Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | Speaking Tree Weekly Blog | March 15, 2021
Although we are all equal in the eyes of God when it comes to justice, mercy and obedience to the Divine Will, it becomes distressingly clear as we progress through life, that many individuals are less well-equipped than others to succeed in any material or spiritual sense. Philosophers, medical men, sociologists, educationists are still arguing as to the roles of heredity and environment in producing this inequitable state of affairs, and as yet are far from producing a solution to the problem. There is no wishing it away, and much as governments and philanthropists have striven to redress this imbalance, we have only to look around us to see with what seeming permanence this situation is stamped. Many countries have attempted to provide equal opportunities for all; but even where material assistance is the greatest, there is always a small group of individuals who stand head and shoulders above the others; there is always, beneath them, a large body of average performers, and sometimes an equally large, or even larger group at the foot of the ladder who make very little of their lives, many of them being what modern educationists would call “under-achievers”. That is, they do have certain potential, but they do not make serious efforts to live up to it.
This is a situation which capitalism has always exploited, in the process, exaggerating the differences between the different classes of people. Socialism, on the other hand, has tried to eliminate such differences, in the interests of both the state and the individual. But whatever the political objectives, individual psychology has remained fundamentally the same. There is still the same friction caused by one individual doing better than another, the same resentment at success being the lot of one’s neighbour and not of one’s own self, the same reluctance to give honour where honour is due. Sometimes this takes the extreme form of character assassination of genuinely superior individuals.
This is when we must stop short of such baseness. This is when we must discount the effects of whatever political and educational systems we live under. This is when we must discard hardened attitudes of envy, bitterness, spite, and, returning to a pure mental state from which all acrimony has been banished, look upon ourselves and our fellowmen as being equal in the eyes of God. It is this aspect of human existence upon which we must keep our attention firmly focussed, irrespective of its material trappings. It is only then that we shall live in true social harmony.