Contrarian Thinking

scale, seeking thereby to obtain their supposed objectives. But without any exception whatsoever, the end result of the violence that was engineered by all of these people was just one—and that is, devastation. The same is the case with Muslims. In present times, in different places, Muslims have taken to violence in the name of obtaining justice or securing rights, but the result of this has always been counter-productive. In the wake of this violence, their conditions only became worse. One example of this is Palestine. In line with the Balfour Declaration, in 1947, Jews were given a third of the territory of Palestine while Arabs were given two-thirds, which included the whole of the city of Jerusalem. However, the Arabs did not accept this division and announced that they would push the Jews into the sea. This struggle of the Arabs was, from its very beginning, carried out by using violence, and it remains so even today. Despite, enormous sacrifices of loss and property, all that the Arabs obtained from this approach was humiliation and deprivation. According to a hadith, the Prophet frequently emphasized that “God grants to gentleness what he does not grant to harshness.” (Sahih Muslim, Hadith No. 2593) From this, we can learn that if for some reason hostility arises between oneself and another person, one’s planned response to this should be on the basis of peace, not violence. When a person adopts the method of violence, in many cases it is because he is overwhelmed with emotions.