When It’s Too Late to Mend!

The Qur’ān presents the stories of earlier communities who were destroyed for their rejection of the Truth. It directs our attention to the fruits of labour they reaped owing to their stubbornness in rejecting the Message of Truth conveyed to them by the Messengers of God, because they are indicative of human life and its…

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Sikandar Azam

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The Qur’ān presents the stories of earlier communities who were destroyed for their rejection of the Truth. It directs our attention to the fruits of labour they reaped owing to their stubbornness in rejecting the Message of Truth conveyed to them by the Messengers of God, because they are indicative of human life and its course of history. The crime of their rejection of the Truth was so enormous that God did not defer His Chastisement to the Day of Judgement, but rather He punished them right on earth and made them serve as deterrent to the generations to come.

That is why the Qur’ān encourages human beings to travel across the land with open eyes and objective approach. It wants them to look at what took place on earth before their time: “Have they not travelled through the land and seen what was the end of those who lived before them?” (The Qur’ān, 40:82)

Were they less in number or were they powerless and had no say in the society? No, they enjoyed power and pelf. The same verse says: “They were more numerous than them, and greater in power and in the impact they left on earth.” The Qur’ān presents such conditions of the earlier nations so that the people of later generations can consider how it could affect them and enable them to draw the right lessons.

But their power, knowledge, social status and numerical strength was of no avail to them. Nothing they had could save them from the Divine chastisement, only because they ‘arrogantly exulted in whatever knowledge they had’. They exulted in their philosophy and their science, their law, their secular sciences and their mythology and theology invented by their religious gurus and deemed their knowledge as the real knowledge, and regarded the Knowledge brought by the Messengers of God as worthless; this exultation made them unable to pay any heed to the Message of Truthand finally made them mock at their Messengers.The Qur’ān records these happenings: “When their Messengers came to them with Clear Signs, they arrogantly exulted in whatever knowledge they had.” (The Qur’ān, 40:83) The same verse also records how they were punished: “They were then encompassed by what they had mocked.”

In these circumstances, the Divine Chastisement was certain! God destroyed them. When they saw the Divine Chastisement coming right before their eyes, they started realising their crime. The Qur’ān records this crucial moment thus: “When they saw Our chastisement, they said: ‘We have come to believe in Allah, the Only One, and we reject all what we had associated (with Allah in His Divinity)’.”(The Qur’ān, 40:84) But it proved too late to mend. The Book of God declares: “But their believing after they had seen Our Chastisement did not avail them. That has been Allah’s Way concerning His servants. And the unbelievers courted utter loss, then and there.” (The Qur’ān, 40:85)

These stories of the earlier nations prove that repenting after the torment has arrived or the signs of death have appeared, is not acceptable to God. May God help us take good lessons from these stories and give us courage to mend our ways; the sooner the better.