The Quran guides to the best in previous religions
Friday
Khutba by Dr Zahid Aziz,
for Lahore
Ahmadiyya UK, 27 June 2025
|
“Allah desires to explain to you,
and to guide you into the ways of those before you, and to turn to you
(mercifully). And Allah is Knowing, Wise. And Allah desires to turn to you
(mercifully). And those who follow (their) lusts desire that you should deviate
(with) a great deviation. Allah desires to make light your burdens, and man
is created weak.” — ch. 4, An-Nisā’, v. 26–28 |
یُرِیۡدُ
اللّٰہُ لِیُبَیِّنَ
لَکُمۡ وَ یَہۡدِیَکُمۡ
سُنَنَ
الَّذِیۡنَ
مِنۡ قَبۡلِکُمۡ
وَ یَتُوۡبَ
عَلَیۡکُمۡ ؕ
وَ اللّٰہُ
عَلِیۡمٌ
حَکِیۡمٌ ﴿۲۶﴾ وَ
اللّٰہُ یُرِیۡدُ
اَنۡ یَّتُوۡبَ
عَلَیۡکُمۡ ۟
وَ یُرِیۡدُ
الَّذِیۡنَ یَتَّبِعُوۡنَ
الشَّہَوٰتِ
اَنۡ تَمِیۡلُوۡا
مَیۡلًا
عَظِیۡمًا ﴿۲۷﴾ یُرِیۡدُ
اللّٰہُ اَنۡ
یُّخَفِّفَ
عَنۡکُمۡ ۚ
وَ خُلِقَ الۡاِنۡسَانُ
ضَعِیۡفًا ﴿۲۸﴾ |
While
giving advice to Muslims on various domestic, social, moral and community
issues, the Quran contains the above verses explaining certain principles which
underlie the teachings and laws of Islam. The statement here that Allah desires
“to guide you into the ways of those before you” may seem strange. “Those
before you” are the followers of previous religions, in particular Jews and
Christians. Why should Allah wish to guide us to their ways, when He sent the
Holy Prophet Muhammad with another religion, a better religion, for people to
accept? In another place the Quran says:
“He
(Allah) has made plain to you (O Muslims) the religion which He enjoined upon
Noah and which We have revealed to you (O Prophet), and which We enjoined on
Abraham and Moses and Jesus…” (42:13).
Noah was a
very early prophet in the history of the world, while Jesus was the most recent
one before the Holy Prophet Muhammad. According to this verse, the religion
revealed by Allah was always the same. Of course it is not meant that the rules
relating to prayer, fasting, charity, marriage, divorce, food, drink, etc.
taught through all these prophets were exactly the same. What is meant is that
the basic principles taught by them were the same, and these principles are:
worship of One God, taking nothing else as god besides Him, belief that humans
will be held accountable for their deeds done in this life, and the doing of
good to all those around us.
This can be seen by reading the
verses which come ten verses later, 36 to 39. Verse 36 runs as follows:
“And serve Allah, and do not set up any
partner with Him, and be good to the parents and to the near of kin and the
orphans and the needy and the neighbour of (your) kin and the alien neighbour,
and the companion in a journey and the traveller and those under your control.”
This is that religion which was
taught by all prophets, from as early as Noah to as late as Jesus, and then the
Holy Prophet Muhammad. The doing of good mentioned here ranges from doing good
to those who are most closely related to us, that is parents and other
relatives, to those with whom we have very little connection. We may have
nothing in common, in terms of race, religion or community, with what this
verse describes as “the alien neighbour”. As regards the “companion in a
journey”, it may be a complete stranger with whom our connection lasts for a
very short time, and we never see them again. Notice also that this verse
mentions “the traveller” separately from “the companion in a journey”. This
means that when those who are not travelling have any dealings with those who
are travelling, they must do them good. Those who are travelling are in a
vulnerable position. They may be passing through a place about which they know
little and where they are reliant on the local people. We know how travellers are
exploited because they are helpless and far away from home. The Quran requires
Muslims to do the opposite of this, which is to actively do good to travellers.
The last category mentioned is ”those
under your control”. These words literally translate as “those whom your right
hands possess”. Usually this is taken to mean slaves in the days when slavery
existed. Even if that were the meaning here, it is quite remarkable and
extraordinary that the Quran required Muslims to do good to slaves in the same
verse in which it requires Muslims to do good to their parents and near
relatives. In fact, these words mean anyone under your control or authority,
with whose care you are entrusted. It includes your servants, employees and
juniors, and even the animals in your care. I have said that this is the
religion taught by all the prophets. But in Islam it has been made more
perfect. Previous religious teachings were meant for particular nations only.
Their teaching of doing good to others was taken to mean by their followers as
doing good to people of their own nation and religion. Islam laid it down
explicitly that our doing of good extends to everyone, and is not confined to
people of our own religion or nation.
There is another point, made by
Maulana Nur-ud-Din, about the meaning of the statement that Allah desires “to
guide you into the ways of those before you”. He said that any good and useful
advice that was found anywhere before Islam, all the ways of following the
right path that were taught by various religions and other thinkers and wise
people to their nations before Islam, whether it was the great philosophy of
the Greeks, or the religions of the Parsees or Hindus or Buddhists, all these
have been collected together in the Quran, without omission, and preserved
permanently.
After teaching the doing of good, the
Quran goes on to describe who are the worst of people. It says:
“Surely Allah does not love people
who are proud, boastful, those who are miserly and tell people to be miserly
and hide what Allah has given them out of His grace. And We have prepared for
the disbelievers a humiliating punishment — and those who spend their wealth to
be seen by people and do not believe in Allah nor in the Last Day.” (4:36–38).
The Quran is condemning those people
who withhold their wealth from spending it to help the deserving needy and they
advise others to withhold their wealth as well from spending it on good causes.
In the 1980s in Pakistan the government introduced a compulsory system of
deducting Zakat annually from the bank accounts of all Muslims. People devised
many kinds of ways of avoiding Zakat being deducted, and there were no doubt
financial advisors who showed people the ways to avoid Zakat, in order words,
telling them to be miserly. Then the Quran here
mentions people who hide what Allah has given them of worldly wealth. In
our modern times people are hiding their wealth from the authorities of the
countries who should know which person has how much wealth, so as to tax them
accordingly. So when this verse says immediately after this, “And We have
prepared for the disbelievers a humiliating punishment”, it means that people
behaving in this way are in the category of disbelievers as far as Allah is
concerned, even if they are Muslims. The verse goes on to say that these people
“spend their wealth to be seen by people and do not believe in Allah nor in the
Last Day”. What this means is that people who behave in this way, even if they
claim to believe in Allah and the Last Day, are acting as if they do not hold
these beliefs.
Turning back to the beginning of the
first verse which I recited, that Allah desires to guide Muslims into the ways
of those who came before them, it indicates that Islam has shown respect
towards earlier religions and their sacred teachers. The followers of those
religions were in a very bad moral condition when Islam came into the world.
Islam blamed them for deviating from the original teachings of their religions
and told the world that their bad actions were not a reflection on the original
teachings of their religions or on their sacred teachers and prophets of the
past. We find today that misdeeds and misbehaviour by Muslims is attributed by
many people to Islam and the Holy Prophet, who are regarded as the cause of the
wrongdoings of the Muslims. But Islam, when it condemned the misdeeds of Jews
and Christians, never declared that their behaviour was caused by their
religions. It declared the opposite: that their behaviour was caused by their
corruption and distortion of the original teachings of their religions, and by
their going against them.
The three verses I recited at the
beginning tell us what Allah wants. The words “Allah desires” occur in each of
these verses, and then, in each case, it tells us what Allah wants for us. He
wants to explain to you and guide you, and to turn to you mercifully. His wish
to turn to you mercifully is mentioned twice. As against this, it mentions that
those who follow their lower, worldly desires of various kinds, they wish to
mislead you greatly. Then lastly, it is mentioned that Allah wants to lighten
your load because He knows that humans are weak. What this means is that a
person following his lower, worldly desires finds himself getting more and more
crushed by the need to follow those desires. He gets a burden placed on him
which he cannot lift. Man is created weak, and his weakness is exploited by
others. As opposed to this, those who follow the guidance revealed by Allah
find that Allah is always making their load lighter by making it easier and
easier for them to follow His guidance.
A verse just after these three
verses, verse 31, says this:
“If you shun the great things which
you are forbidden, We shall do away with your evil (inclinations) and make you
enter an honourable place of entering.”
Unfortunately, many Muslim scholars
have drawn up lists of sins which they call as the great forbidden things, so
that any other kind of wrongdoing is a minor sin. This has created the
impression that as long as you don’t commit what are listed as major sins, then
any minor sins you commit are forgiven, even without you repenting. This is
entirely wrong. The list of “the great forbidden things”, or major sins, that
scholars have drawn up, contains only very serious sins, such as murder, taking
the property of orphans, committing shirk, slandering the character of a
woman, etc., which are only committed by a few people. In fact, everyone thinks
that any sins they have ever committed were minor, and nor major! Maulana
Nur-ud-Din has explained that this big and small, major and minor, refer to how
close you go towards committing a sin. Any sin whatsoever, if committed
deliberately, is a serious sin. The person who commits it goes through a number
of stages before reaching the point of commission. He first thinks about it,
then plans how he will do it, and then takes practical steps leading right up
to it. But if he turns away from this path at any point, before actually
committing the sin, then all the steps he took towards committing it are
forgiven and wiped away. If every time he approaches the committing of a sin,
step by step, he pulls back from it, then gradually he will stop taking the
steps which lead up to that sin.
So may Allah enable us to continue
improving our understanding of His Holy Word and acting upon it to the best of
our ability — ameen.
Website: www.aaiil.uk