Overview (Verses 139 - 140)

The Absolute Losers
 
Once again we find here a repeated example of the people of ignorance and their thoughts, some arrogantly boasting that life is matter, with others, unable to deny God altogether, claiming that faith is merely a matter of beliefs and has nothing to do with social, economic or political systems.
 
We should always be aware, however, that ignorant societies like these which establish a system giving sovereignty and the authority to legislate to human beings, rather than to God, claim at the same time that they respect religion and derive their system from it. Theirs is a very sly and wicked approach. International Zionist and Christian forces hostile to Islam have adopted this method in areas that used to be the home of the Islamic faith where God’s law was implemented. These forces have now realized that their experience in Turkey, carried out by the false hero they created, has ended in failure. Nonetheless, their efforts played an important part in destroying the Islamic Caliphate, the last symbol of Islamic unity. But the experience, adopting an open secular stand as it did, failed to provide a model system to be emulated by other countries in the region. By wrenching itself totally from religion, it gave itself an alien colour which was too hard for people still entertaining some religious sentiments to accept. Hence, in their subsequent attempts to achieve the same goal, international Zionist and Christian forces hostile to Islam tried not to repeat the mistake they made with Kemal Ataturk. They began to dress their new experiments around a religious mask. They allowed their new heroes to establish institutions with a superficially religious character. They stressed that in two ways: by direct, straightforward propaganda or by allowing these institutions to denounce some unimportant details so as to give the impression that the system’s major aspects were religiously sound.
 
These Christian and Zionist institutions which we see mobilizing their forces, harnessing their alliance and benefiting from their past experience, continue to try to repair the damage which followed the Turkish experience. They claim that Ataturk’s initiative was essentially an Islamic revivalist movement, that it was not secular in nature and, therefore, could not be said to have nothing to do with religion.
 
Orientalists, who provide intellectual support to Christian and Zionist imperialism, continue to exert strenuous efforts in order to show that Kemal Ataturk’s experience was not an atheist one. But once we expose the Kemalist experience as essentially atheistic we curtail its role, confining it to its destruction of the last vestige of Islamic unity. This is certainly important, but Ataturk’s efforts failed to produce anything further unlike other experiments in the region which aimed at channelling religious concepts and enthusiasm into endorsing un-Islamic systems and situations. These later experiments sought to change the very essence of Islam while at the same time claiming to be Islamic. They wanted to corrupt sound, well-established values in the name of Islam. Indeed, they wanted to impart an Islamic colour to jāhiliyyah itself, so that it could fulfil its task wherever ill-defined religious sentiments provided the necessary driving force. In this way, they offer a false leadership which seeks to drive the Muslim world astray and eventually deliver it to Zionist and Christian forces. Thus they hope to achieve the same goal which past Crusading and Zionist efforts, launched over a period of 1300 years, failed to achieve.
 
“They also say: ‘That which is in the wombs of these cattle is reserved to our males and forbidden to our women’. But if it be stillborn, they all partake of it. He will requite them for all their false assertions. He is wise, all-knowing.” (Verse 139) They had gone too far in adopting false concepts and misguided practices based on polytheism and idolatry. They had gone even further in giving human beings the authority to make certain types of cattle lawful and others forbidden, claiming that what they did was sanctioned by God. Thus they claimed that what was in the wombs of those cattle should be given to their men and forbidden for their women. However, if any of these were stillborn, it was shared out by all. Try as you may to find a reason or justification for this, you are bound to find nothing. It is merely the whims of those who invent a confused sort of religion.
 
The Qur’ānic comment here gives an implicit warning to those who have enacted these laws and falsely claimed that they form a part of divine faith: “He will requite them for all their false assertions. He is wise, all-knowing.” (Verse 139) He knows the facts as they are, and deals with them in accordance with His infallible wisdom.
 
When we look at these practices and the losses and sacrifices made willingly by those who adopted them, we wonder at the costs people are prepared to incur when they deviate from the straight path established by God. We wonder at the heavy burden imposed by superstition and the delusions of those who have gone astray. How can people accept to fetter themselves with false beliefs? How is it that they can accept that these beliefs claim the lives of their own children and create endless complications in their own lives? How is it that they accept such deviant beliefs when they have in front of their eyes the surety of faith and God’s Oneness; a faith to release human minds from the chains of delusion, superstition and blind imitation. It releases human society from ignorance and its imposed burden. It liberates men from servitude to other creatures in the form of man-made laws and man-made values and standards. In place of all this, it establishes a well-defined, clearly understood, logical and disciplined faith and a practical code of living. It provides a clear vision of the truth of existence and human life. It not only liberates man from subservience to other creatures but it elevates him to the position of God’s servant. That is the summit only prophets can achieve.
 
When humanity deviates from the straight path provided by God and sinks into ignorance, accepting subservience to false gods, it suffers a great loss here in this life, before the one it incurs in the life to come: “Losers indeed are those who, in their ignorance, foolishly kill their children and declare as forbidden what God has provided for them as sustenance, falsely attributing such prohibitions to God. They have gone astray and they have no guidance.” (Verse 140)
 
They are absolute losers, because they have lost both this life and the life to come. They have lost their children, their own souls and minds and the position of dignity which God gave them when He released them from subservience to beings other than Himself. Instead, they willingly submit themselves to other deities which are themselves subject to God’s power. Above all, they lost God’s guidance when they lost His faith. Their loss is doubly confirmed and now they can hope for no guidance whatsoever: “They have gone astray and they have no guidance.” (Verse 140)