Wednesday, 17th December 2014
The present turbulent world is heading towards the wilderness of conflict, hate and mistrust. For centuries advocates of religions have been promoting noble values and a culture of peaceful co-existence with adherents of other faiths, despite the wars that were often given religious justifications. Despite St Augustine’s relentless work on laying the principles of “just war” in order to de-legitimise unnecessary and unethical conflicts, there remains visible absence of the culture of compassion, love and mercy. How can we establish a society of peace and love while evil is establishing foothold in our communities? How can people of religion disseminate the values of mercy and compassion to defeat those of exclusion and takfir?
Chairman: The topic of our discussion today is mercy, compassion and love in Christianity and Islam. Perhaps nothing could be more pertinent on a day when we have seen deaths from Sydney through to Pakistan. The most hard hearted of individuals could not but be shocked at the level and scale of violence that is emerging across the globe. It seems to be something unprecedented. I can’t remember in my life time such a scale and callousness of violence and barbarism that seems to be taking place. For our Christian/ Muslim/non faith members – virtually anybody is shocked.
Living in a Western society we are separated from conflict in the real sense that we see in the rest of the world. We are often numbed into ambivalence with the level of violence that we are subjected to from television and the media. We become blasé about far away conflicts which do not seem to relate to us. It is often very hard to feel empathetic towards problems when they become so common place.
We have 9/11 and 7/7 as a major reference point when viewing conflict from a Western perspective. In reality conflicts go well beyond that and well beyond just the religious element and what is today en vogue the Islamic terrorism that we are constantly bombarded with. Religion is therefore hugely pertinent not so much in conflict resolution but in analysing the root causes of conflict and perhaps also the solutions.
This is something I fight with journalists about often. I come from the world of media and one of the things we are increasingly failing to do is to contextualise and investigate the root causes of conflict and also be bold enough to pose solutions. For me these are two or three fundamental failings within the media world which actually acerbate conflict and perhaps fail to help the public get to the root causes and also gear them towards solutions.
I have seen the word of ethics come up several times in the introductory paper and that fascinates me. The words love, compassion, mercy – all these pop up in both Christianity and Islam and I hope we are going to get erudite and lucid exposes of what these mean to the Muslim and Christian faith. We are hoping that the speakers will give us an idea of the root causes of these problems that are out there and perhaps solutions as well.
Robin Marsh; Secretary General of the Universal Peace Federation: I am going to talk about God’s love for Cain. This is the subtitle. You know the story of Cain and Able. Both Cain and Able have to make an offering and Able’s offering is accepted and Cain’s is rejected. We see the first human family, the first conflict and the first murder. There is a tendency to look at Cain as the evil one for such an evil action.
Both Cain and Able made an offering to God which did not need to be offered. Having offered it and having been rejected Cain was given a warning that sin was crouching at his door, in the sense of pouncing. Sin was ready to jump on him if he moved in the wrong direction.
Going back to the first human family in the biblical sense it draws into the mixture the fall: the breakdown of relationships between the arch angel and Adam and Eve and God and the sense of jealousy of Cain for position. Able is the second son. In once sense he is the victim but the question is how good is Able at wining the heart of Cain. We often look at Cain but how good is Able in winning over the insecurity, the feeling of being unjustly done to and the sense of jealously. There is the sense of lack of value that Cain feels before his younger brother who may be seen as not so capable as him.
We have to look at what Cain does and what Able does. How does Able express this heart of love and care for his older brother who feels that he has been wronged? He could say I don’t know what happened – maybe I got luckily. Somehow if it was possible to touch the heart of Cain and unity could have been achieved to restore and re-establish the proper order that was meant in God’s realm before the fall.
If we look at a couple of twins: Jacob and Esaw we can see the dynamic. Esaw feels wronged by Jacob. Maybe he is deceived and tricked. To save his life Jacob is sent to his uncles where he starts to re-establish understanding and a deepening of his heart and he establishes a foundation both materially and spiritually, he works incredibly hard, sleep is driven from his eyes. He goes through a course of 21 years of maintaining that he has been deceived himself. He experiences the same heart as his older brother.
After gaining a foundation of wealth and also spirituality he experiences the preciousness of God and God guiding him. He also gets wise advise from his wife – previously he got wise advise from his mother. Then he has to return. He returns to his older. His older brother meets him with a small army. Jacob could do a number of things. Maybe he could run and buy some mercenaries with the money that he has. Maybe he could do something else to try to escape. But he offers all he has to his older brother who has had a difficult 20 odd years not being able to do anything correctly and not being able to receive any of God’s blessing.
But the source of God’s blessing – coming to Jacob is given and offered to his older brother and his older brother’s heart is touched by humility: Jacob humbling himself, saying I see the face of God in you and Esaw is touched. I am sorry I am just glossing over these stories – there is so much more in them.
In this way the older brother is touched and he is completely changed and God’s blessing pours on both of them. So the source of God’s blessing for Esaw was actually Jacob. By uniting with Jacob, Esaw could receive God’s love and God’s blessing in the same way that God’s love for Cain would come through Able by making unity with Able and humbling himself before his younger brother. This channel of love would then be expressed from God to those who are further from God through those who are closer.
We therefore have a responsibility – we who have faith, we who receive many blessing, we who are well cared for to share our blessings. A number of times we need to grow in our personal relationship with God in order to understand how to share that blessing. It is always difficult to know what is the realm beyond us. Scriptures are a guide, our text book through which we can gain insight.
Our individual relationship with God is also our day to day guide. So the presence of God and the diminishing or growth of that relationship according to our daily actions in the spiritual life is really -together with scripture -our guide to how we can mature as an agent of God to express his mercy and compassion to those who don’t experience that.
So faith has both inclusive and exclusive tendencies. My own community the Universal Peace Federation has a slogan of building one family of God. There is the sense of all of humanity being one family under God: whether a person believes in God or does not; whether a person has a different faith to you or not. Each person has an equal and sacred value and each person is loved by God.
You may treat someone incorrectly. Maybe Able is arrogant. He looks down on Cain because his offering was rejected. God has a feeling about that. Maybe God is prevented from working and his has to find another way through.
In my own life of faith I had some experiences like that when I looked at someone in the wrong way or I said something that I felt somehow diminished my experience of the presence of God which started to diminish or shrink. What did I do? How can I rectify this? In the position of being someone who has a relationship with God we have to distinguish that there are those who may be closer to God than us. There are those who don’t have so much experience and who need our care to be able to be an inspiration and to learn from those who are closer to God.
We can learn from them and learn by supporting them and the inclusive tendency of a faith should be one which instructs us and helps us to broaden our faith. An experience I had once was with a person on a seminar. We were on a 40 day course to be missionaries. I was sitting in a room with 40 people and I had a real difficulty with this one individual. He was quite confident, brash and loud and I was studying the scriptures and being more introverted. I did not feel comfortable. One day we had a collective experience of the love of God. It kind of poured down on us. It is hard to describe how it happened. I felt the shackles drop away during that experience.
At the same time when I looked at my brother who is sitting next to me I did not see him as this brash person anymore. I saw him as another child of God and my own feeling towards him was completely different. I realised that we are very conditioned by our situation. There is a way to reconcile and to find a sense of compassion with people through deepening our relationship with God.
Chairman: A very deeply insightful and very personal touch to opening the whole issue of mercy, compassion and love and how we can deal with conflict and violence. The audience may have also picked up on the power of story telling within scripture. Both the Quran and the bible are full of parables and stories and something that links into imagination and sparks imagination. In the modern era I often feel uneasy about our education system: are we allowing that imagination to emerge? The other issue that you raised is self analysis and the ability to look into oneself and see what others are. This seems largely relevant to the Abrahamic faiths and other faiths which talk about the inward journey. That is an area that maybe we can pick up on and see how we can develop that. What strikes me about this is that there is a failure in our education system to address psychology and self analysis perhaps among young people, perhaps even the idea of story telling is significantly dropped. This could be because we are now a production and consumption society and are looking to produce young people who can produce and consume rather than people who can imagine, create and dream. That is one of the things you sparked within me.
Rev Maggie Hindley, Community &Public Affairs Specialist, Christian Muslim Forum: At the London Interfaith Centre where I work we have to co-ordinate two inter faith study groups. One is for Jews, Christians and Muslims and one is for everybody. In these study sessions we present texts on a chosen topic and then study them together. So that is going to be my approach tonight. I am going to use a bunch of biblical texts on mercy, compassion and love. It will be very familiar to the Christians.
When it comes to texts on mercy, compassion and love in our bible there is a lot to chose from. To be honest there is also a lot about judgment and punishment in both the Old and the New Testament but the over arching story of the bible and the Christian narrative is a friendly one. Whether we co-operate or not God is in control and God is a God of mercy and grace and has the last word.
God does an extraordinary thing. It is the story of Noah which I don’t think I need to recap. It is not extraordinary that God sends a flood to destroy all but a tiny remnant of living beings. Human beings were behaving badly. The destructive violence that human beings have shown in the last week and the last century is new in its scale. It is not extraordinary of God to despair. What is extraordinary is that after the flood God sets a bow in the sky. It is an arrow pointing to himself to remind him that he will never again respond to violence with violence and that he will never again destroy. You have the text in front of you.
God says: “I establish my covenant with you that never again shall all flesh be cut off by waters and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. This is the sign of a covenant I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations. I set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of a covenant between me and you. When I bring clouds in the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”
It is extraordinary because of its universality. The promise is made not just to the chosen people, not just to the human race but to every living creature and it is extraordinary because it is unconditional. A bit like a regretful parent who knows that this time she has gone over the top with a difficult child. God finds gentler ways to cajole and persuade and coax the people of his creation into ethical behaviour. If not he will punish himself not his creation he says. It is as though God like us has to learn the ways of non violence.
My second text from the Old Testament is from the Book of Jonah. Jonah had the most successful mission assignment ever known. In five words in Hebrew, eight in English, he persuades the brutally violent people of ancient Nineveh to revert to God and change their ways. So God who is about to destroy them has a change of mind and Jonah is furious.
In the text it says :”He became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said is this not what I said to you when I was still in my own country. This is why I fled because I knew you are a gracious and merciful God are prone to anger and ready to relent from punishing. Now Lord please take my life from me it is better for me to die than to live. And the Lord said is it right for you to be angry.”
God as Jonah complains is biased towards grace and mercy and love. And he expects the same forgiving heart in his prophets. Jonah is a how not to story. He has a lot to learn. Turning to Christmas God takes on the cost of mercy, compassion and love. Telling people what to do doesn’t work. Sending prophets has been generally ineffective so God out of love, in Christian tradition, takes human form in Jesus. This is an act of pure compassion and in the text: it a says: “God so loved the world that he gave his only son that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”
And at the end of the text there is a bit about the refusers. “This is the judgment. Light has come into the world and people like darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. People do not come into the light so that their deeds may not be exposed. The only judgement is self judgment. It is the refusal to step into the light of God’s grace where all is mercy and love and compassion. The facts are friendly. The Christmas story has as its constant refrain be not afraid.
So how to deal with cruelty and violence in human beings. Jesus is very explicit about what is required in the central body of his teaching. It is an impossible teaching to obey but in the sermon on the mount he says: “You have heard it said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth but I say to you do not resist an evil doer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn the other also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well. You have heard it was said that you should love your neighbour and hate your enemy but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your father in heaven. He makes the sun rise on the good and on the evil and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike.”
It is a teaching that Jesus not only talks about but exemplifies. And in his life his compassion provokes desperate opposition. Despite many sharp verbal exchanges with his opponents as he dies on the cross Jesus asks for forgiveness for those who crucified him. When they came to the place that is called the skull they crucified Jesus with two criminals one on his right and one on his left then Jesus said father forgive them for they know not what they do. Saint Stephen the Christian martyr does the same when he is stoned to death.
Christians believe that having received such complete and unconditional mercy and love from God via Jesus the only purpose that life holds for them is to reflect that to others. In our last text creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the full freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole of creation has been groaning in labour pains until now. It is a creative process. It is all compassion. The facts are friendly. But what happened to the core teachings? My understanding is that the Jesus people became the church and with the Emperor Constantine the church in 380 became the state religion and ever since then mainstream Christianity in the West has been allied with power which has weakened the core teachings about becoming vulnerable and about forgiveness because those things do not sit well with maintaining power and alongside that Christians as individuals lost the will to pay the cost of being merciful and compassionate and forgiving and loving and to share the same rejection and opposition which I believe Jesus went through. You know the history and today in the nations informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition foreign policy is often motivated by revenge and the press and cheap stereotyping are to blame.
Throughout history there are examples of both ordinary Christians and Christians in power who took their faith seriously and acted as much as they could for the universal good, eschewing violence. The Quakers are a Christian group who do not have much in the way of links to power. They are without clergy and have always supported non violent approaches to conflict with a courage that arises from deeply rooted spirituality.
Now I wonder hopefully whether some of the notions of our founder ignored for 2,00 years are not ideas whose time has come. That is despite the short but appalling history of the 21st century so far – despite Monday in Sydney and the events in Pakistan.
We have a book group at the London Interfaith Centre where we have been studying a book on forgiveness. We read Desmond Tutu’s account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa which has helped to give post apartheid South Africans stability and peace. Not a perfect process and hugely costly for many of the black people who forgave without evidence of thorough going remorse from their perpetrators but amazing in its hopefulness and compassion.
One of our friends at the Inter Faith Centre runs the forgiveness project which brings together victims and perpetrators of violent crimes from the UK and also from Palestine and Northern Ireland to share their stories, to come to understand each other to accept the agony of putting aside the desire for revenge and to forgive and move on. It is a novel idea and it is a fairly new organisation but it is an idea that has been taken up by parents from both sides of the conflict in Palestine who share their grief over the loss of a child in the conflict and call not for reprisals but for better ways of resolving the issues.
We are making our own small attempts to use imagination and to build empathy so that we can think and pray about the Middle East and its repercussions here more effectively by holding silent vigils. Next year we will support our vigils with first hand accounts from areas of conflict beginning with Iraq in January. I believe it has to begin with us and it has to begin with prayer.
Mercy, compassion and love cost us dear. They have to be cultivated in our souls where like Jacob we wrestle with our own need for forgiveness and our own resistance to accepting it. This is the core of the Christian tradition and of Islam because they are our future and without those qualities we die. It is the mercifulness of God’s purpose in history that encourages us to believe that in the very end peace will indeed prevail.
Chairman: Again a very fascinating journey. Reverend you took us from that question where does God’s mercy begin. Justice and mercy is the question. You come out very strongly for God’s mercy, this is primary and essential. That is a Christian perspective. What you moved on to is something more practical and this is the relationship between justice, mercy and forgiveness and the real world in which people are suffering. The media exacerbates issues. Maybe we had paedophiles many years ago. They were just hidden and now they are out in open. Maybe we had barbarians cutting people’s heads off in the past but now they are ever more obvious. So justice and compassion with human beings – those issues are complex and where does faith come into this. What is the relationship of faith communities, religions and institutional religion to the power structures that be: the legal and the law. Is our role simply as a side show or is it something more central. That is the old chestnut in the West post enlightenment that has been resolved. With the arrival of Islam in the West perhaps many would argue that the chestnut is no longer a fait accompli and perhaps that is what worries some people in the secular world and some would argue that there is a cold war between faith mindsets and spiritual or religious mindsets. These are things that came up in mind as you spoke and the wonderful journey that you took us on.
Mahera Ruby Researcher at Goldsmith University: In the name of Allah the most merciful, the most compassionate. That is the fabric of Islam and the perspective I wanted to come from was a family. We have heard about the first family. My contribution will be about families as they exist today – Muslim families living in the UK. How do we reconcile living in the West with practising our faith.
I work with a lot of families. What we find is that there is a lot of anger, fear and pain that dictates within families how they react within families as well as to the communities around them. So in a way every faithful is also an individual. So when we look at Islam the perspective I want to take is to look at us as individuals. How does love, mercy and compassion apply to us as individual Muslims but also how does that transform when we become part of a family. Once we leave the family setting and go into a community we require a lot of compassion, we need to empathise, we need to understand others around us. So how does Islam enable us as individual Muslims to become part of families and part of communities.
This is also a personal journey for myself as a Muslim woman. So when I look at myself as an individual what is it that makes me not fly off the handle and fight and become really angry. So when I look at my relationship with God how does he through his mercy, compassion and love encourage me to be a self confident individual with high self esteem. That is what creates individuals who will stand up to injustice. So as individuals what are the core teachings we find within Islam that regardless of who I interact with I need to maintain all beliefs and understandings. These are justice, benevolence, compassion and wisdom.
And to me when I think about God’s love, mercy and compassion what it draws within individuals is the wisdom that it gives us that enables us to act within different contexts and different spheres. So when I am within my family I may not have to say a lot of things and drum Islam down their throat. They have an understanding of Islam.
But when I am with my community I have to be able to get the message across that we are in the same boat – Noah’s Arc – and that we have to survive. So how do we do that. Again through the story telling and through the narratives that are within the Quran it teaches us that we need to pray. So when it comes to prayer in the five pillars of Islam there are three aspects of prayer: One aspect is that it is obedience to God. The five prayers, the compulsory prayers. I do that because I believe. But there is also the sunnah prayer which is a recognition that I accept and I value the role that the Prophet plays in our lives, the practise he has given us and shown us how to live a human life and how to bring the Quran among humanity. There is a third aspect of prayer which is an optional prayer and there are many times during the day when we are urged to pray to build our personal connection to God. Those are the times when I pour my heart out when I can cry, when I can beseech him and ask him to guide me and to help me to show me the way.
So just in the prayer as an individual this gives me comfort which enables me to function and know that I have been listened to and I have been heard where God himself says that when you turn to me I listen to your prayer. I am there to listen to forgive and to guide. All you need to do is to turn. So there is no closed door policy : we are heard, we are listened to and also guidance is given.
So when we look at ourselves as individuals we are in our comfort zone and that energy is given and confidence is given that you can function and that increases your will power. Once again when I look at my family and how I function within this age, how we prove our worth as individuals: first of all as a human being, as a mother, as a wife. These are roles that we have. And again Islam guides me to fulfil all those roles. And when I have a role as a working mother I turn to God and I find all that matters between me and God is my worship.
He does not care what I look like, he does not see whether I am a man or a woman. To him it is the quality of worship. And to me that is ultimate justice. I do not have to compete with a male counterpart to see if I am a better worshipper or a better individual because that is between myself and my Lord.
Again when I look at families as individuals the core thing is intention and to me that is a powerful message. People can judge you but they can never get inside your head. The only person who can do that is God himself. God will judge me according to the way I have acted. Although I may be seen by others as a terrorist or as oppressed – however people may like to label me I know what is in my heart and what I am trying to promote.
That does not mean that I am not conscious. I am meant to use my wisdom to interact with those around me. So within my family we are taught to be merciful to our children, to take into consideration their age, their ability and their disability. Also to be merciful to our children and at the same time to be merciful to our parents. Parents are mentioned alongside God many times. He says after you obey me obey your parents. So the role they have on earth is a very powerful one. Break that down a little more and the role of the mother is given more importance. Again in the Quran the role of the mother is emphasised over and over again. It is broken down to the pain and the process she goes through to give birth and for the children and the community and the society to recognise that and to give due respect to that.
So within the family between the husband and the wife there is a lot of guidance around showing mercy and being kind to one another. If there is something that you dislike in your partner and your wife and your husband try to see something that you do like and you will find that will overcome the weaknesses in your spouse. That is a wonderful lesson for us: there is goodness in everyone and we just need to search for it.
Again we can look at the wisdom that one of the wise disciplines gave when he gives advise to his teenage son. He asks him to believe in the one God and to worship but then he asks him to pay due respect to his parents. And then it ends with a voice. He tells his son to be careful about raising his voice. And that is so important in the current context. When we are so scared, when we are so afraid of those around us we are suspicious because families are encouraged to spy on one another and report to the police.
In this context to actually be able to stay calm and to reflect and to think – in the family setting you have individuals who are not only God conscious but are people conscious. And they are conscious of their duty and their brotherliness. That family becomes a reflection of what society should be like.
So if you look into your role within the community, if you can experience love and mercy within the family you develop compassion. You are able to allow your heart to feel compassion for others and to empathise with those around you. You do not have to look overseas. We have poverty within this country. We have children who don’t have a second meal. Yet we ignore those things and move on to greater stories. Yet we have those on our doorstep to look to. I feel that as a community we should be able to show compassion to one another and to love our neighbours as ourselves. There is a hadith that says when you cook within your homes and your neighbours can smell cooking they have a right to that food. How many of us actually practise that. When you talk about your neighbour it does not actually mean your neighbour to your left or to your right – it means 40 doors away. Those people also need to be safe with you and enjoy your safety.
To feel the pain and hardship of others is not because I am a Muslim: people without faith feel those things as well. What I feel as a Muslim is that that responsibility has been given to me by Allah to put that into practise. Once I start to practise my responsibility which is seen as activism within the community I may get labelled as an Islamist because we are trying to bring change in our community.
For me as a way forward to have love, mercy and compassion in our community is to have these discussions and to create inter-faith work and to be able to speak to one another. We are creating community safety havens and we are working closely with telco within our communities to safeguard people’s safety but also to eradicate some of the fear and pain and suspicion within different communities.
Love, compassion and mercy is not just one way from God to us but also it must radiate from us human beings within our communities to each other.
Chairman: From the sublime to the practical. We dealt with individuals and self reflection. We have now moved to family and beyond family to community. All of these units are totally important in being able to deal with the outside world and conflict: understanding yourself, and understanding your family. These are massive issues for us given that we are not totally in control of ourselves or our families. Lets face it this little gadget here [the mobile phone] now virtually invades every individual, every person. The cultural impact of having access to this vast world which no longer knows any boundary, neither a home, nor a country, nor a community. So one the issues that you raise is the challenges for the family and family breakdown. It is infinitely harder now for mums, for dads for individuals to maintain these values of giving and generosity. There is a world out there which is very relentless and tough and which is based on economic realities. In that world it seems that we are being constantly told it is the survival of the fittest and ethics does not come into it. Just climb that ladder. That is the message that I see – -especially among the young generation in the
urban areas. This is emerging world wide. But it was a really heartening message because you are giving us the idea of safe havens and the reverend gave us the forgiveness project. It is great that these initiatives are emerging and that they are practically dealing with things as well. Finally words like wisdom, terminology, worship. We automatically assume we know what worship is. Many Muslims I know will consider worship simply prayer or doing what is obligatory within the jurisprudential sense. Yesterday somebody gave me a definition of worship: that even your generosity and everything you do is worship which has a good intention. At this point I am going to defer to somebody who is more qualified than me to talk about ethics and morality.
Sheikh Mohammad Ali Shomali, Director of the Islamic Centre of England: In the name of God the compassionate, the merciful. I am grateful to the Gulf Club for giving me the opportunity to share some of the Islamic aspects of the understanding of mercy. I am also grateful for being able to listen to you and benefit from your wisdom.
This is a very broad area and I cannot do justice to this topic – in fact I cannot do mercy to this topic in just 15 minutes. I will just refer to some aspects. For those who are interested I have seven papers on understanding God’s mercy so maybe you can find it useful.
The concept of mercy that we use here is equivalent to rahma and we have to be careful because mercy when we understand the term in English is mostly a matter of forgiving someone who has done something wrong and we want to show mercy by forgiving. But rahma is much more than this. Rahma does not need to be given or shown to someone who has done something wrong.
The concept of rahma or for our convenience we can say mercy is one of the concepts that has the potential for becoming the basis of a system of theology. There are few concepts in the Quran that have this capacity for explaining everything: like haq the concept of truth, the concept of light and the concept of rahma. They have this capacity that you can describe God by using this concept. You can describe creation, you can describe relations. Everything in one way or another can be related to this concept. It is one of the most fundamental aspects in Islamic theology, especially in the Quran.
In the Quran we find that God has many different attributes and qualities but the qualities that relate to this rahma, mercy are the most frequently mentioned qualities. You cannot compare them to other qualities. There is a misconception: some people think that the God of the Quran is a God who is more known for bringing people justice, or getting angry or punishing you when you do something wrong. But this is not the most common image that God gives in the Quran.
I have a paper with my wife called Image of God and we have tried to list all the qualities of God and put them in different classes and we show that the qualities that relate to his mercy are the most frequently mentioned: 596 verses relate to God’s mercy and that is addition to the places in which rahma is described by using a verb. Just those attributes and qualities are mentioned about 600 times and much below this is an emphasis on God’s knowledge, God’s power and then later comes God’s justice. Justice in the Quranic understanding is different from justice the way we understand it in English. The Quranic understanding of justice is more than bringing a criminal to justice.
There are many different attributes of God which relate to rahman. For example we have al rahman, we have al rahim, the most merciful of the merciful, the possessor of mercy, the most forgiving and so on. I want to mention only two of them. These are al rahman and al rahim. We know that all the chapters of the Quran apart from Chapter 9 start with in the name of God who is al rahman and al rahim.
In English for our convenience we say the compassionate, the merciful or the beneficent but these are not very accurate because al rahman and al rahim both come from rahma and al rahman refers to that mercy of God which embraces everything and everyone. Al rahim is additional rahma which he has for the good people. So if we want to be very literal we should say in the name of God who has all embracing mercy and he has additional mercy for the good people. So it is not only that God loves good people and it is not that God loves everyone equally. So God loves everyone but he has extra love for the people who do good. This is something we also remember. When we do something and we mention the name of God who is rahman and rahim it is an inspiration for us to try and show love to everyone, especially to the people who are good people.
In the Quran we have 169 cases in which Al Rahman is used. So in addition to the beginning of the chapters of the Quran we also have this term inside the chapters 169 times. And then al rahim 269 times. It is amazing. Just these two together are almost 400 cases in which
God describes himself.
There is a beautiful point here – why doesn’t chapter nine start with bismallah al rahman al rahim. So there are two views. One is that chapter 9 is the ending of chapter 8 but a more common idea is that chapter 9 is warning pagans who have been killing and confiscating the properties of the believers and so on and so forth and that they should not go inside the holy mosque. And some people say God did not start this chapter with bismallah al rahman al rahim because that was not serving a purpose. If God says in the name of God who is very kind and very forgiving I am warning you they would not take this seriously. This is the only chapter that does not start with bismallah al rahman al rahim.
But in surat nam we have bismallah al rahman al rahim twice – once in the middle. This compensates for the other one so we have 100 bismallh al rahman al rahim. For Muslims this is very important. We believe that bismallh al rahman al rahim is part of every chapter because some Muslim scholars have the idea that bismallah al rahman al rahim was revealed once and then Muslims have repeated this and it is copy pasted at the beginning of every chapter.
And the other idea is that bismallah al rahman al rahim is actually revealed 114 times and God revealed bismallah al rahman al rahim at the beginning of each chapter. So there must be a reason why God is introducing himself so many times in the name of God who is rahman and rahim. I was thinking that maybe Chapter 9 was not that much suited to saying al rahman, al rahim but why didn’t God say something else. Why out of 114 times did he not say he is the God who is angry, who wants revenge – he could have said something like this.
Maybe this is a lesson for us. God is telling us I want you to remember me as the one who is al rahim and al rahman. I want you to keep this image of me in your mind. And if there is a case when I cannot introduce myself as al rahman and al rahim then I prefer not to say anything. I don’t want you to have any other image of me in your mind. This has a great impact on our ideas of how we should behave. If you believe that the most appropriate image of God is God who is al rahman and al rahim then you should try and be al rahman and al rahim with your own capacity.
Then the Quran explains that God has created the whole universe because of his mercy. This is in need of explanation but I just leave it. I mention the words if someone is interested they can follow up. God has created people for his mercy. Another thing that he says in the Quran is that his mercy is compulsory. This is very important. God does not have any duty towards anyone: God does not have any obligation towards anyone because everyone no matter what he has is from God. So we are receiving from God but we are not obliging God. But the Quran says that God has made it obligatory for himself to be merciful.
God has made this compulsory, he has written it down, he has made this necessary. It means on reflection that this is an essential quality of God. God cannot be separated from mercy. If he has made mercy obligatory for himself then who are we to refuse to be merciful. Another quality of his mercy is that his mercy embraces everything. This is very beautiful. God says my punishment is for the people that I will. There may be some people who may not be deserving of forgiveness.
Immediately after he says that my punishment is for certain people he says but my mercy embraces everything. It means that even the people who are criminals and are going to be punished will be out of the reach of the mercy of God. So even if he is going to punish the people who are left with no choice other than to be punished then he will still treat them with mercy. This is very important.
There are many excerpts about his mercy. My time is short. I would also like to mention the Quran and prophet Muhammed. God says that out of his mercy he has sent divine books to us. The Torah is a book of mercy, the gospel is a book of mercy and in particular in many places God says that the Quran is a book of mercy and healing. So any interpretation of the
