The more I hear and read about scientific developments and discoveries stronger becomes my conviction that the scientific community, as a matter of fact all rational people, should come to the fold of Islam. For instance, accountability is one of the basic beliefs in Islam. It means that whatever deeds, good or bad, we do in this world will have to be accounted for in the Hereafter and every person will be rewarded or punished accordingly. Non-believers argue that when a person is reduced to dust or burnt to ashes how would they be revived or recreated thousands of years after their death to face the consequences of their deeds. But scientists have shown that exactly the same creature can be recreated rather reconstructed by the minutest particle of that living creature or a plant.
Governments have banned the attempts to recreate a human being, but who knows if the scientists clandestinely continue their experiments in their laboratories while tests of recreating or reconstructing small animals and plants have been successfully made. Very recently it was reported that a flower frozen under the Siberian ice of thirty thousand years was excavated and the whole plant of that flower was recreated by a minute particle of the plant and the newly generated plant functioned normally, bloomed flowers and produced seeds.
Another argument of non-believers is: could the records of activities and voices of a person be reproduced after thousands of years of his death? One need not go to see the evidence of reproducing voices and other records years and decades after their origin. It is an everyday observation that people are caught for their past misdeeds through their conversations made on phones or acts recorded through invisible cameras. All such records are invisible or inaudible until and unless they are reproduced. No one knows where such, rather all, records are preserved in space.
Mirza Ghalib in his typical amusing style wrote: Pakrey jatey hain frishton kay likhey per nahaq / Aadmi koi hamara dam-e-tahreer bhi tha? (We are caught unjustly according to the writings of angels, was there any witness of ours at the time of writing?)
Now we know that there is no need for a witness. A person himself stands as the undeniable witness for all his deeds. This is the meaning of accountability in Islamic belief.
From the foregoing it may be concluded that the panacea for all social maladies that our society is awfully suffering from lies in the acceptance of the principle of final accountability as preached by Islam and confirmed by science.
A businessman gathers a certain commodity and hoards it with the intention to create shortage of that commodity in the market and then sell it for a higher price. He knows that it is a crime and unlawful act, so he makes it certain that the act of hoarding is kept secret to avoid being caught by authorities and punished. Thus he escapes punishment. But if he is assured that he is finally accountable for that guilt and there could be no way to escape punishment, he would certainly avoid doing that act. Similar is the case of all those who adulterate food and medicines which is certainly harmful for people; and those who accumulate wealth through unlawful means depriving people of the benefits of that wealth which must have been generated through their efforts. Thus there is an urgent need to emphasise and propagate the inevitability of accountability to cleanse the social and political life of the country.
Our elected representatives raise a lot of noise in legislatures, stall business of the house, waste precious time which is, in fact, loss of huge money spent on them in many ways which has been extorted from the people through taxes and other means. They simply don’t bother about it. They forget the oath they have taken to serve the people faithfully. It is all due to the lack of the sense of final accountability. As for the accountability here in this would, they bypass it by resorting to unlawful means. It is time now to do something to draw the attention of people towards this urgent need just as we do about many other things such as advertisements of luxury goods.
Our school teacher had once said: you say that all believers will go to Paradise and every one of them will have large palaces and vast gardens; in that case where will God find so much space to accommodate all of them with so much luxury? Now space scientists tell us that the universe is much larger than what we understood it to be and that there are many solar systems in the universe, may be much larger than that of ours, whereas only this solar system has billions of stars. Thus where is the question of saturation and shortage of space for all believers rewarded with Paradise? Even if all non-believers embrace Islam and become good Muslims and repent for their past sins, there will not be any dearth of space for them in Paradise.
[Email:ruilmi@rediffmail.com]