Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | Speaking Tree Weekly Blog | April 26, 2021
The ugly and ill-tempered hero of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment murders an old woman without heirs in order to further his education by means of her ever-increasing but unavailed of wealth. The other characters in the novel, and, of course, the reader, cannot but hold him guilty of a heinous crime. The old woman’s wealth was as tempting to the murderer as the flesh of a deer is to a lion. But when a lion kills a deer to eat its flesh, a certain amount of sentimental concern may be shown, but no one would seriously raise this kind of killing as a moral issue. No one would feel the urge to frame laws prohibiting such acts. On the contrary, when a man commits a similar offence, society as a whole joins in protest and efforts are made to ensure that the murderer does not go unpunished.
This is because man, although often as instinctive in conduct as the predatory animals, is superior in moral status to them, in that he is capable of distinguishing between right from wrong and is therefore expected by society to act in accordance both with the laws of the land and the dictates of his own conscience. If he fails to do so, he must expect, in his capacity as an ethical being, to be brought before a court of law.
The guilty of conscience, however, are not invariably brought to justice. This is because there exists no temporal court, with an all-seeing eye, which can unfailingly dispense justice on all the myriad occasions on which it is warranted. At best, the courts set up by human beings can try only a certain number of identifiable offenders, and many are the wrongdoers who go scot-free because their crimes are never discovered, because they are able to cover up their offences, because they find loopholes in man-made laws or because they are able to use their wealth in order to corrupt. Justice is only partially obtainable in this world: absolute justice is attainable only in the life, hereafter.
In the present world, no judge, however well-intentioned, can ever hope for anything more than partial justice in a large proportion of the cases he presides over. If, to expiate his crimes, a criminal must serve a prison term of 1000 years, his death is going to provide him with an escape route. This inexorable reality calls for the existence of an unlimited world in which man is granted so long a life that he can never escape the full consequences of his deeds. Since, in human terms, this is an impossibility in the present world, we must seek true justice in the eternity of the afterlife.