-Forgiving, All-Compassionate. (64:14)

FOURTH PRINCIPLE: Those who indulge in rancor and enmity wrong and transgress their own souls, fellow believers, and Divine Compassion. For they condemn their souls to torment whenever they see their enemies obtain a blessing or advantage, and suffer pain because they fear their enemies. Enmity arising from envy is the severest torment, for envy consumes and destroys the envious while leaving the one envied untouched or largely untouched.

If those ensnared in such envy want to be cured, let them ponder the fate of what or who engenders such envy. Doing so will cause them to see that the physical beauty and strength, and the worldly rank and wealth, which they see their enemies have, are transient. Their benefit is slight, but the trouble they cause is great. If you envy others because of their merits with respect to the Hereafter, you are either a hypocrite who wants to use up here the rewards to be paid in the Hereafter, or unjustly consider the object of your envy a hypocrite or ostentatious.

If you rejoice when those you envy suffer misfortune and grieve when they receive a bounty, you are being offended by the good done to them by Destiny and Divine Compassion and thus indirectly criticize and object to them. Those who criticize Destiny strike and break their heads on an anvil; those who object to Compassion are deprived of it.

How can justice and sound conscience accept that you elevate something unworthy of even one day’s enmity to cause a year of rancor and enmity? Moreover, you cannot attribute any evil you have suffered at his or her hand to a fellow believer alone for three reasons: Destiny has a part in allowing it, so accept it quietly; consider the share of Satan and the evil-commanding soul, which will cause you to pity—and not resent— your fellow believer who was defeated by them; and God may use such people to punish you for a defect which you tend not to see or you keep secret.

By responding to the remaining small share with tolerance, forgiveness, and magnanimity, you will conquer your enemy swiftly and safely, and will avoid any wrongdoing and harm. Otherwise, you will be like a drunken or crazed merchant who buys ice and glass fragments at the price of diamonds. In other words, you will respond to worthless, transient, and insignificant affairs with violent, persistent hostility and permanent rancor, as if you and your enemy would remain in this world forever. Such an attitude leads to excessive wrongdoing, drunkenness [in the sense of being unaware of reality], and a kind of insanity.

If you care about yourself, do not allow enmity and desire for revenge, both of which are so harmful to your life, to enter your heart. If they are already in your heart, do not heed them; instead, heed the words of Hafiz ash-Shirazi: “The world is not a commodity worth contending for.” The world is worthless because it is transient. Given this, understand how insignificant are its petty affairs! Hafiz also says:

The tranquility of both worlds lies in two things: Magnanimity toward friends and the wise management of enemies.

If you say, “But I have no choice, for enmity is part of my nature. Moreover, these things angered me and so I cannot overlook them,” I respond, “If you do not act badly, such as backbiting, or under the influence of such impulses toward those for whom you cherish enmity, and if you are conscious that you err, it is harmless. For awareness of your error and admission that your evil impulse is wrong means repenting and seeking God’s forgiveness, which will deliver you from its evil consequences. This is why I wrote this section— so that you might seek forgiveness, distinguish right from wrong, and might not publicize your enemy who is in the right as being in the wrong.”

A case worthy of notice: I once saw a partisan yet pious scholar of Islam condemn another pious scholar of a different political opinion by implying that the latter was an apostate, and then respectfully praise a fellow partisan hypocrite holding his own view. Appalled at such an evil result, saying, “I seek refuge in God from Satan and politics,” I withdrew from political life.

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi