an inferno. Those who lead their lives in this world with a violent
mentality incur the great risk of being thrown into the pit of fire in
the next world.
According to the Quran, the inhabitants of Paradise will be
peace-loving in the full sense (36:58). There, everyone’s hearts will
be imbued solely with feelings of peace and love. This being so, only
those will be selected to inhabit Paradise who have proved to have
a peace-loving character. The present world is a selection ground.
In this world, those people are selected who are peace-loving in the
full sense and who deserve to be lodged in the peaceful society of
paradise. This is the greatest reality which the people of Kashmir
and others are invited to ponder upon.
The Culture of Gratefulness
What is violence? Violence stems from a culture of ungratefulness.
Complaints produce violence and violence puts an end to feelings
of gratitude in man. At the beginning of life, Satan threw down a
challenge to God, saying: “I will surely come upon them from before
them and from behind them and from their right and from their left,
and thenYou will find most of them ungrateful.” (7:17)
If you look at it from this angle, you will find that violence is
not as simple as people imagine it to be. A society vitiated by the
culture of violence is quite evidently under the influence of Satan. It
is Satan who had first led them into complaining and subsequently
into violence. Violence is a Satanic culture: violence opens the door
to hell.
We learn from the Quran that when God created man,
He commanded Iblis to prostrate himself before man,
but he refused to do so. Iblis, the leader of jinns, enjoyed
many blessings of God, but on being denied one thing,
(i.e. supremacy over man) he deviated from the path of
gratefulness. This is ingratitude, and becoming ungrateful is,
without doubt, following the way of Iblis.
Whenever an individual or a group deviates from the path of
gratefulness, and opts for the path of hatred and violence, the cause
is always traceable to some complaint or grudge. Notwithstanding
the fact that he enjoys 99 good things, just the deprivation of that
hundredth thing is made such a great issue of that it dominates
his mind. Despite the plethora of causes for gratefulness, he turns
18
The Dawn Over Kashmir
