ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Islamic Concept and Its Characteristics Chapter Vi : Balance "You do not see in the creation of the All-Merciful any imperfections"(Al-Mulk 67:3). The fourth characteristic of the Islamic concept is balance, balance in its constituent elements and balance in its teachings. And this characteristic is closely connected with its characteristic of com­prehensiveness, which is a balanced comprehensiveness.

This distinc­tive characteristic protects the Islamic concept from fanaticism, contradictions, and foreign intrusions, while all other concepts are afflicted by such troubles, whether they be philosophical concepts or religious concepts that have been distorted by the addition or subtrac­tion of human ideas or through wrong interpretations of the originally correct beliefs. We present a few prominent examples from the Islamic teachings to illustrate their manifest quality of balance.

Some aspects of the Islamic concept we accept by immediate recog­nition of their self-evident truth, and the matter ends there. Other aspects need to be understood, discussed, researched, and applied to the actual circumstances of life. And there is a balance between these two types of aspects. Human nature is happy with both because both of them are as they ought to be. Indeed, Allah knows that the human intellect cannot compass all the: secrets of existence, nor can it fully comprehend them.

He therefore conditioned the human intellect to be happy with what it can know and with what it cannot know. And there is a balance between the satisfaction of knowledge and the curiosity about the unknown in the personality of man, reflecting the same kind of balance between the knowable and the unknowable in the nature of existence. A belief system in which there is no element of the unknown nor anything greater than the limited understanding of man can hardly be called a belief.

The .human soul can find little appealing in such a system, because there would be little to excite its curiosity or satisfy its sense of mystery. On the other hand, a belief system that is self-contradictory or so steeped in mystery that it baffles the human intellect is also not a belief. The human personality requires something illuminating yet not contradictory or puzzling, because it also needs something that can be understood, translated into action, and be applied in life situations.