Islam why do good people suffer

The movement, founded by Muhammad bin 'Abd al-Wahhab d. The movement considered the Ottomans and their Muslim supporters, as well as Sufi orders, Shi'i sects, and proponents of rationalist orientations within Islam, to be heretical apostates who must repent or be put to death.

The movement meted out the same treatment to Muslims who did not follow the strict code of practice adhered to by the Wahhabis.

Relying on its very narrow understanding of orthodoxy, Wahhabism espoused a deep distrust of human subjectivity, creativity and intellectualism, and it banned philosophy, music, dance, romantic poetry and practically all forms of artistic expression.

But what started as a marginal movement limited to the hardened desert Arabs of Najd was supported by enormous reserves of oil money and protected by Western powers eager to secure favourable oil concessions, and it eventually spread throughout the Muslim world. In one respect, modern, Islamic, militant extremism, or what some have come to call jihadi movements , represent a clear failure of religious happiness, especially when such movements take the form of a persistent theology of rage, anger and condemnation.

In a piece written some years ago, titled "The Orphans of Modernity," I described the general state of dispossession and alienation felt in so many Muslim cultures due to the invasive and disruptive effects of colonialism and modernity, which severed the ties between Muslims and their inherited, native intellectual and moral traditions - the cumulative historical legacy in which they anchored and also negotiated their sense of distinctive and collective identity.

The colonial and postcolonial eras were periods of numerous social and political upheavals that only exacerbated the sense of alienation and disempowerment felt in most Muslim cultures, as the collective memory of historically anchored institutions, normative categories, and epistemological traditions were dismantled, lost and became extremely difficult to retrieve or reconstruct.

Puritanical movements sought to overcome these feelings of displacement and loss of identity, and the resulting sense of disempowerment, by adopting highly reactive modes of thinking that emphasized highly symbolic displays of power, defiance and patriarchy. Part of the mechanics of purity, absolutism, and efforts at self-empowerment is the production of modes of thinking that may be called fault- and judgment-centred. What I mean are modes of thinking that are preoccupied with the idea that humans have historically failed God, and that because of this failure, they deserve God's wrath and punishment.

Muslim puritanism had to place itself in a position to judge the failures of other Muslims and, at the same time, to judge its members' own success or fidelity to God's plans.

To be empowered in such a fashion, puritanism had to assert that it and it alone understood God's straight path, and it had to usurp the domain of judgment and condemnation. Therefore, these puritans saw themselves not only as the people who could see that Muslims had deviated from the righteous path, but also as the possessors of the hope for reconciling with the Divine.

From the puritanical point of view, the vast majority of Muslims are responsible for bringing God's wrath and punishment on themselves by deviating from the straight path of the Lord, and they the puritans hold the key to resolving any feelings of disempowerment and defeat by bringing about an end to God's wrath.

The puritanical mindset is prone to casting feelings of disempowerment and displacement, felt at any particular time, as the result of historical failures that burden subsequent generations with the sins of their forefathers. Not surprisingly, puritanical movements tend to be unsympathetic to narratives of social suffering because, from the puritan perspective, any current hardship or misery in the Muslim world is simply Muslims' just desert for their impiety and disobedience.

This mindset also explains the intolerance of puritanical movements towards co-religionists, who are seen as impious or heretical, and the irreverent and highly selective attitude that puritans exhibit towards the collective, inherited Islamic tradition. In their most extreme form, these puritanical orientations glorify suicide bombings as a form of sacrificial catharsis that is performed with a sense of deluded heroism. Having despaired of the possibility of happiness on this earth, the suicide bomber sacrifices himself or herself in the belief that his or her own death, and the death of Muslim victims in particular, will help to absolve the umma the totality of Muslims everywhere of its failures before God.

The bomber focuses on what he or she believes is a life of happiness in the hereafter and believes that any Muslim casualties are part of the necessary price that Muslims must pay as a result of having broken their covenant with God. The suicide bomber sees himself or herself as a martyr, forcing fellow Muslims to pay the price of resistance, a price that must be paid to earn Divine victory. In many ways, suicide bombing, if religiously motivated, is a total failure of religious happiness.

True earthly happiness is imagined to have existed only in a highly idealized historical moment, during which the Prophet and his companions are believed to have founded a utopia in Arabia. Puritans believe that this utopia was lost only after Muslims betrayed God's law and indulged their whims and base desires.

Only through pious adherence to God's law will Muslims once again deserve God's grace and victory and become capable of recreating the imagined utopian state in which they enjoyed dignity and justice. This didactic and mechanistic logic locks Islamic puritanism into a cycle in which the utopian ideal becomes an instrument of judgment and condemnation, while the unattainability of the ideal creates significant pressure that leads to spiralling frustration and radicalization.

Whether in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran, puritanical movements do tend to generate a considerable amount of social unhappiness and desolation. Not all puritanical movements resort to suicide bombings or political violence. Furthermore, not all puritanical groups believe that Muslims have no sanctity because they are deserving of God's wrath and punishments.

However, the modalities of thought in puritanical movements have a consistently demoralizing and dehumanizing effect that persistently undermines the possibilities of social and moral happiness, and thus, undermines the very purpose of the Islamic faith.

I call these modalities, and the way in which they set forth norms that generate repetitive social consequences, the modalities of pietistic affectations and stereotyped determinations. Puritanical movements insist on a simple and straightforward premise: if humanity piously follows the straight path set forth by Islam, people will attain the twin goals of well-being and happiness in this life and in the hereafter.

In most cases, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this conviction or the intentions of those who adhere to it. The fact is, however, that the lived experience of puritanical Islam persistently sets in motion processes that invariably lead to social vulgarization and dehumanization. I do not believe that the failures of puritanism are necessarily in its objectives or purposes, but rather, in its modalities of thinking that doom those who fall under the authority or control of puritanical movements to a state of frustration and unhappiness.

What I mean by stereotypical determinations are responses that lock Islamicity within a narrow space of interpretive or constructive possibilities. A stereotyped response is reactive, and to the extent that it affirms a picture of orthodoxy in order to reassert an authoritative image of Islamicity, it is a form of religious affectation.

Stereotyped responses assume a narrow view of Islamicity and, then, seek to reproduce this view as an affirmation of orthodoxy within a specific sense of presupposed determinations. In other words, stereotyped responses are premised on a narrow view of what is truly and authentically Islamic and what is not, and also on the dogmatic exclusion of alternatives.

The Islamic intellectual heritage contains many possibilities of creative interpretation, and the Shari'a tradition, in particular, is rich and highly diverse. Stereotyped responses, however, significantly narrow the range of constructive possibilities by restricting potential creative interpretive activity by dogmatically limiting the tools of determination - tools such as text, reason, or custom.

It is much easier, but also dangerous, to deal with life's challenges by identifying the relevant facts, not through sociological and cultural experiences but through a religiously motivated, imaginary construct. Instead of dealing with the full complexity and richness of life and with challenges on their own terms, the religious-imaginary limits what are considered to be the relevant facts in such a way as to avoid having to deal with challenges in the first place. In this situation, life is not experienced and studied in its full richness and diversity; rather, the process of living itself is conceptualized in highly stereotyped forms that have little to do with material culture or lived experience.

Consequently, challenges are not dealt with through a dynamic of systematic analysis, and social problems are not treated from within an exhaustive analytical framework. Instead, the stereotyped forms that are used to respond to challenging facts and difficult problems sustain and perpetuate certain fictions of performance or pietistic affectation.

In effect, instead of wrestling with contexts and contingencies, practitioners rely on convenient fictions that allow them to avoid confronting the reality that exists on the ground, and they respond to constructed fictions through stereotypical determinations that affirm, and do not challenge, these constructed fictions.

Stereotyped responses that ignore the nuances of history and life do not just stunt the development of Shari'a as a field of normative discourse; they often stunt the development of serious ethical evaluations, social development of standards of reasonableness, and the cultivation of shared human and humane values.

This occurs because practitioners fall into the habit of avoiding the pain of wrestling with uncomfortable facts, and the escape into ready-made dogma acts to dull the intellect and hamper the continual development of a critical sense of moral responsibility. Archetypal symbolism plays a prominent role in puritanical orientations as an elaborate system of pietistic performances that affirms and perpetuates doctrinally constructed images of genuine Islamicity. Very often, these constructed images are vigorously and irrationally asserted and defended at the cost of a vibrant discursive dynamic that would allow for the critical regeneration and reconstitution of Islamic norms.

Of course, the silencing of alternatives is not something practiced by puritans alone, but the tension between the expectations set by puritans as the bearers of the symbols of Islamicity, and the complex and unyielding reality of Muslim societies, leads to a particular, recognizable dynamic.

The gap between the constructed Islamic ideal of the puritan, and the highly contextualized and contingent Islamicity of the average Muslim, creates a challenging and tense situation. Attempts to forcibly impose the constructed Islamic ideal are met by numerous acts of resistance by average Muslims, which often brings puritanical Muslims into full confrontation and conflict with their native societies. Such conflict often leads puritans to ignore the growing gap and friction between the ideal and reality and to adopt pietistic affectations that distil and encapsulate the whole idea of Islamicity into highly symbolic performances of piety.

Since the s there has been enormous growth among movements that emphasize symbolic performances - such as forms of attire, facial hair, smells and perfumes, or specific expressions and phraseology - as representations of genuine Islamicity.

Of course, symbolic performances of religiosity are not problematic. What is problematic is when these performances become a form of pietistic affectation that compensates for or conceals social tensions and frustrations.

While stereotyped responses to complex and contingent social realities lead to a great deal of social frustration and unhappiness, pietistic affectation only ignores and conceals the existence of this unhappiness.

From the earliest narratives of Islamic history, and to this very day, there have always been believers who find happiness to be a rather uncomfortable subject.

To their minds, happiness seems to be an indulgence that does not correlate with the purportedly stern and sombre deliberativeness that is needed to submit to God. This attitude towards happiness, however, runs afoul of cumulative and redundant historical narratives that portray the Prophet of Islam not only as a joyous, serene and tranquil person, but also as someone who cherished and celebrated happiness.

The Qur'an bolsters this impression by emphasizing the importance of happiness to faith in God, and the importance of faith to happiness. The real issue has always been how one understands submission to God. Submission to God is not simply obedience or servitude to God; submission to God also means aspiring to and seeking the goodness of God, and liberating one's soul and being from a state of godlessness in order to attain a state of Godliness.

As numerous Muslim theologians have argued, to grow into and with God's love is the epitome of fulfilment, goodness and happiness. The key that unlocks this process is self-knowledge, knowledge of others and ultimately, knowledge of God. In my view, happiness is possible only if people are free to grow with and into God.

However, when submission becomes a formulaic relationship based not on knowledge, grace and love, but on generalized stereotypes about history, societies and people - indeed, when submission becomes a relationship based on a stereotyped understanding of one's self dealing with a stereotypical understanding of an omnipotent but inaccessible God - unhappiness will become the norm. What Quran says about them? They would be in Jannat or Jahanum.

How to get hasanat everyday. The punishment for breaking the fast in Ramadaan with no excuse. Thanks There may be some grammatical and spelling errors in the above statement. Answer: Why good people suffer?

Allah Says in the Holy Quran Chapter 3 Surah Ale-Imraan verses Allah's object also is to purge those that are true in faith, and to deprive of blessing those that resist faith.

Therefore one should never volunteer or challenge Allah Subhanah to test him, but rather follow the Sunnah of the Prophet saws and always pray to Merciful Lord to not test him beyond his capacity, or lay upon him the severe trials and tribulations that He laid upon the people before him; but when put in a trial and affliction according to the Plan and Decree of Allah, one should pray for Mercy and patience, and stay steadfast on the Straight Path.

Your Brother in Islam, Burhan. Why did the three big religions originate in the Middle East? Subject: Mens awrah Asalaamu Aleikum I was wondering, when one looks at the awrah of a female, many believe that only the hands and face are allowed to be revealed right? Well Alhamdoelilah, i dont Recommended answers for you:. Charity aayahs and hadiths. Three types of Tawheed. Dua from good brother. As for the One with perfect Knowledge and perfect Ability, He does not restrict Himself to a single action or type of action, for that would be a flaw in His Sovereignty.

At the same time, it is due to His Wisdom that, because humans are not identical, they are not treated identically, for that would be contrary to His perfect Justice. In many cases, it is none other than the phenomenon of evil which sets the stage for the manifestation of those Divine Attributes.

Tests by nature necessitate a person grappling with challenges and overcoming obstacles before being crowned successful. Should anything other than that be expected of our test called life?

But when this erroneous perception is avoided, people can recalibrate their perspectives and become resolute for the uphill climb of their brief lifetimes. These verses are particularly valuable in the theodicy discussion, for they help us realize that being subjected to good and evil are not just a test of conduct but also a test of faith—a litmus test for doubts, not just desires.

Once we do, we not only find the One with the answers but find out that He Himself is the answer. Then, God endowed us with the ability to discern good from evil [] and sent us forth in this life for our mind, heart, and limbs to undergo examination []. If we avoid corrupt indoctrination and misguided inclinations, we will remain upright in all our affairs.

Since life was intended as a test, this test would be meaningless without us possessing a degree of free will. Otherwise, how can our enactment of good be commendable or evil be reprehensible if we are like feathers in the wind, with no agency whatsoever? Resigning oneself to the fact that one can only see pixels while God sees the entire picture is a huge test of intellectual humility.

Accepting that you are like the ant on the carpet who sees the masterpiece it walks on as a chaotic jungle calls for the greatest dose of humility. Ibn al-Jawzi d. This recognition obligates it to forgo [objecting to] whatever of this [wisdom] is hidden from it.

Whenever a specific matter is unclear to it, it would hence be incorrect to then determine that the principle itself is invalid. What possible wisdom could there be in a young innocent child being killed? In the story of Prophet Moses and al-Khidr [], those apparently pointless evils were unveiled to show us the subtle strands of hidden detail in the Divine tapestry.

This story demonstrates that we quite often cannot comprehend the ultimate wisdom behind apparent evils. Little did Moses peace be upon him realize that damaging that boat prevented it from being forcefully taken by a pirate-king and that killing that sinless child was out of ultimate mercy for both him and his parents, sparing them all a greater evil had he grown to maturity among them.

In reality, though, these laws set this world as it was meant to be, and are there in order for life to serve as a stage for the test of life. Events have to exist that call for confidently appealing to God in supplication, courageously rescuing those in danger, and selflessly serving those in need. It is true that the laws God created to make life possible, stable, and enjoyable, are the same laws that sometimes make life painful and uncomfortable.

The melting of glaciers does irrigate the land and quench the thirst of people and animals but may also result in destructive floods. Lightning provides plants with nitric oxide but may sometimes fatally strike down a human being. However, in all these cases, God created a natural law that offers a far greater good for the world than the occasional evil it causes. That greater good includes, but is not limited to, the ability to engage a comprehendible reality natural laws and the evaluation of how our will is used in light of that reality.

When sizing up our transient lives in this world, measuring them against the life of the hereafter, the problem of evil and suffering disintegrates. What are 70 years of supposed misery measured against, not 70 trillion, but endless years of unimaginable bliss? Once they die, they awaken. It is common to find atheists aggregating the incidents of evil in the world, piling them together to evoke the emotions of their audience, attempting to persuade people to anger against God.

By appealing to emotion, they seek to highlight these pains and sufferings as if they were not exceptions but the rule. Did you experience any distress? I did not experience any distress; I did not see a single hardship. The ugliest atrocities like those committed by Hitler and Stalin, or those perpetrated against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the saddest crises like those of starving children collectively amount to near nothing when compared to everlasting life.

In reality, it is atheism that has to grapple with the problem of evil, not those who see this life with all its hardships as a shadow-world next to the enjoyment of the next life. The believer whose mind is illuminated by revelation understands that just as the dead earth is brought to life each spring, and just as we were unliving and came to life before birth, our death will not be our end but rather just the beginning—transitioning to a new life where every annoyance and pain will be forgotten.

It is interesting how some people mock the pursuit of Paradise, but at the same time embrace painstaking years of study in order to earn a degree, to put some food on the table and a roof over their heads.

To secure a home with limited walls no matter how spacious , and some food for energy no matter how delicious , we all consider it fair to invest and toil for years, yet some find it unfair to work for an unending unimaginable bliss. Therefore, although a mindful Muslim sees the problem of evil as making this life more meaningful, and hence remains immune to nihilism and apathy, he or she simultaneously sees the problems of life as seeds to cultivate their true life in the hereafter.

Indeed, they see it [as] distant. Far from being distant or indifferent, Allah God as described by authentic revelation loves to give and forgive, even those who continue to get and forget.

Simply put, that is His unique Sublime Nature. But for this forgiveness to take place, there must exist sins and sinners. If Allah wished for humanity to be sinless angels, that would not have been difficult for Him, but who then would these beautiful Divine traits envelop? Who would God redeem, and who would be mended after breakage by the Most Merciful? Some may argue that a doctor would readily remove the painful element of treatment if he could, so why does God not purify souls without pain?

What Ibn al-Qayyim suggests here is that it is the pain itself that serves to purify the wicked soul. Without repentance, indulgence in sin continues to desensitize its doer and blind them from seeing anything but their next moment of prohibited pleasure. Just before they finish spiritually strangling themselves with these sins, and just before their faith bleeds its last drops, God rescues them from accelerating any further down that slippery slope to their doom.

This rescue comes in the form of a Divine reprimand and sometimes arrives just before their lives expire in heedlessness, by afflicting them or those near them.

On the individual level, consider a person dying a slow and painful death from a terminal illness; most would judge this at face value as utterly tragic. The medicines failing his body, and the loved ones streaming tears at his bedside, finally might bring forth a humility and brokenness in his spirit that qualifies him for salvation.

Lastly, sacrificing a part to preserve the whole—when necessary—is something all prudent people find to be reasonable. Good and evil are two sides of the same coin, an inseparable cosmic pair that need each other to exist. Valor cannot exist without peril, forgiveness cannot exist without offense, and perseverance cannot exist without obstacle. The delight of satiety is only known to those bitten by hunger, and feeling quenched is only savored by those who experience thirst.

There must be some manifestations of evil in order to attain the virtue of conquering them. As Hubert S. God deemed that there must be sickness, so that we would pursue and enjoy health, and that there must be failure, so that we would be interested in accomplishment.

We will savor nothing of our lives on this earth unless we also taste its bitterness on our tongues, and feel its regrets streaming down our cheeks. Without suffering, pleasure would also cease to exist. Such a scenario in which we are all equal—knowing neither pleasure nor pain—is counter to reality.

With individuality and intelligence comes recognition of gain and loss—and thus recognition of pleasure and pain. The two are inseparable. Well, for the atheist this is a non-issue. God cannot be blamed because God does not exist. Chance created everything; chance determined that a random person would have experiences that would motivate him to murder 26 individuals who per chance were his victim on that fateful day. That is not to say atheists even slightly endorse, justify, or anything less than condemn this horrible act.

It merely points out that if God has no role, then any pleasure or suffering we understand is mere chance.