c) Who was Rip's compassion?
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HOMEPAGECOMMENT
COLUMNSCOMMENT
RIP compassion, RIP empathy, RIP reason
The piety brigade strikes again
One would not usually expect three letters to trigger such a furore. Last week’s commotion on the social media was started by nothing more than a benign RIP wished to Sushant Singh Rajput. The resulting explosion of bigotry was troubling even if it wasn’t exactly eye-opening (one can have eye-opening experiences only so many times). It was not permitted to pray for Singh as he had died a non-Muslim, the piety brigade vehemently announced.
Just as way too many atheists believe that anybody religious must have some screws loose, way too many religious folks think that anybody who is an atheist (or belongs to the ‘wrong’ religion) must be insincere. There is a marked dearth of goodwill and spirit of extending the benefit of doubt on either side; but the latter directly concerns our subject today. From the Muslim point of view, there can be at least two reasons for somebody not being a Muslim: either he did not get the message properly; or he received it all right but rejected it due to arrogance, convenience or some such reason. This is certainly not to say that Singh necessarily belonged to the first category. But the point is that there is no way to know that he belonged to the second category either. While there is no denying the existence of insincerity among many unbelievers, without a prophet in our midst how can one say about a given individual that he is insincere? And not knowing one way or the other, what is wrong with assuming the best on the part of others, especially when the Quran warns against erring in the opposite direction? [49:12]
The Quranic verse pressed into service to support the position that one is not permitted to pray for the non-Muslim after his death, and which became a twitter trend, was this: “It is not fitting for the Prophet, and those who believe, to pray for the forgiveness of idolaters even though they may be their near of kin after it has been made clear to them that they are people of hell fire.” [9:113] First of all, one would be hard pressed to find a Sikh who will admit to being an idolater. But let us not dwell on that detail. The subject of Chapter 9 of the Quran is punishment for those deniers of truth about whom God had declared that they had received and understood the message. The Prophet (PBUH) of God was among the believers so there was no room for any doubt. The verse has nothing to do with the non-Muslims of today. Whenever a verse of the Quran is quoted after tearing it loose from its context, the conclusions that are drawn are always flawed. This tendency to quote out of context is a very slippery slope. People have notoriously used other verses of the same chapter to justify all sorts of killings in the name of Islam with devastating consequences.