TOWARDS GLOBAL PEACE

In a universe which has been forcibly subjugated to the will of God, man is privileged to have a will of his own. unnecessary clashes. Before this can happen, this principle should have to be universally recognized and adopted. There is no gainsaying the fact that our present world is one of competition, with everyone relentlessly pursuing his own ends. This being so, the only safe onward journey will be one in which people steer clear of one another whenever a clash of interests seems imminent. It is not in our hands to put an end to all such rivalry with its inevitable confrontations, for that is all part of the divine scheme of things. The sole remedy human beings themselves can offer is the scrupulous avoidance of path which is directly confrontational. That is the only way in which disaster may be averted. In the life of the Prophet, we find a number of salutary examples, such as the decision he made when he learned that the great warrior Khalid was advancing upon him with his army (AD 629). A pitched battle seemed inevitable, but the Prophet, who was at that point approaching Hudaibiyah on his way to Makkah from Madinah, promptly took his men by a different route, choosing an unfamiliar path well away from the main thoroughfare along which Khalid and his troops were advancing. By this simple stratagem, he avoided what would certainly have been a disastrous confrontation. We would do well, in the highly competitive world of today, to follow the Prophet’s example, in order to secure a safe and peaceful existence for all humankind. Converting Negative into Positive In a verse of the Quran (42: 37), true believers are stated to be willing to forgive when they are angered, or, to put it in another way, they convert their anger into forgiveness. This is an important part of the teachings of Islam, and it has been described in the Quran in different ways. For instance, at one place, it is stated that ‘good and evil are not equal’. (41: 34) If we reflect upon the whole complex system according to which our world functions, we come to the conclusion that it is essentially one of conversion. Through the conversion of matter, energy is created. Through the conversion of the soil’s nutrients, trees are grown. The cow eats grass, and the grass is converted by it into milk. Indeed, all kinds of progress depend upon this principle of conversion in the universe.