INNOCENT WHISPERS

What does (or should) one feel when he/she watches on television gruesome pictures of an earthquake or volcano survivors mourning their loved ones ? Many of us watch such scenes while eating or chatting with family or friends. The philosophers amongst us wonder why these things happen in the first place. The religious-minded would probably say it’s a divine punishment.

I once heard on BBC World (TV) an Indonesian Tsunami survivor say something like, "I believe it’s God’s punishment for people’s wrongdoing." This young man explained (in a program entirely devoted to him) that while he was fighting against the waves and hunger and all sorts of danger at sea for many days, he vowed that if God saved him from this ordeal he would never sin again. It appears that God answered his prayers ; he was saved by a ship’s crew, and later on someone helped him enroll in a university in Malaysia.

I heard and read a lot of comments suggesting that such calamities are indeed divine punishments for people for their sins. To me, that may be just one of four probable reasons. Although I believe, as a Muslim, that God does punish people for their wrongdoing, I just can’t imagine that all the victims (be they dead or survivors) of Tsunami, the recent Burma cyclone or the last earthquake in China committed such sins that the only way God could have punished them was a Tsunami or a cyclone or an earthquake. For one thing, thousands of little children who either died in these catastrophes or became orphans cannot possibly be imagined to have committed such deadly sins. Even for grown-ups, you just can’t tell for sure who was punished from who wasn’t. That’s beyond anybody’s knowledge. (The Hadith ° suggests that a whole population –including the good people– could be destroyed if there were too much evil, and that –on the Day of Judgement– each will be judged according to the intent he/she had at the moment of his/her death.)

So what could be other possible reasons ?


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° Zaynab bint Jahsh said, "O Messenger of Allaah, will we be destroyed even though there are righteous people among us?" He said, "Yes, if evil becomes widespread." (Reported by al-Bukhaari, 6/381, Muslim, 18/2)


Innocent Whispers

I remember seeing a program featuring Australia’s tropical forests. The TV cameras moved gracefully among breathtaking trees, beautiful native flowers, exotic birds and animals. I thought there couldn’t be a more tempting place for a holiday. But then suddenly a hellish fire broke out and destroyed all the trees, the flowers, the birds and the animals. I sighed as the voice commenting the scene explained that such fires were sort of commonplace in these forests, and that it was a very natural phenomenon. It was good of the program to give that warning to nature-loving tourists and that lesson to those who easily succumb to beauty.

Unfortunately, natural phenomena cannot all be predicted. So many tourists (from all over the world) died in Tsunami. No one –least of all the local people– could have predicted such a catastrophe. And yet people gave free rein to their hindsight. People asked a lot of (existentialist) questions. Some made some kind of change, others continued to live their lives as if nothing had happened.

Personally, I do ask questions too. Recently, I read on the Web a question I had asked myself even before the Internet entered this country. Were WWI and WWII divine punishment? That was the question.

I wondered why such a thing happened to people who were behind all the incredible technological development, whose fruits we enjoy in our everyday life. Those people made great inventions, worked in coal mines, struggled for human rights, etc, etc. So why were they rewarded with two bloody wars?

The curious thing is that during these two wars (and the subsequent Cold War) a phenomenal technological development took place––as if our (civilian) planes today couldn’t have been able to fly as far and fast as they do today; as if our mobile phones, Internet connections, televisions, etc, could have remained topics of science-fiction books, hadn’t there been two devastating (world) wars. The United Nations was born only after those wars. Democracy became widespread only after those wars, where died the children and grand-children of great inventors, engineers, teachers, and patient workers who endured life in coal mines.

Would it be superstitious to link that to so-called separation of religion and state (as was the case in France in 1905)? Or would that be explained by people’s increasing immorality? (Some would argue, though, that “real immorality” became even worse in 1968 , more than two decades after the War!) Others would argue that the War(s) had rather come as a result of then big powers’ struggle for supremacy and their rivalry over overseas colonies.

Whatever the reasons of this or that calamity, it’s never bad to ask questions about it. What is bad is “to impose” one’s answers.

Very often –but not always– it’s people who had been within an inch of death in such disasters who DON’T ask the hardest questions, such as, “Why should there be such a thing in the first place?” I was moved by the story of a German young woman and her mother who happened to be in Sri Lanka during Tsunami. In a program aired on Alarabiya TV, the young woman explained how a Sri Lankan young man had saved her, risking his own life. The young man himself spoke while the two women –who had come back to Sri Lanka to meet him and remember the incident– listened, their heads bowed in thought. This unexpected friendship is an instance of the paradoxically wonderful things that do happen during and in the aftermath of disasters. But the question remains, though: why should there be such a thing in the first place?


Innocent Whispers

And what is more beautiful Man can do than rebuilding shattered lives ? Indeed, I regard reconstruction as the fourth probable reason after those I mentioned above. Destruction is no doubt horrific. But it’s part of life. What we tend to forget is that most destruction is man-made. Natural disasters had no hand in the unbelievable destruction that occurred in the heart of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Natural disasters have had no hand in the destruction that has taken place in Iraq, for example. We tend to overlook man-made destruction, but when it comes to natural disasters, some of us yell out, "Why does God do this to us ?"

Practical-minded people get down to work at once to mend the destruction, leaving to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Sometimes the destructors themselves rush to reconstruction. The U.S., who helped bring down Hitler’s Reich and Japan’s empire, put in place the Marshall Plan to rebuild postwar Europe and Japan. A thriving Baby boomer generation enjoyed the fruits of that reconstruction, thus turning the page on the horrors of the War their fathers had witnessed. "Unhappiness of some makes the happiness of others,” as the French proverb goes.

Now the Chinese say it will take up to three years to resettle the survivors. This means that a lot of (Chinese) people will have a lot of work, a steady income for at least three years. A lot of companies will thrive during this period and a lot of trade will take place. Some Chinese parents who lost their children in government-run schools are now blaming the government for the disaster, claiming that the schools had been constructed poorly. Now, not only those demolished schools, but the whole (old) infrastructure is going to be much better than it had been before the earthquake. This will give the opportunity to newly graduated engineers to prove their worth, to build their personal lives.

Idem for Burma. Idem for any other disaster-hit place. Destruction is followed by reconstruction. And when souls are "reconstructed", Muslims rebuild their mosques , Christians rebuild their churches, Bhuddists rebuild their temples, agnostics repeat their eternal, indestructible question, "Why did that happen in the first place ?"

Innocent Whispers