Second aspect: They are wrong from the viewpoint of wisdom.

 

Love and enmity are opposites, like light and darkness, and so their true nature cannot be combined in a single heart. If love is truly felt in a heart due to the predominance of the causes that engender it, hostility assumes the form of pity. Believers should love—and indeed do love—their brothers and sisters in faith and be pained by any evil seen in them. They should try to help them reform themselves only with gentleness, for a Prophetic Tradition states, “Believers should not be angry with each other, nor refuse to speak to each other for more than three days.”15 If the causes producing enmity predominate and hostility invades the heart, love becomes merely formal and no more than pretense and flattery.

O unfair people, see how great an injustice is rancor and enmity toward a brother believer! If you regard worthless pebbles as more valuable than the Ka‘ba and greater than Mount Uhud, you are guilty of a repugnant folly. Since all Islamic attributes like belief (as valuable as the Ka‘ba) and Islam (as splendid as Mount Uhud) demand love and concord between believers, it is an enormous disgrace, folly, and injustice to give less weight to belief and Islam than to certain faults and shortcomings which arouse hostility toward a believer but in reality are like worthless pebbles compared to Mount Uhud or the Ka‘ba.

Unity in belief requires unity of hearts, and unity in following the same principles of creed and action demands social agreement and solidarity. If you are in the same squadron as someone else, you will feel friendly toward him and so form a mutually friendly relation because you are commanded by one commander. You also will experience a fraternal relationship with another due to being from or living in the same town. Given this, there are ties of unity, bonds of accord, and fraternal relationships generated by the light and consciousness of belief as many as the Divine Names which belief makes manifest to you. For example:

Both of you serve the same One Creator, Sovereign, Object of Worship, Provider... so there are as many ties between you as there are Divine Names. Your Prophet, religion [Islam], and qibla are one and the same, and the number of such ties amount to almost a hundred. Your town, country, and state is one, and tens of things are one and the same for you.

These ties require unity and oneness, union and concord, love and brotherhood. Such immaterial chains are strong enough to link all the planets together. If, despite all this, you prefer things as frail and trivial as a spider’s web and that cause dispute, discord, and rancor, and cherish enmity and grudges toward fellow believers, you must understand—unless your heart is dead and your intelligence extinguished—how great is your disregard for those ties of unity, and how seriously you are offending those causes of love and transgressing against those brotherly relationships!

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi

15 Bukhari, Adab, 57; Muslim, Birr, 23; Abu Dawud, Adab, 47. (Tr.)