Brotherhood in Islam

But if the causes of enmity prevail and true hatred settles in the heart, then love itself becomes merely superficial, degenerating into pretence and flattery.

O unfair person! Reflect on what a grave injustice it is to harbour resentment and enmity toward your believing brother. If you were to claim that ordinary pebbles are more precious than the Kaba or greater than Mount Uhud, everyone would regard it as absurd. In the same way, the believer possesses qualities such as īmān—which is as sacred as the Kaba—and Islam—which is as majestic as Mount Uhud—qualities that call for love, unity, and solidarity. To prefer certain faults, insignificant as common stones, over these exalted realities and to make them the cause of hostility is an act of profound injustice, irrationality, and cruelty.

Indeed, the unity of īmān necessarily requires unity of hearts, and unity of creed requires social unity. You cannot deny that serving alongside someone in the same regiment gives rise to a bond of friendship, or that serving under the command of the same officer fosters a sense of comradeship. Living together in the same land likewise gives rise to feelings of kinship and fellowship.

Yet the light and awareness bestowed by īmān reveal far stronger bonds: as many ties of unity, agreement, and brotherhood as there are Divine Names manifested through faith.

For example, your Creator is the same, your Sovereign is the same, the One you worship is the same, and your Provider is the same—and so on, to a thousand such points of unity. Likewise, your Prophet is the same, your religion is the same, and your qibla is the same—and so on, to a hundred such points of unity. Moreover, your village is the same, your state is the same, and your homeland is the same—and so on, to ten such points of unity.

When so many unifying bonds exist—bonds strong enough to link together the entire universe and its spheres through spiritual chains—how grave an offence it is to abandon them in favour of matters as insignificant and fragile as a spider’s web, matters that give rise to dispute, division, resentment, and enmity. To nurture genuine hatred toward a fellow believer on such flimsy grounds is a profound disrespect toward the bond of unity, a belittlement of the causes of love, and a serious injustice against the ties of brotherhood—if only your heart has not died and your reason has not been extinguished.

The Third Aspect

According to the verse

وَلَا تَزِرُ وَازِرَةٌ وِزْرَ اُخْرٰى

which expresses absolute justice, it is boundless injustice to condemn all the other innocent qualities of a believer and to harbour hatred and enmity toward him because of a single bad quality. In particular, according to the mystery of the verse

اِنَّ الْاِنْسَانَ لَظَلُومٌ

you commit a great injustice when, because of one fault in a believer, you become offended and resentful and extend your hostility to his relatives. While this verse—by expressing the injustice of human beings in the strongest terms—together with the truth, the Sharia, and the wisdom of Islam warns you against such conduct, how can you still claim to be just and insist that you are in the right?