The Twenty-second Letter

 

• Islamic brotherhood [and sisterhood]

• Contentment and greed• Concerning backbiting

 

In His name.

There is nothing that does not glorify Him with His praise. (This letter has two chapters. The first one calls believers to brotherhood [and sisterhood] and mutual love.)

 

First chapter

 

In the name of God, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate.

Verily the believers are brothers, so make peace between your brothers. (49:10)

Repel (evil) with what is better; then he between whom and you there is enmity shall be as if he were a loyal friend. (23:96)

Those who restrain their rage and forgive people. God loves those who do good. (3:134)

 

DISPUTE, DISCORD, PARTISANSHIP, OBSTINACY, AND ENVY CAUSE RANCOR and enmity among believers, and therefore are sins that harm personal, social, and spiritual life. Truth and wisdom, as well as Islam (the viewpoint of supreme humanity) all prove this. Moreover, they poison human life. Out of this truth’s numerous aspects, we mention only six.

FIRST ASPECT: It is wrong from the viewpoint of truth. O unjust one who nourishes rancor and enmity for a believer, imagine yourself on a ship or in a house with one criminal and nine innocent persons. If someone tried to destroy the ship or the house (because of that one criminal), you would understand the magnitude of such an injustice and protest. Even if there were one innocent person and nine criminals on that ship, it would still be unjust to sink it.

A believer may be compared to a house or a ship belonging to God. Such a person has not nine, but as many as 20 innocent attributes such as belief, Islam, and neighborliness. If you cherish rancor and enmity for a believer because of one criminal attribute you do not like, and you want to destroy that ship or house created by God, your crime would be most atrocious.

SECOND ASPECT: It is 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, hostility assumes the form of pity. Believers should love—and indeed do love—their coreligionists and be pained by any evil seen in them. They should try to improve their coreligionists 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 3 days.”339 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 what a great injustice such attitudes are! If you regard worthless pebbles as more valuable than the Ka‘ba and greater than Mt. 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 Mt. Uhud) demand love and concord between believers, it is an enormous disgrace, folly, and injustice to nurture hostility for any believer. Doing so means that you prefer certain hostility-arousing shortcomings to belief and Islam!

Unity in belief requires unity of hearts, and oneness of creed demands oneness of society. 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 because you live in the same barracks. Given this, understand your intimate attachment to believers through mutual ties of unity as numerous as the Divine Names, and the bonds of accord and fraternal relations coming from the light and consciousness of belief.

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,340 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 planets together. Preferring something as frail and trivial as a spider’s web, which causes dispute, discord, rancor, enmity, and grudges toward fellow believers, shows your great disregard for such ties. You seriously offend those causes of love and transgress against those brotherly relationships!

THIRD ASPECT: According to: No soul bears the load of another (6:164), which expresses absolute justice, nurturing rancor and enmity for believers is like condemning all of their innocent attributes on account of one criminal attribute—a very great injustice indeed! If you extend your enmity to their relatives, you are the object of People are much given to wrongdoing (14:34). Since truth and Islam’s law and wisdom warn you against such a great injustice, how can you consider yourself to be right?

In the view of truth, the forms of evil that arouse enmity are in themselves evil, and they are dense like earth. They should not infect or pass on to others. But if others see others who commit them and imitate them, it becomes a different matter entirely, for such people do so more from their own inclination toward such evils than to those evils’ effective powers. In contrast, good actions and qualities spring from love, arouse love, and are luminous (for love is luminous). They are by nature transmittable. This is why we have such proverbs as: “The friend of a friend is a friend” and “Many eyes are loved for the sake of one eye.”

So, O unjust ones, consider how great an offense it is to harbor enmity toward innocent fellow believers who are worthy of love, or toward their relatives because you do not like individual believers.

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.” As we know, “the eye of contentment is too dim to perceive faults, whereas the eye of anger exhibits all vice.” So 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 it is not proper to say (carelessly and on every occasion) whatever is true. If you do, the other person may be irritated by your advice and react unfavorably, especially if your intention is not quite sincere.

THIRD PRINCIPLE: If you want to nurse your hostility, direct it against the enmity in your heart and try to remove it. Fight your carnal self 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 injurious self. 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. 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...

 

Believers are noble by nature and so will submit to you if you treat them nobly. If one believer seems to be ignoble, he or she is yet noble with respect to belief. 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:

 

If they come across vanity, they pass by with dignity. (25:72)

But if you pardon, overlook, 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. They condemn their souls to painful torment, inflict anguish upon themselves 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 physical beauty and strength, worldly rank and wealth 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.

If you rejoice when those you envy suffer misfortune and grieve when they receive a bounty, you are offended by Destiny and Divine Compassion and thus indirectly criticize and object to them. Those who criticize Destiny mean they 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 self, 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 of which you may be unaware or 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, ignore them and heed the words of Hafiz al-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 prevent your rightful enemy from presenting it as wrongful.

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, I sought refuge in God from Satan and politics and withdrew from politics.

FIFTH ASPECT: Obstinacy and partisanship only harm social life.

QUESTION: A Tradition says: “Difference among my community is a mercy.”341 Difference requires partisanship that, although a social disease, does relieve the oppressed masses from an oppressive elite that, if united, tends toward tyranny. If there are [political] parties, the oppressed may protect themselves by joining one. Also, do you agree that different opinions and ideas allow the truth to shine forth?

ANSWER: In such a context, difference is positive, meaning that it allows each side to promote and propagate its own argument, to improve and reform a competing view instead of destroying it. The Prophet rejects a negative difference, for it seeks to destroy another side because of partisan bias and hostility. Those who are at each other’s throats cannot act positively (toward each other).

Partisanship in the name of truth can be a refuge for those seeking their rights. But the current biased and self-centered partisanship is only a refuge and a focus of support for the unjust. If devilish people support those engaged in biased partisanship, such partisans will call God’s blessings upon them. Moreover, if angelic people join another side, the same partisans will call God’s curses upon them.

If people differ in the name of truth, this is only a difference of means. In reality, it is an agreement and a unity with respect to aim and basic purpose. Such a difference can reveal all aspects of truth, and so serves justice and truth. But a confrontation between biased, partisan opinions driven by egotism and fame-seeking, one engendered by a tyrannical, carnal self, only can bring forth the flames of dissension. Opposing views based upon such a source can never converge, for only differences based upon seeking the truth in the name of a united purpose can do so. Since they do not differ in the name of truth, they split into extremes and give rise to irreconcilable divisions.

In short, if their conduct is not based on exalted principles, loving, disliking, and judging for God’s sake alone, dispute and discord will result. If one ignores these principles, attempts to do justice will result in injustice. This can be seen in the following incident: Imam ‘Ali once felled an unbeliever. Just as he was about to kill him, the unbeliever spat at him. ‘Ali released him. When the unbeliever asked why, ‘Ali replied: “I was going to kill you for God’s sake. But I became angry when you spat at me, and so my intention’s purity was clouded by my soul’s inclinations. So, I did not kill you.” The unbeliever replied: “I spat at you so that you would become mad and kill me instantly. If your religion is so pure and disinterested, it must be truth.”

An incident worthy of notice: Upon seeing a judge display signs of anger while executing a sentence, the just ruler fired him. If the judge had performed his task in the Sacred Divine Law’s name, he would have felt pity and shown neither mercy nor anger. Since his soul’s inclinations had some share in his deed, he could not perform this task with justice.

The Muslim world is beset with a regrettable social condition and a perilous disease that paralyzes its social life. In short, a harmonious social life requires that internal enmities be forgotten and abandoned when the nation is confronted with foreign enemies. Even the most unsophisticated people recognize and practice this. So why do those who claim to serve the Muslim community nurse their petty hostilities at a time when numerous enemies are ready to attack us, and thereby prepare the ground for our enemies? This is nothing less than corruption, barbarity, and treachery directed against the community of Islam!

Our current situation reminds me of the Hasanan bedouins, a tribe had two mutually hostile clans. Although more than 50 had been killed on each side, whenever another tribe (e.g., the Sibkan or the Haydaran) attacked them, they would forget their tribal enmity and unite until the enemy was repelled.

O people of belief! There are more than 100 “tribes” and enemies, like a series of concentric circles, ready to attack the “tribe” of believers. At a time of assuming defensive positions and supporting each other, how can believers insist on pursuing their biased partisanship and hostile rancor and thereby facilitate the enemy’s assault and grant access to the fold of Islam?

As many as 70 circles of hostile forces, ranging from the misguided, the atheists and the people of false belief, to the vicissitudes of worldly life, are watching you. Each one looks for ways to hurt you, and studies you with anger and hatred. Your firm weapon, shield, and citadel is Islamic unity. Pursuing your petty enmities and other pretexts is a flagrant contradiction of the Muslim community’s conscience and unity, both of which are based on all believers’ feelings of unity. Come to your senses!

Prophetic Traditions report that such harmful and terrible people as Dajjal and Sufyan will lead the unbelievers and hypocrites at the end of time.342 Although they will have only a small force, they will reduce humanity to anarchy and the Muslim world to slavery by exploiting people’s worldly ambitions and dissension.

O people of belief! If you wish to avoid such a fate, come to your senses. Take refuge in the citadel of your fellow believers and fight those oppressors who exploit your differences. If you do not, you cannot preserve your lives or defend your rights. While two champions fight each other, even a child can beat them. If two mountains are balanced in the scales, even a small stone can cause one to rise and the other to fall.

So, my fellow believers, control your passions and hostile partisanship, otherwise your strength will weaken so much that even a small force can beat you. If you have any commitment to a collective life of social harmony and solidarity, make the principle of “the believers are together like a firm building, one part of which supports the other” your guiding principle in life!343 This will deliver you from humiliation in this world and wretchedness in the next.

SIXTH ASPECT: Enmity and rancor spoil spiritual life and worship, for they spoil your intention’s purity—the means of salvation. Biased partisans seek superiority over the enemy while performing good deeds and so do not act purely for God’s sake. Slanting their judgments and dealings toward their supporters, they cannot be just. Their intention becomes impure, and their justice becomes injustice, both of which void their good deeds. This aspect could be elaborated upon, further, but we keep it short to reserve space for other matters.

Said Nursi

339 Bukhari, “Adab,” 57; Muslim, “Birr,” 23; Abu Dawud, “Adab,” 47.

340 Qibla: The direction of the Ka‘ba in Mecca, which all Muslims must face during prayer. (Ed.)

341 Al-Munawi, Faydh al-Qadir, 1:210.

342 Dajjal is the Islamic counterpart of the “Anti-Christ” in Christianity. Sufyan is a type of Dajjal. Both will cause great havoc and confusion among believers.

343 Bukhari, “Salat,” 88; Muslim, “Birr,” 65; Tirmidhi, “Birr,” 18.