Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | The Sunday Guardian | Nov 29, 2020
According to a saying of Prophet Muhammad, related in the Sahih Muslim: “God has a hundred mercies, and one of them He has sent down amongst jinn and men and cattle and beasts of prey. Thereby they are kind and merciful unto one another, and thereby the wild creature inclines to tenderness unto her offspring. And ninety-nine mercies has God reserved unto Himself, that therewith He may show mercy unto His servants on the Day of Resurrection.” (Sahih Muslim, Hadith No. 2753)
Human beings do not have knowledge of the unseen, so they have to suffer setbacks in life. Moreover, it is important to note that they lack willpower, so they tend to give way to base impulses and commit grave mistakes. The resources at their disposal are insufficient for them to deal with external factors working against them, so they crash to defeat. Predicaments such as these have combined to turn man into an afflicted soul, constantly tormented by thoughts of having been a failure in life, of not having achieved what he set out to do. The rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, all human beings are a prey to such despair.
Can man hope for any improvement of his lot? Can our failures in life become successes at the end of the road? Is it possible that our faults will be counted as good deeds, that–despite our digressions–we will safely reach our destination? The glimpse of God’s mercy that we gain from a mother shows us that this can indeed come to pass. God’s mercy is many times more than that of a mother for her child; by His grace He will make up to us what we lack, but on one condition–that we make God Almighty our everything, as a mother means everything to her child.