ISLAM means SUBMISSION

The answer of Islam is very simple: Everything that happens is the will of God. Bend under it and accept it as such. Islam literally means submission - submission to the sovereign will of God. In submitting to whatever comes, good, bad and indifferent, as the will of God, you gain inner stability. The will of God becomes your peace. This contains a truth: The will of God is our peace. But it also contains a very dangerous untruth: Everything that happens is the will of God. If everything that happens is the will of God, then what kind of a God is He? His character is gone. It is true that God in making us free agents is indirectly responsible for what we do with that free agency. He assumes that responsibility and discharges it at a Cross - at a Cross where everything that falls on man as a result of the misuse of that free agency falls on Him. The world's sorrow and sin is "forced through the channel of a single Heart." He bears it and redeems us through it.

But to tell a stricken mother that the taking of her babe, or the loss of a loved one in an automobile accident, is the will of God is to charge God with murder. The time is here when we should be ashamed to have children die, for we know that some law has been broken either by remote parents through heredity, or by the immediate parents through ignorance or carelessness, or by the wrong organisation of society producing impossible living conditions, or through the wrong choices of the child. The death is the result of one or more of these wills, but it is not the will of God. God wills health, not sickness; life, not death.

The quest of Islam for inner poise through acceptance of the will of God has produced a patient people, but not a progressive one. Islamic civilisation comes up to a certain level - the level of the letter of the Koran and there becomes sterile. To progress they must throw off the letter of the Koran, or submit to it and become stabilised at sterility.

(From E. Stanley Jones' book "The way to Power and Poise")

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