THE BURDEN OF SUBMISSION

THE BURDEN OF SUBMISSION

How many persons can a man hold in esteem during a life which is brief as well as circumscribed? All of them are worthy of respect. All of them are honourable. All of them make pronouncements which deserve our fullest attention. All of them deserve to be emulated. But the problem is that our life span is too short. It becomes impossible to submit to so many, to obey so many. A surfeit of leaders holds us in terrible thrall. We are under severe pressure from the diversity of our aims. An outbreak of nervous exhaustion has overtaken us. Man, hemmed in by exigencies, can do nothing but yield. The forces which assault and browbeat him are too powerful. There is no way out.
Consider, for instance, the injunctions of Allah. As injunctions these are but he injunctions of Allah and nothing else. The decrees of Allah suffice for one’s life time. The sequence of do’s and don’ts is longer than the sequences of days and nights and in the meantime life itself is being pulverized by the mills of time’s vicissitudes.

In the present era man has to answer for his conduct before countless powers. What can he after all do! Should he try to become a better person, remove the dark stains which mar his inner being, assuage his hunger, bring honour to the forehead by prostrating himself or enrich his nights by offering prayers which entail standing upright, bowing down and prostration. Even if he were able somehow to do all this how will he get initiated into the secrets of statehood? “Saintly” rulers often abandon their subjects in the certainty that the Creator Himself will look after them. These rulers attend only to improving their prospects in the Hereafter. Such “Men of Allah” often become so unconcerned about their fellow creatures as if, may Allah forbid it, they themselves were the Creator. Unconcern of this nature befits only the Creator because He is not answerable to anyone. If a head of state becomes indifferent he is dubbed a headless sovereign. And a headless ruler is nothing but an ordeal for his subjects.
The problem, of course, is that winning the approbation of Allah or of men who are His creatures, are entirely different matters. It is very difficult to please both of them simultaneously. As long as the circumstances are not alike the submission cannot be alike either. And if the submission is not alike you can’t treat others alike; and if you can’t treat others alike it would be impossible to please them all. It is but natural that even the upright leaders feel worried. Even the entire span of one’s life is not enough for complying fully with the injunctions of Allah.
We should obey not only Allah but also His dear friend, the Holy Prophet. Every action of the Holy Prophet is Sunnah and it is incumbent upon us to emulate it. By recalling his sayings and ahadith we obey him, as we must. And the acts of Holy Prophet-well, if we were to do what he did in all humility, all of us would dispense with fine dresses and wear nothing but patched up clothes. The Holy Prophet was the Emperor of emperors and yet his life was more ordinary than that of the commonest man. He starved while Allah and His angles sang his praises. Never in his life did he seek revenge for personal reasons.
We believe that to be obedient to him is part of our faith and we can never really do justice to the obedience expected of us. Nor is it easy, in the course of our brief life, to acquire full knowledge of his immaculate earthly existence. We believe that we must become fully conversant with his blessed ahadith (sayings) but it is not easy for us to do that either. We have so many other things to worry about. How can we shoulder the burden of submission?
It would have been some sort of relief had the matter been confined only to the demand that we should obey Allah and His Friend. But there are other duties for us also which we must carry out. We are required to learn the Holy Quran thoroughly, to understand it, to become comersant with its insights. The problem is that our knowledge of Arabic is rather insufficient. It is not possible for everyone to acquire a thorough knowledge of the Holy Quran. It is incumbent upon us to model our life according to the Quran. It would be a blessing if we can do that but this state of blessedness cannot be attained through our own effort.
Let us suppose we would live for sixty years. Out of these years twenty are lost in sleep. Some years of our life we dispose of. We sell them in order to subsist. The pressure exerted by life is but a sort of pressure cooker. Man is getting pulverized. We labour very hard and even so cannot ensure that we would be able to meet the demands life imposes on us. Whatever we acquire never seems to suffice. The necessities breathing down our neck are always more than we can cope with.
As soon as we retire from our jobs we fall a prey to the very problems to solve which we had put in so many yours of service. The outcome is that we start looking for another job immediately after our retirement. Once more we need a house which we can rent. Once again we are weighed down by liabilities. Circumstances dictate their terms and we are kept busy carrying out the orders. But there are so many who command us. How many from among these can we obey? Necessity orders us around, ailments force us to do their bidding, society imposes its will on us and then there are the injunctions of religion and, to top it all, the directives issued by the state.
If the matter were to end here it would still be possible to get along somehow. But there are many others also to whom we must submit. The spiritual instructions of the blessed companions of the Holy Prophet are a beacon of light for us. We will follow them through thick and thin. We have to submit also to the distinguished Imams as well as to the Islamic jurisprudence. Besides these the sayings of the illustrious saints and religious scholars of proven integrity are the shining milestones which mark the road to the Truth. We have no choice but to obey them and the fact that we have no choice serves only to make us happy. Other voices also join in this chorus of commandments aimed at us. For instance, the instructions given to us by Iqbal who, at times, either orders us to fathom the very depths of the heart or to break out of the barriers of time and space. We cannot be more submissive to Iqbal than his own son. However, Allah be praised, there is still a way out. Otherwise, the danger was that there may come a time when we would feel that although committed to arrive at an understanding of Iqbal’s message we have failed in our task. The realization of our failure would be too shameful to brook. We do certainly love Iqbal. But we cannot possibly love him as much as a child loves his father. We keep his memory alive but are not his heirs. In this case, we would carry only that much burden of submission as has been allotted to us.
We are also duty bound to submit fully to the teachings of the Quaid-e-Azam. Every dictum of the Quaid possesses for us a validity of its own. His life too is exemplary. We can model our lives on it. His Islamic identity also sets an example for us. We approve of the Islamic conduct of the Quaid-e-Azam and Iqbal. That is all the Islamic conduct we would stand up for. But our religious scholars express their dissatisfaction with it and feel that it leaves much to be desired.
It is here that the main question raises its head. We live but once. So which one, out of so many lives before us, should we consider exemplary? We possess only one mind. So which one, out of so many injunctions aimed at us, should we regard as conclusive? We have only one heart. So which one, out of so many personalities, should we love? What terrible responsibility this burden of submission is!
If we believe that it is binding on us to obey the Friend (the Holy Prophet) of Allah why should the dictates of anyone else carry any weight with us? Why should we regard them as imitable? It does not matter who the others are. Even the Messiah himself would mean nothing to us. We are the slaves of the Holy Prophet. Why should we be forced to submit to anyone else? This question we put before those who call themselves the thinkers of Islam.