Forces of Evil

Forces of Evil - Lecture by Dr. Bilal Philips

Opening

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Most Merciful. I'd like to welcome you dear viewers to the first in our series "The Forces of Evil." May Allah's peace and blessings be on each and every one of you.

Introduction

This series, "The Forces of Evil," deals with evil in our world - from its origin in the past, where it originated, who are the forces involved, including the present, what we are faced with in this world today of evil, and in the future, what is to come. What evil or what further evil from the forces of evil are we to encounter in this world?

However, before beginning our look historically back into the past, we need to tackle the concept of evil itself in this world, as this concept has caused a number of people - people who profess to believe in God - to turn away from that belief, or people who nominally believed in God to give up their belief.

The Problem of Evil and Belief

When personal tragedy strikes people and they seek to find some reason or rhyme to this tragedy, they usually end up rejecting God. Many times, if one sits and talks with an atheist - the person who denies God's existence - you will find that they relate their rejection back to some personal experiences they had. Their close friend, their mother, their neighbor, or whatever, somebody really close to them died, and they couldn't find a reason for it. Why should this person die? Why should this person suffer?

Some people find themselves in this world in very awkward situations - a person born with certain illnesses which would cause them to become quadriplegic. We have some of the leading atheists in the world today who are quadriplegic, who can hardly communicate verbally, but who have written some very powerful books on the beginning of time and world history, in which they basically deny God's existence. In the end of it all, when one looks at the basis of their denial, they question why - why, if God is good and there is a good God, should they have been born in the state that they were born in? It's something very difficult for them to come to grips with.

The Atheistic Argument

When we look at this issue of evil - bad things happening in the world - if a person believes that God is good and God is all-powerful, the question remains: where did this evil come from?

Atheists would argue that if God is all-powerful, as those who believe in God believe (for the most part, those who don't believe God is all-powerful usually have beliefs in more than one God - we're talking about those who believe in one supreme being), that supreme being is all-powerful, and that God is good. The idea of God being bad is something which, for those who believe in one God, is not acceptable, because if that one God tells us "don't do bad things," how can that be when He Himself is bad? It's contradictory. It's something not acceptable.

So the basic belief is that God is good - He's all good, the ultimate good. Now, if we have a most powerful God, able to do all things, who is ultimately good, then where in the world did evil come from in our world? The fact that there is evil, atheists argue, is proof that there is no God.

We can see this issue of coming to grips with where evil came from in the world relates back to our very belief in God itself. It is essential for us to come to grips with this, understand this, to confirm and realize the fullness of our belief in God.

Understanding Evil Through Islamic Principles

To understand where evil comes from in this world, it is important for us to understand a couple of other principles.

First Principle: Knowledge Through Opposites

First and foremost, there is a particular phrase in Arabic which goes like this:

"It is with opposites that things become clear or distinct."

It deals with this basic concept that we know things through their opposites. For example, sweet - if we don't understand sour, we don't know what sour is, then sweet has no meaning. Sweet only has meaning if we have understood sour. Up has no meaning if we don't understand down. Left has no meaning if we don't understand right, and so on and so forth. Light and darkness, soft and hard - all of the opposites.

Our world is created in opposites. All of these opposites are necessary for the individual elements to be understood. Similarly, good can only be grasped if we understand evil. Good can only be grasped if we understand evil. So evil is necessary in our world for good to become a reality, something which we strive for, which we support, if there is evil for us to oppose and to reject and to work against.

Second Principle: Greater Good

The other point that we need to understand is that when God creates a thing - and we said everything God creates is good - when He creates something, He may create that thing totally good in and of itself, for the good of itself. Or He may create something because of the good that that thing will bring. Now that thing, when we

look at it itself, it may not be good, it may not appear to us to be good, but it brings about, it causes, a greater good much greater than the apparent evil that there is in that thing.

This is why, for example, whenever you find Allah talking about the evil in His creation, you will find that Allah never attributes that evil to Himself directly. Though as a general principle, when we believe that Allah is the Creator of all things - there is nothing outside of His creation, there are no other creators, nothing else is created which is not a part and parcel of His creation which can be attributed back to Him - then it means evil in the creation has to also ultimately be attributed back to Him too.

But what we find is that whenever Allah refers to that evil, when you read through the verses of the Quran, Allah always refers to the evil of His creation, not the evil that He created.

For example, in the second last chapter of the Quran, known as Surah Al-Falaq (The Daybreak), you find Allah saying for us to seek refuge in Him:

"Say: I seek refuge with the Lord of the daybreak, from the evil of that which He created." (Quran 113:1-2)

It didn't say "the evil which He created," but "the evil of that which He created." This is a standard principle throughout the Quran - you find that Allah attributes the evil to His creation, not directly to Himself. Though it is what He created and the evil came from it, therefore it is a part and parcel of His creation.

What is being demonstrated here is that evil may come from some aspect of His creation, but the fact that Allah is all good means that that creation has a good part to it, whether we're able to grasp it or not, which is really what was the goal of its creation - for the good that would come from it.

Examples From Daily Life

If we look into our own lives, we do function in a similar fashion. For example, when we go to the dentist to have a tooth extracted, and the dentist has to numb the gums - numb our nerves so that we don't feel when the tooth is extracted - and he pulls out that big long needle, that syringe with a needle that seems to be about this long, the longest needle we see for almost anything, very scary. All of us get some shivers down our spine when we see this needle. No matter what he does before giving us the needle, we're still going to suffer from it. It's gonna pain, it's gonna hurt. We know it.

But we gladly accept him sticking that big long needle into our gums because of the good which comes from it - that is, numbing of the gum so that the extraction of the tooth is not painful. So here we are accepting that harm for the greater good that would come from it.

Similarly, with any form of injections, we could also include in this the medicines that we take. For example, the doctor gives us a medicine - we have to take castor oil. I know as a child myself, castor oil is the most hated of the medicines. You got sick and you have to take castor oil - oh, this is the end, the most trying medicine to

take, horrible smelling, horrible tasting, makes you want to vomit. But this is prescribed for us. We take it because of the fact that it is going to get us well.

So we function in this way - that there is evil, but that evil we accept because of the fact that a greater good will come about from it.

A person gets cancer in his foot, and the doctor tells him, "I'm gonna have to saw off your foot. If I don't, the cancer is gonna spread to the rest of your body. You're gonna die." That person will tell the doctor, "Please saw off my foot." This is life, isn't it? We will sacrifice parts of our body to save the rest of the body. Though the act of cutting off that foot, or a hand, or a breast in the case of women with surgical cancer, or whatever - parts of our bodies are cut off for saving the rest of the body - we gladly accept it.

Similarly, when Allah creates certain things that we may perceive to be evil, there is a greater good. There's a good side to it that we may not perceive. Maybe we'll see it later on, we'll understand it later on, or maybe not.

Real-Life Example: The Gulf Air Tragedy

For example, I remember a few months ago when the Gulf Air airplane crashed - it was going to Bahrain, I believe - crashed in the sea and all of its passengers died. Perhaps the investigations as to the whys are still going on. Now that was a great tragedy.

The next day after the crash, I remember seeing in the newspaper a picture from Egypt. There was a man there with his sister kissing him on one cheek and his father kissing him on the other cheek, and he had this big smile. His thumb was up in the air. What was the caption? The caption was: this individual was supposed to be on that plane. He's a teacher - actually, many of the people who died in the plane were teachers going back to the beginning of the school term. He was supposed to get on the plane, and he had gone to the airport with all his stuff, and he didn't have some stamps - some stamps were missing from his passport. He needed to get these stamps, and he was gonna miss his flight.

It's a very important flight to get back in time to begin work. If he is late, maybe he might lose his job.

Whatever - he was so upset, he had been so worked up, so upset about what happened to him at the time when he couldn't get on the flight. However, the next day, after the news came that the flight crashed and he survived because he wasn't on it, then he was extremely happy, extremely happy.

So this is life, isn't it? Circumstances may appear to us at one point in time to be evil. Later on we come to find out that fact is good. Now the point is, whether we're able to perceive the good aspects of a thing or not, we have to understand that the good is there. And the fact that we cannot see that good shouldn't then lead us to deny God - that there couldn't possibly be any good here.

The Example of Prophet Adam

When we look, for example, at the case of Adam, Adam ate from the tree. This was an evil act on his part, was

wrong - disobedience. Adam and Eve, they both ate from the tree. However, God had taught Adam and Eve words of repentance, how to turn back to God in repentance, having committed the sin. And He taught them these things even before there was any sin envisioned, before they had committed anything. These words were already taught to them.

Now the significance of those words came to them once they disobeyed God. When they disobeyed God and they turned back to Him in repentance, called on Him, asked His forgiveness, God forgave them. God forgave them, and the consequence of the sin was ended there.

This is why we don't believe in any inherited sin, as Christians do, for example - that Adam and Eve's sin is inherited by all the generations to come, and everybody else's sins are inherited by generations coming afterwards, and this sin became so great that human beings could no longer free themselves from it. But no, we don't believe in the inheriting of sin. The sin that you do is on you, that I do is on me. Each person is responsible for their own actions.

So Adam and Eve, when they disobeyed God, they turned back to Him in repentance, and He repented and forgave them. Now the act of repentance - turning back to God, remembering God, turning to Him, and God forgiving - is a far greater good than the evil which came from their disobedience.

This is the principle here: that greater good - turning to God, God forgiving them - could only become manifest if they committed a sin, if they disobeyed God.

The Prophetic Teaching on Sin and Repentance

This is why Prophet Muhammad, may God's peace and blessings be upon him, was authentically recorded to have said that if we didn't commit sins, Allah would have removed us from the earth and replaced us with another people who would commit sins, turn back to Him in repentance, and He would forgive them.

That greater good is a part and parcel of our creation and of the creation of evil in this world, or means to evil.

The Sources of Pure Evil

Now human beings - they are the ones who, we can say, may commit or do pure evil, meaning they have an evil intent and they commit an evil act. In the case of God, His intent is good, and He may do what we perceive to be an evil act, but He may cause to happen, or He may create, what seems to be an evil creation. However, the good which comes from it far outweighs the evil that we perceive in it.

So it is the human being, really - this is the source now of pure evil - human being, as well as the jinn. The jinn - another creation which we will look at in more detail in coming sessions - who live in a world parallel to ours, and they have the ability to choose between good and evil also, like ourselves.

It is the beings of these two worlds - these are the beings that commit what we may call pure evil. They have an evil intent and they commit an evil act.

However, even this, when we go back to the realities of God's creation, the point here is that even this only takes place with the permission of God. Because the person may intend evil - many people intend evil - but when they try to fulfill it, they're incapable, they're unable to fulfill it.

So it goes back to God again, whether He will permit that evil intent to become manifest in the actions of that human being. If God has permitted it, it's part of His creation. If He has permitted it, then though we may see again that thing as evil and we blame that human being, we may punish that human being for it as God has prescribed that he be punished for it, in the ultimate scheme of things, God only permitted that evil to take place because there is some greater good behind it.

The Fallacy of Planned Repentance

Now a person may come back and argue, "So what then? You mean to say it is good for us to go out and do as much evil as we can so that we can ask forgiveness and God will forgive us, since that's the good thing, that's the greater and the better thing?" This is the big question.

No, of course not. When we commit evil deliberately, saying to ourselves, "Well hey, after doing it, I'm going to repent" - that repentance is meaningless. That is just a ritual. It has no value.

It is when we commit evil inadvertently, not intentionally, not seeking and working out a plan that we're going to just ask God's repentance and He will just forgive us for the sin - that form of evil is not acceptable. It's not repentable. We cannot repent for it. God will not accept that kind of repentance.

If we do sin and we truly and sincerely repent to Him, yes, God will forgive us. But where a person plans ahead of time - "We've got a plan here to do this and then repent" - then we have to question what kind of repentance is that going to be if you planned it ahead of time? It's going to be just a ritual. You say "Astaghfirullah," you go and try and do some good deed or whatever, but in your heart, the love of that evil is still there, and you will repeat it.

One of the conditions for the acceptance of repentance is that one hates that evil, one feels sad and bad about that evil, one strives against it in one's heart. Otherwise, then there is no real repentance from it.

Closing

Dear viewers, we'd like to conclude this first episode in our look at the forces of evil - forces of evil in our world, in the world which parallels ours, which affects our lives - to understand the place of evil in this world and how we should deal with it. How do we protect ourselves from these forces?

So with that, dear viewers, I'd like to thank you for being with us in this first segment, and I hope that you continue to follow the programs with us down through the weeks and the months ahead.