Good and evil. Sheikh Ahmed Bermejo

Today we get a little “technical” again to try to clarify an aspect that has great importance in our belief, in the belief of Ahlu sunna wal yama’ah. It is an aspect that concerns us all and that we should know, because not doing so can lead us to have an incorrect belief and to have a bad opinion and bad thoughts about Allah.
What we are going to talk about today is good and evil, or rather, what in Arabic is called “As Salah wal Aslah”, which is a dogma of the belief of Mu’tazilism that stipulates that Allah always does what is best for the servant, and that He has the imposition to continue to do what is best for the believing servants.
This is a thought very typical of ancient Greek philosophy, especially of Plato and his theory of ideas, which should not surprise us since Mu’tazilism is a consequence of the encounter of Islamic civilization with Greek philosophy.
Now, in order to deal with the matter before us today, it is essential that we know what is good and what is evil, what is really good and what is really evil.
Is the good ontological?
Is it the good deontological?
Are good and evil absolute?
Is Allah good in Himself?
Is Allah evil?
And are things good in themselves, because of a quality they possess, or are they not?
What we believe is that Allah is the one who determines whether things are good or bad; the absolute good itself, by a quality that it possesses, does not exist, but it is Allah, with His Free Will, Knowledge and Power, who has determined it.
And how do we access that knowledge?
We do this through the Scriptures, the Revealed Books, what in Arabic is called an-naql.
Therefore it is not our intellect, nor our habits, nor our own perception that lead us to determine whether something is good or bad, but that knowledge is found in the Scriptures.
But to understand this, there are four points we need to talk about:

1. That good for a person is that which seems good to him and does not imply evil or pain, neither in the present nor in the future.
   And evil is that which has some kind of pain, either in the present or in the future.
   And when we talk about “pain” we mean something that can affect the intellect or some other of the senses.
   An example of this is food, a good food in its right measure, is the one that does not hurt you and a bad food is the one that produces some kind of evil.
2. The second aspect is that, of the affairs of this world, of Dunia, we cannot say that something is entirely good if we use the previous meaning; that is, that it is good in all its aspects and forms, since everything good can have a dark side, in the same way that there is nothing bad that is bad at all; and what is done in these cases is to give the judgment of good or bad to that which has the greatest proportion.
   On the other hand, in the affairs of the Deen we do find aspects that are a complete good, that is, from them a good is obtained in the present and in the future, and by future we mean both the future in this life and the future in the next.
   For example, the case of a person to whom Allah has given knowledge of Him, and thereby reassures him, obtains an immediate good and also obtains a good in the future.
   And that is why the Messenger of Allah ( peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said in a hadith that is a wonder to us: “Dunya is cursed and so is everything in it, except the dhikr of Allah and what is obtained from it, and a man of knowledge and one who learns it, who learns knowledge.” Why?
   Because these three, the one who remembers Allah, the person of knowledge and the one who is seeking knowledge, get immediate pleasure and delight and will also get it from it in the future.
3. The third aspect is that the human being does not have the capacity to encompass or understand the complete knowledge of what can affect a person, because he does not have the knowledge of the present, the future, the internal and the external; both for good and for evil.
   Since both good and evil have many facets that we do not know.
4. And the fourth aspect is that what is good for one person, may not be good for another; and the opposite is true: what is bad for one person, may not be bad for another; that is, that good and evil are relative and we can never declare and affirm that they are absolute.
   And this is known as ethical relativism.

Taking into account these four aspects, it is very difficult for us to say what is good or what is bad.
And this unless we have what?
May we have the revelation that will make it clear to us whether it is good or bad, for as Allah says: “You may dislike something that is good for you and you may love something that is evil. Allah knows and you do not know.”
I think we all know the story of Sayyiduna Musa with the Khadir (and those who do not know it can read it in the Qur’an, or in its translation, it is related towards the end of the Surah of the Cave), in which Al-Khadir performs a series of actions that externally and immediately seem evil, but internally and subsequently are good. This is why we believers have a good opinion of Allah, since we are able, in everything that happens to us, to see a good that comes from Allah, whether or not we know the secret of that good. And this is what the words of the Messenger Muhammad refer to, Salla Allahu Alaihi wa Salllam., when he said: “The amazing thing about the believer is that everything that happens to him is good, and this happens only with the believer. If good happens to him, he is thankful and that is beneficial to him, and if evil happens to him, he has patience and that is better for him.” But of course, all this, which is true, this having a good opinion of Allah and being able to see some good in everything that happens to us, cannot lead us to the extreme of believing, as the Mu’tazilites do, that Allah is obliged to do what is good, or what is best for the servant.
Well, this opinion has criticisms that make it inconceivable as we will see below: The first thing is that if someone says that Allah is obliged to do good, one must ask oneself, who is it that obliges him?
If Allah says in His Book: “Judgment belongs only to Allah.”
That is to say that Allah is the one who judges, He is the one who imposes or forbids and no one can impose or prohibit anything on Him. The second thing is that there are aspects in which it is not possible, there is no option that contains good, such as when Allah creates a person who is disbelieving, poor, sick, despicable; It is being punished in this life and will also be punished in the Next Life. Or like the diseases that affect children that lead to their death; What good can there be in that child? This second point, which is also linked to the first, is very interesting, because what we do with it is to answer the question of why Allah has done this, why Allah creates wars, why He creates natural disasters, why He makes one person poor and another rich, why if I do this and that, I get up every day to Fajùr, I don’t stop doing dhikr, I do good, I give sadaqa, I treat others well, Allah makes me go through so many difficulties. The answer is very simple, because Allah does what He wants, not what you want, no; Allah does what He wills. Allah is not a God of design who does what we want or what suits us, he is a God who does what He wants. And the third point is that if we see a matter that has no good for the slave and we believe that Allah is obligated to do good towards His slaves, then what does it mean if Allah does not do it? That Allah has failed to fulfill what He had to do? And what happens when someone who is obliged to do something does not do it, what consequences or repercussions does it have? It is for all this that
Ahlu Sunna wal Jama’ah do not agree with the statement of the Mu’tazilas who declare that Allah is obligated to do good; what we do is to have a good opinion of Allah, and not to ask or question why Allah has done one thing or another, since that is not our business.
Allah says in His Book: “He (Allah) will not be asked for explanations of what he does.” And this particular matter is what causes the great Imam of the Asha’irah, Abul Hasan Al-Ash’ari, to separate himself from his teacher Al-Jubbai, the great Shaykh of Mu’tazilism.
It is a very beautiful and well-known story, in which Al-Jubbai was teaching this matter of good and evil, and then Al-Ash’ari (who until that moment belonged to Mu’tazilism), full of courtesy and respect, said to him: “Master, I am going to ask you a series of questions: What about the case of three brothers, one of whom dies as an adult having obeyed Allah, another dies as an adult having disobeyed Allah, and the other dies as a child, who is not yet judged or taken into account?”
The teacher, al-Jubbai, said: “The first (the one who died in obedience) will be rewarded with the Garden because he fulfilled what his Lord had commanded him; the second (the one who died in disobedience) will be punished with Fire because he was not able to fulfill what his Lord had commanded him, and the third will be neither punished nor rewarded, because he had neither time nor opportunity to obey or disobey his Lord.” (This is also a Mu’tazila thought: there is the Garden and the Fire, and there is an abode between the two, to which for example children and other categories go, which we will talk about another time.)
And Imam al-Ash’ari says to him: “Okay, okay, but if the third (the child) says to him: “O lord, why have you not made me grow up so that I would obey you and enter the Garden. What would the Lord (Allah) say to this?” Al-Jubbai said: “The Lord would say, ‘I knew that if you had grown up, you would have disobeyed me and therefore you would have had to go to the Fire; So it is best for you (al-Aslah) that you die small, so I have decreed it.”
“Very well,” says Al-Ash’ari, but if the second (the disbeliever who has died in disobedience) were to say: “O Lord, why did you not make me die small so that I would not enter the Fire? What would the Lord (Allah) say to this?”
And the Jubbai was left with his mouth open, unable to answer, for if Allah had done what was best for the servant, which is what He was bound to do according to His doctrine, He would not have let it grow.”
And in this simple but wonderful way, the great Imam Abul Hasan Al-Ash’ari, completely dismantled the theory of Mu’tazilism, of the “God of design” in which Allah does what is convenient for me, what I believe and perceive to be the best.
But no, Allah is the one who if He wants something to be He tells it It is, and it happens just as He has wanted, just as He has established.
O Allaah, we ask You to give us understanding and knowledge, to make us accept Your decree and to make us think well of You.
Sheikh Ahmed Bermejo http://ahmedbermejo.com