DO UNTO OTHERS ...

written by Ra'ana Khan

Up until today I had heard “Do unto others what you would want them to do to you!” This quote had appealed to me much, but as I went through life, I realised there was something not quite right with it!

It was a simple enough rule to apply to ones life, and should have been enough to keep one humbly satisfied. But no matter how hard one tried to follow the rule, some amount of discontentment kept sucking at ones internal peace. And strangely enough instead of becoming increasingly humble, deep down inside I felt a kind of arrogance brewing. I know, this absurdity makes no sense, but I explored my inner-self enough to finally manage to hunt down why this was so. The reason for this strange discontentment and even stranger arrogance is far simpler than the implementation of the rule itself.

Lets go over the rule itself, since the resulting attitude is a direct consequence. “Do unto others what you would want them to do to you!” Basically what’s being asked of you is to be good to others, because you want them to be good to you. So when you begin to implement this rule to yourselves what you are doing is trying your best to change for the better, because you would want others to change for the better too. So you’re being good because you are hoping for others to be good to you. The harder you are trying to put aside all your negative instincts like revenge, anger, irritation, etc and the harder you are trying to cut people slack, the more that ‘hope’ of returned goodwill is turning into expectation. And here is where the crux of the problem lies. We do good to others, and then we expect them to do good to us. So our focus and expectation of reward is stuck on other helpless imperfect mortals who may or may not be following the same rule. It is here where the seed of arrogance starts to bury itself into our souls. When we are not reciprocated with goodness, we try to over come our irritation or negative feelings towards the person by rising above. And in doing so we actually ‘rise above,’ we rise above them! In our minds we begin to slowly place our self, little by little above person by person, on a mini pedestal, which is perhaps not so mini by the end of it.

As we ‘rise above’ the persons around us, in our minds, the irritation begins to wither away leaving behind this feeling we wrongly perceive as contentment. This contentment is in fact just an illusion, it’s called gloating in the glorified image that we have created of ourselves in our minds. And each time that we are good to someone, yet again we have given ourselves reason to be proud. We speak to people nicely, people who may be of a lesser educational or financial background, and we feel we have been ‘good’ in doing so. We believe we are humble and down to earth because we have been kind to those, who in our minds are below us. Thus we ‘rise above’ and the seed of arrogance grows to a plant, to a tree.

What an entirely bizarre situation to be in. You set out to better yourself, and end up being perhaps far worse and far shallower than you were to begin with. I could not understand what exactly the flaw was in the law, until I heard the following; “Do unto others, what you would want Allah^-SWT to do to you!” And this changed my world, understanding, perception and capacity to love and forgive.

“Do unto others, what you would want Allah^-SWT to do to you!” … If I were to make a list of what I would want Allah^-SWT to do to me, I thought that list would be endless. But I was quite wrong. It is perhaps so short that I cannot even call it a list!

I want Allah^-SWT to love me unconditionally and forgive me without accountability, as if I never sinned!

And thus my life is simplified and I am at utmost peace. I continue to love everyone unconditionally (as best as I can) & pray for them. But forgive them I cannot, because for forgiveness comes only after the acknowledgment of they’re wrong doing, and I refuse to acknowledge that, because I don’t want my wrong doings acknowledged by Allah^-SWT either!