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INTRODUCTION
Whether the fate of man is predestined or he himself is the
architect of it, is a question which has been very often
discussed by scholars of all times. This problem is
significantly important as no sensible man. not even the man
in the street, can afford to ignore it. Faith in Taqdir
(Destiny) has a very deep impact upon our lives and we always
find our lives oscillating between determinism and freewill.
As a man looks around himself and looks to his own self and
within himself, he finds that there are hundred and one things
in shaping and reshaping of which he has no hand, e. g. in
determining the climate of the land in which he is born, in
canalising the courses of rivers which flow therein and in
determining the nature of the soil thereof. He finds himself
absolutely powerless. As he looks to himself he finds that
there are so many things In him which are beyond his control,
viz. the measure of intellect he has been endowed with, the
shape and form of his physical structure with which he has
been sent to this world, and the inclinations and so many
other qualities of head and heart which are embedded in his
very nature. In all these aspects of life he finds himself
helpless before the Great and Mighty Power that created him.
On the other hand, there are so many things in which man
finds himself quite empowered. As he looks to the marvellous
achievements of man despite all odds, he finds it difficult to
believe that he is a mere puppet in the mighty hand of Nature.
This problem of predestination and freewill, in which man
finds his life hanging, has been adequately solved by the
Qur'an and the Sunnah. We give below a brief summary of their
elucidations.
The first principle which Islam lays down in regard to
Taqdir is that man is neither completely the master of his
fate nor is he bound to the blind law of predestination. So
far as the sovereignty of Allah's Will is concerned, it is
all-pervading and nothing falls outside its orbit. Not even a
leaf, therefore, stirs without His Will.
It is His Will that prevails everywhere. To God belongs the
sovereignty of Heavens and the Earth. He created what He
pleaseth, giving to whom He pleaseth females and to whom He
pleaseth males or conjoining them males and females, and He
maketh whom He pleaseth barren, verify He hath knowledge and
power (xlii. 48).
Men are, therefore, completely subordinate to the
overruling power of God, they cannot do anything unless God
wills so.
" Whom God guideth he is the rightly-guided. Whom he
sendeth stray, thou wilt not find a patron to set him right (xviii.
16).
His mighty grasp is, therefore, over everything. The
Almighty Lord, Who has created everything and has determined
its nature and course, has in His infinite wisdom and mercy
conferred upon man a limited autonomy according to which a man
is free to do or not to do a certain thing. It is because of
this autonomy enjoyed by man that he is hold accountable for
his deeds. The concept of human responsibility and that of his
answerability for his deeds and misdeeds becomes meaningless
if he is supposed to be deprived of this autonomy. There are,
a large number of verses in the Holy Qur'an which make a
pointed reference to the autonomy conferred upon man.
Man shall have nothing but that what he strives for (liii.
39).
Allah does not change the condition of a people until they
change it themselves (viii. 53; xiii. 11).
Those who strive in His path, are guided in the right path,
while those who persist in denial and sinful livifig have
their hearts sealed against faith (ii. 7, 26; iv. 155; v;. i.
102).
Allah does not compel belief and leaves the people free to
believe or disbelieve (vi. 35, 150; xvi-. 9).
Whoever has done an atorn's weight of good shall meet with
its reward and whoever has done an atom's weight of evil shall
meet with its consequences (xcix. 7-8).
It should be borne in mind in this connection that the word
Taqdir used in the Qur'an does not always signify something
predestined. It at times implies a measure or the latent
potentialities or possibilities with which Allali created man
and all things of Nature. For example: He created everything
for its Destiny (or its Measure) (xxv. 2). In Sura 54, verse 9
(the words are): We created everything according to a Measure
or Destiny. In both these verses Destiny impiies the inward
reach of things, their latent potentialities or possibilities.
The idea of Destiny as we find in the hadith that God wrote
down the decrees regarding the created world fifty thousand
years before He created the Heavens and the Earth does not in
any way mean that God created a block Universe, finished off
and complete, bound to the iron formulae of Nature. Here the
idea behind Taqdir is that the creation of this universe is
not accidental but something preplanned and pre-conceived and
it was shaped according to the Grand Design of the Greatest
Designer. There is no element of chance in the creation of
this Universe. Everything is well-set and well-planned.
The idea that Allah has a foreknowledge of everything that
He created and the events unfold themselves exactly according
to it, does not imply that human beings have been completely
deprived of the freedom of action. The foreknowledge of God is
an acknowledged fact, but it should not be interpreter in the
sense of predestination, for if we do so we shall have to
conceive of eternity as a storehouse of ready-made events,
from which they drop one by one like particles of sand in a
glass hour. If we take the foreknowledge to be a reflecting
mirror we shall have to deprive the Creator and the Controller
of the Universe of His Creative activity.
Dr Muhammad Iqbal has shed a good deal of light over this
problem. He says:" Divine knowledge must be conceived as
a living creative activity to which the objects that appear to
exist in their own right are organically related. By
conceiving God's knowledge as a kind of reflecting mirror, we
no doubt save His fore-knowledge of future events, but it is
obvious that we do so at the expense of His freedom. The
future certainly pre-exists in the organic whole of God's
creative life, but it pre-exists as an open possibility, not
as a fixed order of events with definite outlines."
We should bear in mind that the idea of put, present and
future is something relative and is conceived by the inite
wind of man. It is. however, a great now in the eye of the
All-Seeing God. The whole expanse of eternity lies before Him
in the shape of now. Knowledge is, therefore, an act of
creative activity and not the mere reflection of it. When He
decrees a thing it happens and He knows it before it happens.
God in Islam is not, therefore, a prisoner of necenity. He is
a free Creator.
The concept of predestination in Islam, therefore, does not
in any way mean helpless abandonment of oneself to otherwise
unwelcome fate. It means rather co-operation with God,
studying His will and bringing oneself into unison with His
Planning Will. Destiny as conceived by Islam is, thus, by no
stretch of imagination, fatal to the freedom of conduct and
unfoldment of one's inherent possibilities; it is a source of
inspiration and encouragement and opens up vast fields of
human activity. It is not a message of despondency and
despair, but a source of solace, comfort and inspiration and a
powerful means of evoking a sense of piety and humility and
self-surrender to the Will of God. It does not inculcate in
mind frustration and pessimism, making his life dark and
dreary, devoid of hope and promise for the future, but it
teaches him to put his heart and soul in the sublime work as
assigned to him by his Master.
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