The Black Rainbow

by Hussain Zaidi

  “Ali Naqvi, son of Fatima Naqvi, may please come forward,” an imperious voice made the announcement and a strong hand pushed Ali in front of a majestic throne.

  The throne was empty but a voice seemed to be coming from all over addressed him: “Welcome to the hereafter and to the real and the never ending life. To be brief and to the point, your bad deeds grossly overweigh your good deeds. Most of the time, you neglected your duties towards others. At times you were just, but your justice was divorced from mercy. At times you were merciful, but your mercy rested on a false sense of pride. Most of your apparently good deeds lacked purity of intention and were done either out of fear of social disapproval or to make a parade of your righteousness. Worse, your faith in God was never beyond doubt. You believed in and turned to God only when you were deeply in trouble. Your belief in God thus sprang from convenience rather than conviction, fear rather than love. Before we announce our judgment about you, we would like to give you an opportunity to speak in your defense. Have you anything to say?”

  Ali remained speechless for a while and then picking up the courage began, “I strongly regret that my misdeeds outweigh my good deeds and that my faith in God was never indubitable. But I believe I was programmed to think and do what I thought and did. It couldn’t have been otherwise.”

  “A very weak pretext!” the voice responded. “Were you not given eyes to see, ears to hear, the heart to feel and the mind to think? Didn’t your senses inform you of the justice and order, harmony and proportion in the world? Didn’t your heart feel the presence of a cosmic power, who created and sustained the world? Didn’t your reason enlighten you of the presence of a Supreme Intelligence that fashioned and ordered the events? The fact is that you had all the reasons and all the faculties to be good and righteous but you chose to be otherwise.”

  “You mentioned my lord of the order, harmony and justice in the world. Did the world really have such attributes? In the world that God created, the strong crushed the weak, the mighty exploited the vulnerable, the shrewd duped the simple. Worse, the tyrants would always get away with impunity. Was that divine justice? The world was characterized by the extremes of poverty and wealth, ugliness and beauty, adversity and prosperity, suffering and luxury, strength and sickness. Was that divine order and proportion? To cut the long story short, there was so much evil and so little good, so much vice and so little virtue, so much wickedness and so little righteousness, in the world. Was that divine intelligence?” Ali put in the counter argument.

  “If by making such remarks you are trying to justify your misdeeds, then we are afraid you are widely off the mark. The world had evil no doubt but there was good as well; it had ugliness but there was beauty as well. It was possible for God to make a world free of evil and ugliness, death and destruction, calamity and casualty, injustice and oppression, suffering and adversity. But to what avail? Good consists in fighting evil and the enormous the challenge the greater the good. There were no doubt injustice and exploitation but they were not without purpose. The real test of a person is to be mighty and just, strong and merciful, intelligent and upright at the same time. The people who misused their qualities of head and heart, their power and strength, are a failure not a success in the eye of God. And mind you, though people like you bragged about justice, they were rarely interested in justice. They wanted justice only when it suited their interest. On all other occasions, they would turn their back on justice.

  “As for your question,” the voice continued, “why the wicked and the oppressor got away with their misdeeds, our reply is that the world that you have left behind was not meant to be a place of reckoning but a place of action. This world that you are about to be in is the place of reckoning and you’ll see absolute justice done here.”

  “Was not the world a great drama whose script had been written well before the enactment started? Ali asked

  “We know what you are driving at,” the voice replied. “But as today is the day of justice, we’ll answer whatever question you have so that you have no cause for complaining that you have been judged unfairly. Yes, the world was made with a purpose and it was designed to achieve that purpose. To that extent, the events in the world were pre-determined and the script, if you insist so, was pre-written. But within that determinism there was considerable freedom. To use an analogy, which we think will be interesting for you: while the actors were given their roles and they could perform only those roles, how well an actor performed the given role depended on him or her. Freedom then consisted not in choosing a role, which was always given, but in acting it out — superbly, satisfactorily, badly, or pathetically. A person was made a king and he had to be a king whether he liked it or not but whether he did justice to his role, or to put it differently, whether he was a good or bad king was up to him. So what was important was not the role per se but how it was performed. This is our answer to the problem of free will and determinism, which preoccupied you so thoroughly during your earthly existence.”

  “Forgive me, but you mean to say that a person who was poor and wretch was condemned to remain so no matter what he did and that there was nothing bad about his deplorable state!”

  “As we mentioned before, the world had to have contrasts to make the struggle and freedom meaningful. Besides, such terms as poverty and wealth, weakness and strength, beauty and ugliness, wretchedness and blessedness, fortune and misfortune, scarcity and abundance, were relative. Neither of them was absolute. You were richer than some and poorer than others, fortunate on some counts and unlucky on others, and so on. The roles could change and they did. Many a slave rose to the rank of a prince and many a king ended up a prisoner. But the change of role wasn’t that important. What was important was how you responded to the change or lack of it. A person who maintained his faith and self-respect even in the face of defeat and adversity was better than whom victory and prosperity made insolent,” the voice explained.

  “I don’t know whether your answer to that perennial problem is valid. Granted that I was responsible for my actions, because I had the freedom of choice. But if I was free, I had the freedom to obey or disregard divine commands. Freedom doesn’t consist in acting in a predetermined manner but in choosing the way one likes. So why am I to be punished for exercising my freedom? This to me is denial of freedom,” Ali remarked.

  “Your argument is fallacious. Freedom doesn’t mean acting the way you like but acting responsibly. I give you an example. In the game of cricket that was so popular in your times, a good batsman was not one who played the way he wanted but one who played according to the situation. In life as well, while you had the freedom to play, you were supposed to play by the rules. Hence, while you were free to disregard divine commands, you were told not to do so as well as warned of its consequences. But as you disregarded divine commands, you bear the responsibility for the same.”

  “You said a while ago that the world was made with a purpose. May I ask what was that purpose and has that been achieved?” Ali put another question. “Surely, condemning some of us to hell and rewarding others with the paradise hardly deserves to be a cosmic purpose.”

  “Reward and punishment wasn’t the divine purpose, to be sure. It is only an expression of divine justice. God draws no pleasure in condemning His creatures to hell. In fact, it would have been better had the hell been empty. But as things stand, it’s going to be a heavily populated place. As to your question why the world was made, the answer is that the Almighty wanted to actualize His infinite creativity. He originated life and then segregated it into different forms. He also created the worlds —plains and mountains, deserts and forests, oceans and glaciers —which these life-forms inhabited. There were challenges as well as opportunities, failure as well as success, extinctions as well as survivals, progress as well as regression. Species came into being and withered away. Civilizations were born and passed away. Nations rose and declined. Empires were built and crumbled. Cultures rose and decayed. World orders were contrived and s
ank into oblivion. But life continued to march unfolding the magnificent and matchless divine creativity. Doubtlessly, the Almighty had the foreknowledge of all that was going to happen since the beginning of time to this day. But it’s one thing to have foreknowledge of some event and it’s another to let it happen in a long series of cause and effect,” the voice explained.

  “Your answer brings us back to square one,” Ali maintained. “For if God had foreknowledge of all events from all eternity including the final reward or punishment that all mortals would receive — and divine knowledge can’t be incorrect — then the inescapable conclusion is that there was no escape from the inexorable law of causation. All was eternally settled including not only the roles but also how they would be acted out. Why then first create good performers and bad performers and afterwards reward or penalize them?”

  “You are again barking up the wrong tree,” the voice observed. “It’s not that events took place or the people behaved in a particular way because God had their foreknowledge. To put it differently, divine knowledge was not the cause which necessitated that such and such event would take place in such and such a manner. To give a familiar example, in your times people sitting at their desk speculated purely on the basis of their knowledge and experience that the stock market would crash, which it did on occasions. But that didn’t mean their forecast was the cause of the crash. Yes events could have happened otherwise. But God knew they would not because he knew all the causes and conditions governing those events. Not only that, he could intervene and change the effects of the causes to produce different results. After all, the law of causation wasn’t binding on the Almighty being its Author. Divine intervention though was confined to special events.”

  “Again, accepted for the sake of argument. But didn’t the divine intervention expose the failure of the scheme of causation established by none other than the Almighty Himself?” Ali queried.

  “God could have established a perfect scheme of causation as He could have created a perfect world inhabited by perfect men and women. But then the very purpose of creation would have been lost. When everything is perfect, there’s no room for change, no possibility of improvement, no scope for progress, no need for experimentation. So the perfect world would be a static world. Needless to emphasize, creativity can hardly be exercised in such a world. Thus in a perfect world, the divine creativity wouldn’t have found its full expression. That’s why except the Almighty everyone and everything is well short of perfection. Everything is subject to change, decay and decadence, and permanence is an attribute of God only,” the voice said emphatically.

  “Now if you have nothing more to ask,” the voice added after a pause, we would pronounce the divine judgment. In sum, since the debit side of your balance sheet is much larger than the credit side, you are condemned to hell.”

  “Please my lord, have mercy on me. I realize and confess that I was wrong and wanting in good deeds. Give me another chance,” Ali bewailed.

  Hearing his cries, Mrs Naqvi rushed to his room and found him sweating profusely.

  “Are you ok?” she shook him.

  Ali opened his eyes and to his great satisfaction realized that he was just dreaming.

  “I guess you had a bad dream. What were you thinking before you went to bed?”

  Ali narrated to his mother how he was thinking about death and what he had dreamt.

  “I understand you have been deeply affected by your father’s death. But my son death is part of life and we all have to experience the separation of those we love and adore. Have trust in God and yourself. He will give you the strength to face up to the world. People say despair in God is the ultimate sin. I would add that it’s also the ultimate blunder.”

  Chapter 37

  “I‘m Babu Javed from the intelligence department,” the man introduced himself to Dr Junaid.

  “Yes but what possible reasons can an intelligence agent have for coming to see me?” Dr Junaid asked looking keenly at the gentleman. “Am I being considered for some high profile position in the government and need agencies’ clearance for that?”

  “No sir, that’s not the reason that I’m here, Babu Javed replied. “I’m here because of Maulvi Zia. Please don’t get surprised. I’m well familiar with the connection between you two. And you need not worry either, because I’m on your side.”

  “Oh that’s fine! But I must say you scared me for a while. Have a seat please. May I know what precisely brings you here?” Dr Junaid asked.

  “Yes of course; I’ll come to that shortly but please ensure none interrupts us.”

  “Don’t worry, I live along with an old, reliable servant. Just give me a moment.”

  Dr Junaid went out of the room and returned shortly. “Now we can talk freely.”

  “You know how Maulvi Zia narrowly escaped a drone strike. Initially the government thought he was dead but later they got the tip that he was alive and had taken refuge in a safe haven belonging to a ruling party parliamentarian.”

  “Yes I’m aware of that,” Dr Junaid confirmed. “But I was instructed not to try to contact him. I trust he’s safe and sound.”

  “He is all right. Probably you are unaware that security agency personnel raided the place he was hiding. But the raid was leaked and so Maulvi sahib was removed from there.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “He is in a safer place: in the embassy of a Muslim country,” Babu Javed disclosed. “Only a handful of persons know his whereabouts.”

  “How do you fit in the whole affair? I mean does the agency you work for also support Zia sahib or are you doing this on your own?”

  “The agency-militant axis is a complex one and we needn’t go into that,” Babu Javed replied. “In the agency I work for, there’s strong support for the militants. But this is more on individual level and hasn’t much to do with the policy of the agency. I’m helping Zia sahib on the directions of none other than prime minister Malik Naseem. You must be wondering why Malik Naseem is trying to save Maulvi Zia.”

  “I can guess that but to be frank what surprises me is not why Malik Naseem is supporting Zia sahib but how come a junior rank intelligence agent enjoys the confidence of the prime minister on such sensitive an issue?” Dr Junaid queried.

  “I can understand this. I have been on personal terms with Malik Naseem for a long time. To cut a long story short, Malik sahib murdered a call girl when he was very young and was contesting his maiden election. At that time, I was assistant sub inspector in the police station concerned and was in the position to save or damn him. I saved him and ever since Malik sahib has been grateful to me. I have done many other things for him and he has always reciprocated. If he had his way, he would make me the head of the agency I work for. But we know that wouldn’t be good for either of us. But I remain his most trustworthy person in the entire government machinery,” Babu Javed explained.

  “Malik Naseem’s confidence in you must be well deserved,” Dr Junaid noted. “Before we proceed, tell me one thing: Of late, father of one of my students, who happened to be a well known journalist, was shot dead in daylight. Do you know anything about his killers?”

  “If I’m not mistaken you are alluding to Hassan Naqvi. He was also related to me — a very upright person he was. But I’m afraid I have no clue as to his murder.”

  “Ok. You have updated me about Maulvi Zia. But is this all why you are here?”

  “Maulvi Zia wants to meet you and I have been tasked with arranging the meeting. Now listen carefully.”

  Babu Javed whispered some instructions into Dr Junaid’s ears.

  “Yes tomorrow we’ll leave.”

  Ali accepted the advice of his mother and sought, yet another time, to establish his faith in God.

  “I’m aware that it’s difficult to prove the existence of God empirically or rationally. But empirically and rationally, denial of the existence of God is not a necessity either. In fact, the existence of God can neither be proved nor disprov
ed by traditional arguments. So the grounds for the existence of God should rest elsewhere. Why not the pragmatic ground? In philosophy I have read about several tests of truth and one of these is pragmatic test. And no truth is more important than that of God’s existence,” Ali argued with himself.

  “I should start by reposing my faith in God and then see what effects it produces on myself. If the belief works and makes me more courageous, more responsible and mentally and emotionally more stable, then it means God exists. If the consequences are otherwise, then I may infer that God doesn’t exist. So let’s start with the assumption that God exists,” Ali made up his mind.