ENJOINING GOOD AND FORBIDDING WRONG

ENJOINING GOOD AND FORBIDDING WRONG Replace Evil with Good I N various parts of the world today, Muslims are engaged in acts of violence. If they are told to stop this, they claim: “We are only doing what the Prophet of Islam commanded us to.” In this regard, they cite a Hadith that orders the believers to rectify a wrong: He who amongst you sees something wrong should try to rectify it with the help of his hand; and if he has not strength enough to do so, then he should do it with his tongue, and if he has not strength enough to do so, then he should abhor it in his heart, and that is the least of faith. (Sahih Muslim) This Hadith is cited by some people in order to claim sanction for violence, although actually the Hadith does not mention violence. This Hadith speaks about reforming or rectifying a wrong. If one does not have the ability to rectify the wrong, then the Hadith says, one should speak out against it. The Hadith certainly does not say that on seeing something wrong one must begin to unleash violence against people or resort to suicide-bombing. One cannot derive sanction for violent activities from this Hadith. This Hadith talks about taghayyur-e-munkar, which means rectifying or remedying a wrong. The Arabic word taghayyur means ‘replacement’. Hence, in the above Hadith, the word taghayyur means replacing a condition of evil or wrong with a condition that is not evil or wrong. In other words, this Hadith ordains the reforming of a certain condition, not engaging in conflict and causing destruction. The well-known Arabic dictionary Lisan alArab explains the word taghayyur as follows: ‘Taghayyur means to change something. That is, to change it into something that it had not been earlier’. The eleventh-century Muslim scholar of Quranic exegesis and the Arabic language, Raghib al-Isfahani (died 1108 CE) has written a dictionary of Quranic terms, Al-Mufradat fi Gharib al-Quran, in which he explains the word taghayyur thus: “It is said ‘I changed (taghayyur) my house’, which Almost all Muslims are involved in violence some way or the other, because those Muslims who are not directly engaged in this violence are silent about it.