The Lesson of the Spring

an inferno. Those who lead their lives in this world with a violent mentality incur the great risk of being thrown into the pit of fire in the next world. According to the Quran, the inhabitants of Paradise will be peace-loving in the full sense (36:58). There, everyone’s hearts will be imbued solely with feelings of peace and love. This being so, only those will be selected to inhabit Paradise who have proved to have a peace-loving character. The present world is a selection ground. In this world, those people are selected who are peace-loving in the full sense and who deserve to be lodged in the peaceful society of paradise. This is the greatest reality which the people of Kashmir and others are invited to ponder upon. The Culture of Gratefulness What is violence? Violence stems from a culture of ungratefulness. Complaints produce violence and violence puts an end to feelings of gratitude in man. At the beginning of life, Satan threw down a challenge to God, saying: “I will surely come upon them from before them and from behind them and from their right and from their left, and then You will find most of them ungrateful.” (7:17) If you look at it from this angle, you will find that violence is not as simple as people imagine it to be. A society vitiated by the culture of violence is quite evidently under the influence of Satan. It is Satan who had first led them into complaining and subsequently into violence. Violence is a Satanic culture: violence opens the door to hell. We learn from the Quran that when God created man, He commanded Iblis to prostrate himself before man, but he refused to do so. Iblis, the leader of jinns, enjoyed many blessings of God, but on being denied one thing, (i.e. supremacy over man) he deviated from the path of gratefulness. This is ingratitude, and becoming ungrateful is, without doubt, following the way of Iblis. Whenever an individual or a group deviates from the path of gratefulness, and opts for the path of hatred and violence, the cause is always traceable to some complaint or grudge. Notwithstanding the fact that he enjoys 99 good things, just the deprivation of that hundredth thing is made such a great issue of that it dominates his mind. Despite the plethora of causes for gratefulness, he turns