But those who believe in the reality of obstacles to faith and doubt GOD’s Power and Desire to remove them will nourish hatred in their hearts towards those illusory obstacles. In the verse above, those obstacles appeared to them as human enemies – the leaders of Makkah and their followers who harassed and fought the Muslims prior to its conquest. Hatred of ensouled creatures of GOD like us, still capable of virtue and piety, is like harbouring hell in our heart, and serves only to repel those who could have found through us the higher absolutes that they too seek. Aggression, bigotry, and other diseases of the heart are by-products of a deficiency of faith combined with a desperate, unrecognized need for quick and concrete solutions.
We see this foolish impatience in people’s attitudes to those who are different from us – foreigners, other races, adherents of other belief systems, and so on. ‘If only’ they were gone from our lives, from our community, from our nation, or from the world, ‘our faith’ would be accomplished and whole. They fail to see that a faith with such conditions is not a faith in GOD, but in a (lesser) God denied to us by those conditions. But GOD in His True Glory is undeniable.
The Jews declare, “The Christians do not have a single thing [worthwhile],” and the Christians say, “The Jews do not have anything [worthwhile],” though they [both] recite the Book. In such a way do those who have no knowledge speak. But GOD will judge among them on the Day of Resurrection in their matters of dispute. (Q2:113)
وَقَالَتْ الْيَهُودُ لَيْسَتْ النَّصَارَى عَلَى شَيْءٍ وَقَالَتْ النَّصَارَى لَيْسَتْ الْيَهُودُ عَلَى شَيْءٍ وَهُمْ يَتْلُونَ الْكِتَابَ كَذَلِكَ قَالَ الَّذِينَ لاَ يَعْلَمُونَ مِثْلَ قَوْلِهِمْ فَاللَّهُ يَحْكُمُ بَيْنَهُمْ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ فِيمَا كَانُوا فِيهِ يَخْتَلِفُونَ
A common pitfall among the ‘People of the Book’ (Jews, Christians, and Muslims in particular) is to think that when a scripture or religion is declared by God to be true, everything else automatically becomes false. Truth for them is like the contents of a box or the pages between the covers of a book, even though the Qur’an itself (Q7:157), like the scriptures before it (Q5:44 and 5:46), is described as Light, which is by nature expansive and boundless. Their thinking is that ‘If I have it (and I do), then you don’t.’ This zero-sum mentality reduces the Truth to a commodity, a thing with physical properties, rather than the Spirit underlying the sentence so often repeated, AL-LAH created both the heavens and the earth with truth. (Q45:22)
Say, “If the sea were ink with [which to write] my Master’s words, the sea would be consumed before my Master’s words were finished, even if we brought another one to supplement it.” (Q18:109)
قُلْ لَوْ كَانَ الْبَحْرُ مِدَادًا لِكَلِمَاتِ رَبِّي لَنَفِدَ الْبَحْرُ قَبْلَ أَنْ تَنفَدَ كَلِمَاتُ رَبِّي وَلَوْ جِئْنَا بِمِثْلِهِ مَدَدًا
The words of GOD are limitless. They may be concentrated in certain books or persons or ways of life, but are never contained by them. Whichever way you turn – there! The Face of GOD. (Q2:115)
From Ubayib-ni Ka’b, [who said] that the Prophet (may GOD bless him and give him peace) said, “Verily in poetry there is wisdom.” (Sunanu Abi Dawud, Book 43, Hadith 238)
عَنْ أُبَىِّ بْنِ كَعْبٍ، أَنَّ النَّبِيَّ صلى الله عليه وسلم قَالَ ” إِنَّ مِنَ الشِّعْرِ حِكْمَةً ”
This does not mean that everything written is true, just as we find it. But it also does not allow us to dismiss a speech or a book or a genre in its entirety because it contains mistakes. Rather, in the same way as light appears in various forms and intensities with whatever is visible, and yet is not identical with that object, so is truth detectable in everything that GOD creates . . . including Satan. Wisdom enables us to see and acknowledge reality wherever we meet it, even in the lowest and meanest objects. We do not throw money away because a twenty-five-cent coin is tarnished or a hundred-dollar bill is slightly torn. Nor should we reject a word of truth on the tongue of an atheist or in the book of an opponent because of how we view the speaker or due to the errors written down beside that truth. True insight enables us to distinguish between truth and falsehood proficiently, not carelessly and wholesale, such as by saying, “They do not have anything [worthwhile]”.
The GOD You Already Know 