INTRODUCING THE QURAN

The fact is that God Almighty has created man with great potential. It is not good to suppress this potential. One should rather avail of this potential for the sake of personality development. It means converting every experience, whether good or bad into a positive experience for ourselves. It means living a life of well thought out action and not reacting to situations. This in turn results in developing our personality on intellectual lines. Positive spirituality can be termed creative spirituality. For example, there is a verse in the Quran which says with reference to the believers that, “they forgive people when they are angry” (3: 134). It means that positive spirituality is based on the principle of anger management rather than one trying to become a person who has no feelings of anger. The principle for positive spirituality can be summarized thus: turn your negative sentiment into positive response; make friends out of enemies. Adopt simple living and high thinking. Simple living and high thinking are complementary to each other. Simple living saves you from all kinds of distractions and high thinking saves you from being the victim of negative experiences. Simple living and high thinking are a sine qua non of spiritual culture. Positive spirituality is mentioned as follows in the Quran: “You are on the sublime character” (68: 4) . Sublime character is that character which is based on high thinking. If you read the Quran, you will find that it lays great emphasis on sabr (patience) (39: 10), sulh (reconciliation) (4: 128), forgiveness (42: 40), avoidance (7: 199), etc. What is the importance of these teachings? These teachings apparently seem to advocate passivity. But that is not so, for they embody great wisdom. The Quran tries to build that kind of mind which is able to manage all the affairs of life on the basis of spirituality. It is not passivity which is advocated but skill in the proper management of life’s problems. The Quran's greatest concern is to concentrate on high goals and one who wants to achieve high goals has no option but to foster the afore-mentioned qualities. He has to try to effectively manage all undesirable situations. Otherwise, he will become preoccupied by trivial issues and will fail to continue his journey towards higher goals. In the chapter of the Quran entitled Al-Shams (The Sun), you will find these verses: “He who purifies it will indeed be successful, and he who God Almighty created man as an eternal being but He divided his life into two periods—the beforedeath period and the post-death period.