When Friends Forsake on

When Friends Forsake on

1985 3 March 10 When Friends Forsake on (410) When the Prime Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in the early hours of Wednesday, October 31, 1984 it was two members of her own bodyguard who delivered the lethal shots. Sub Inspector Beant Singh, the elder of the two assassins, had been a trusted member of her bodyguard for eight years. Mrs. Gandhi had trusted him so much that when - a few months before the murder – a foreign reporter asked her whether she felt safe with Sikhs guarding her, she pointed to the young officer and said: “How could I not trust a man like this?” (The Muslim Daily, Islamabad, November 2, 1984). According to Newsweek magazine “Beant Singh was so trusted that he regularly was selected to drive Mrs. Gandhi’s grandchildren to school.” (November 12, 1984).

When such betrayal occurs in the world, everyone stands up in protest and abhorrence. Yet they would be even more shocked were they to realize that every relationship, every attachment, every dependence of one human being upon another, is doomed to end in much the same way. When a crisis occurs which affects one party in the relationship personally then he will forsake the other; if it is a crisis for which he holds the other responsible, then he will become the enemy of the other, who was before his trusted, and trusting, friend.

The Day of Judgment, when all mankind will have to answer for their actions before the Lord of the Universe, will be such a crisis afflicting the whole of the human race. There all relationships which were based on worldly factors will disappear. Everyone will be concerned with his or her own fate. Even “every suckling mother shall forsake her infant, every pregnant female shall deliver her burden, and you shall see mankind reeling like drunkards although not drunk; but dreadful will be God’s chastisement.” (Qur’an, 22:2). “Each man will forsake his brother, his mother and father, his wife and his children; for each one of them will on that day have enough concern of his own.” (80:34-37)

The only relationship to survive – the crisis of that day will be one which was based on common submission to God. Only those who had a mutual concern to please God, and earn redemption in the next world by spending their lives in service of Him, will remain friends on that day:

“On that day friends shall become enemies one to another, except the God-fearing.” (Qur’an, 43:67)