Our Hearing Is in Itself a Responding: A Reflection on God's Will and Justice in the Quran

A heart that is calm in its ground, God-still, as he will,

Would gladly be touched by him: it is his lute-play.

                                                                       Angelus Silesius

Were not the eye a thing of sun,

  How could we ever glimpse the light?

If in us God’s own power’d not run

Could we in the divine delight?

                                                 Goethe

God’s wisdom is expressed in scriptures and in the Quran.  However, it doesn’t fit into our linear way of thinking and our self-serving and self-centered interpretations.  We ask ourselves ‘if God can guide anyone, why does God leave some to astray?’  ‘If God can will anything, why does God not bring a sign from the sky right now or reveal the Divine to all, so they know and bring faith?’  So, some ask, ‘why should God punish the evildoers in the Day of Judgement?’  These questions show we are lost in the labyrinth of this line of thinking.  What is wrong with it?  One thing: I forget the gift given to me for the cultivation of the self: freedom of the will to heed the light within and without, or to ignore it and thus follow my low desires (nafs) for success and pleasures, which is also within my own very soul.  I can choose.  God knows the outcome of all events, but I am in a quest to grow and love God knowingly, not mechanically, or to lose my soul.  The problem is that we have a deterministic and mechanical view of how things happen in us and in the world.  Let’s read these verses from surah Pilgrimage (22):

“There is no doubt that the Last Hour is bound to come, nor that God will raise the dead from their graves, yet still there are some who, with no knowledge or guidance or any book of enlightenment, argue about God, turning scornfully aside to lead others away from God’s path. Disgrace in this world awaits such a person and, on the Day of Resurrection, We shall make him taste the suffering of the Fire. [It will be said], ‘This is for what you have stored up with your own hands: God is never unjust to His creatures.’” (22:7-10)

God gave life and consciousness to me and paths to choose.  If I did not have the possibility of choice, then God would be unjust to punish me for spending all my life following my desires for beauty and pleasure, not caring about cultivation of my soul.  God has given every creature, not only me, a longing to heed, love, and praise God.  "The seven heavens and the earth and everyone in them glorify God. There is not a single thing that does not celebrate His praise, though you do not understand their praise: God is most forbearing, most forgiving." (17:44).

This internal and essential sense of praising God holds and sustains me and is the kernel of my longing and existence.   However, I can distance myself from this inner call and fall astray.  I have a self and an awareness responsible for my deeds.  So, God says:

“Do you not realize [Prophet] that everything in the heavens and earth submits to God: the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, and the animals? So do many human beings, though for many others punishment is well deserved. Anyone disgraced by God will have no one to honor him: God does whatever He wills.” (22:18)

Then one might ask, is this not “contradictory” to say we deserve ramifications of our actions and then “God does whatever He wills”?   This puzzlement shows a mechanical understanding and fragmentary reading of the Quran. 

It is mechanical and fragmentary, because one may think God’s omnipotence is arbitrary or can take any course, good or evil.  We are puzzled by the idea of “omnipotence” to the extent that some believe that if we say God’s will is good and cannot be evil, this bounds God to an inevitable direction and then God can’t be omnipotent!  It is obvious this question comes from the lack of imagination of a limited creature who is NOT omnipotent. 

These skeptical questions take “God does whatever God wills” devoid of “God’s justice”.  What is the problem with this kind of thinking?  Does God’s omnipotence mean that God also can become unjust if God wills?  The question is, does God have a choice to be unjust and do evil? 

But what do “choice” and “being unjust” mean?  We should remember “choice” and “being unjust” belong to our limited created existent.  Every choice for a limited being means to take a route and to lose the other.  A limited being can’t have it all.  A limited being ought to choose between better and worse, now it can be better and worse for survival, for ethical-spiritual growth, or for exertion of power.  In our everyday understanding, to be unjust means to disturb the balance of things, to be domineering, to exert power over others without rhyme and reason, to make some suffer or favor others just for whims or exploitation, to be cruel, to be selfish, or to surrender to the will-to-power.  But all these characteristics are applicable to beings who have a choice, otherwise we can’t say they can be just or unjust, or good or evil.  What about God?  Can God whimsically harm anyone? 

The point is that God is beyond choice and being determined.  We can’t gauge God’s “choice” with our understanding of human “choice”.  Because that which can choose to attend God or not attend God, to hold to the center or fall apart, can’t imagine what is to be the center.   However, the Quran says God will not be unjust to the creatures to whom God has given the gift of choosing to attend and abide with God or to accelerate away and eventually decelerate and wither away far from the center by their own choice for will-to-power: "Devote yourselves to God and assign Him no partners, for the person who does so is like someone who has been hurled down from the skies and snatched up by the birds or flung to a distant place by the wind." (22:31)  

 Islamic Pattern

The picture is like this: “everything in the heavens and earth submits to God: the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, and the animals? So do many human beings, though for many others punishment is well deserved.” (22:18).  In another word, nothing has absolute autonomy but God-Center.  Everything praises, loves, and exists in this rotation-love around the God-Center.  In the final analysis, every choice of each and every being who enjoys “choice” is to stay in the orbit of God or to depart to separation and a fallacious and destructive sense of absolute autonomy and will-to-power, analogous to a cancer cell, or a tree, an animal, or human being to escape from the vitalizing light of sun or water to their detriment.  One who has choice and chooses will-to-power rather than submitting to the sun, to the God-Center deserves destruction and suffering.  

"We showed Abraham the site of the House, saying, ‘Do not assign partners to Me. Purify My House for those who circle around it, those who stand to pray, and those who bow and prostrate themselves.  Proclaim the Pilgrimage to all people. They will come to you on foot and on every kind of swift mount, emerging from every deep mountain pass to attain benefits and celebrate God’s name, on specified days, over the livestock He has provided for them– feed yourselves and the poor and unfortunate– so let the pilgrims perform their acts of cleansing, fulfill their vows, and circle around the Ancient House.’  All this [is ordained by God]: anyone who honors the sacred ordinances of God will have good rewards from his Lord." (22:26-30) 


And this is the picture of ethical-spiritual death by Yeats:  

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi*
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

*: 'Spiritus Mundi' was a term used by W.B. Yeats to describe the collective soul of the universe containing the memories of all time. From 'Spiritus Mundi,' Yeats believed, came all poets' inspiration. Spiritus Mundi is a Latin term that literally means, 'world spirit'.

God’s Will Is Always Just

In the above surah, God states that “God is never unjust to His creatures.”  What happens that one becomes unjust?  Is the kernel of injustice not will-to-power?  Will-to-power for what purpose?  To declare absolute autonomy and indeed to become like Creator, omnipotent?  But the desire to become absolutely powerful comes from the fact that one is NOT all powerful and so one desires to become omnipotent.  It comes from a lack and indulgence in a self-destructive desire to take over and give in to pride, greed, lust, envy, and wrath--characteristics of limited dependent created beings.  Whimsical exertion of power comes from a lack.  What about the Creator who is indeed all-powerful and doesn’t lack anything, but every existing thing in the world belongs to and is governed by the Creator?  Can this Creator be unjust or desire will-to-power?  Here the question is not arbitrariness of God’s omnipotence, but the fact that ontologically and conceptually, to be unjust or to do evil are categorically excluded from God’s conception of omnipotence.  In another word, God’s omnipotence means that which renders justice and good possible, and injustice and evil belong only to creatures who are creatures and not omnipotent.   However, as that which grounds justice and good, God is beyond justice and good too.  Hence, we enter into the ineffable zone of “absolute purity”, where our concepts of “good” and “evil” or “choice” and “determinism” are not applicable. 

Thus, in the Day of Judgement, I will receive what I chose.  If I chose hedonism and ethical decay, if I chose materialism and worshipped this transient life in seeing it accidental and nihilistic, if I disregarded my existential longing for the Source and took the path of pleasure, then I have configured my body-psyche-soul by my own action and distanced myself from my divine source and lost the capacity of “hearing” and “seeing” my ontological connection to God.  In this respect, Hell is what I deserve: “This is for what you have stored up with your own hands: God is never unjust to His creatures.’” (22:10)

"Have these people not traveled through the land with hearts to understand and ears to hear? It is not people’s eyes that are blind, but their hearts within their breasts." (22:46)

When the prophet is impatient and in agony about disbelievers, God reminds him:

“If you find rejection by the disbelievers so hard to bear, then seek a tunnel into the ground or a ladder into the sky, if you can, and bring them a sign: God could bring them all to guidance if it were His will, so do not join the ignorant. Only those who can hear will respond; as for the dead, God will raise them up, and to Him they will all be returned. They also say, ‘Why has no sign been sent down to him from his Lord?’ Say, ‘God certainly has the power to send down a sign,’ though most of them do not know: all the creatures that crawl on the earth and those that fly with their wings are communities like yourselves. We have missed nothing out of the Record– in the end they will be gathered to their Lord. Those who reject Our signs are deaf, dumb, and in total darkness. God leaves whoever He will to stray, and sets whoever He will on a straight path.” (6:35-39)

“Only those who can hear will respond”, “Those who reject Our signs are deaf, dumb, and in total darkness,” –these two statements point to two sides of a coin, or the double edge of a sword: destiny and a choice.  The one who chooses not to hear cannot be guided by God.  “God could bring them all to guidance if it were His will, so do not join the ignorant,” but God’s will is justice as such and those who chose to decenter themselves from God, have already chosen being deaf and blind and live in total darkness and hence can’t hear.  God’s will-justice treats us as autonomous choosers, and to the extent that we heed God, we will receive guidance. 

The capacity to “hear” God is already embedded in our fitrat (ruh, divine essence).  As well the capacity not to hear God or hear Satan predominantly also resides in our nafs (lower soul).  If we corrupt our “hearing” through lust and empty ambitions, at certain point our likeness to God will be reduced and our likeness to evil will increase to the extent that one loses the capacity to hear God and gives an ear to Satan.  This is the Hellish state.

As Heidegger puts it:

"There was a thought familiar to the old Greek thinkers, a thought that one all too crudely portrays thus: like is only known through like.  What is meant is that what speaks to us only becomes perceivable through our response.  Our hearing is in itself a responding.  In the introduction to his Theory of Colors, Goethe refers to that Greek thought and sought to express it in German rhyme in the following manner:

Were not the eye a thing of sun,

How could we ever glimpse the light?

If in us God’s own power’d not run

Could we in the divine delight?

It seems that up till today we have not yet sufficiently pondered what the sunliness of the eye consists of and where in us God’s own power is to be found, to what extent both belong together and give the directive to a more profoundly thought human being, to humans who are the thinking creatures.” (The Principle of Reason, p.48)