Who is a Fool?

When they are asked to believe as (the other) people believe, they say, shall we believe like the fools? Beware! They indeed are the foolish but they know it not.

Abul ‘Ala M‘arri was an outstanding atheistic thinker and poet of the medieval Muslim world. A nihilist and existentialist before Nihilism and Existentialism formally arrived on the scene, he devised his own epitaph which would have made Jean-Paul Sartre jump for excitement: Wrote M‘arri:

I am the sin which my father committed;

I have committed such a sin against none.

This because M‘arri had taken a vow not to marry and add to human misery. M‘arri also wrote:

They all err – Muslims, Christians, Jews and Magians;

Two make Humanity’s Universal sect:

One man intelligent without religion,

And one religious without intellect.

Some people have attributed a similar saying to the great medical genius, Avicenna (Abu Ali Sina), who is said to have remarked that only two communities exist – men with wit but no religion and men with religion and no wit. Recalling his student days at Aligarh Muslim University in the sixties of the last century, an economist quotes one of the AMU professors saying that when a non-Muslim wears a beard, he is called an ‘intellectual’ but when a Muslim wears it, he is dubbed ‘a fool’. Some spirit of this facetious attitude has travelled to Eastern poetry especially Persian and Urdu poetry, in which the Shaikh and Zahid are laughed at with impunity. This exercise of heaping ridicule on men of religion has some sense if the butt of ridicule is that rigid and inflexible religiosity which remains frozen in form at the cost of the true spirit of religion but a blanket ridicule of all religion indicates sheer bankruptcy of sense and serious lack of balance. In any case there is another point of view. The Quran speaking of the hypocrites (munafiqun), says:

When they are asked to believe as (the other) people believe, they say, shall we believe like the fools? Beware! They indeed are the foolish but they know it not.        (2: 13).

In the same context the Quran also adds that the hypocrites say that they ridicule the true believers whereas the fact is that they themselves stand ridiculed in Allah’s subtle planning. And the Prophet (SAW) remarks in a hadith:

“A wise man is one who controls his self and works for the life that follows death, and a fool is one who pursues his desires, pinning false hopes on Allah.”

(Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah)