Ignorance isn’t all bliss

By Ayesha Irfan 

“Your Lord is the All-Forgiving, Full of Mercy. If He were to seize them immediately for what they commit, He would have certainly hastened their punishment. But they have an appointed time, from which they will find no refuge.”

(Al-Kahf, 18:58)

When we commit a wrong, we don’t realise what actually has happened. Because it isn’t visible to naked eye, we don’t see the category in which we have fallen because of our action (or mis-action), and we walk around doing everything as if nothing has happened. 

When actually it has.

By design, we don’t see the weight of our sins and its inevitable consequence, that no one else will bear except our own selves.

Like cause and effect. 

Like action and reaction. 

Like energy never dies but only transforms. 

We walk around with the weight of those sins: effects, reactions, energy. Like Allah says

“He knows what enters the earth and what comes out of it; what descends from the sky and what ascends to it. He is with you wherever you are; He sees all that you do.” (Al-Hadid, 57:4)

We walk around with Allah’s displeasure without knowing, without realising. In that demoted state we do everything – we eat, we laugh, we shop, we watch TV, we hang out, et cetera. We become grumpy over the blessings we have; we react to little things that aren’t to our slightest liking; and of course there are more mistakes we make that cause further demotion – all on top of the first lapse. We carry on living as if nothing has happened, as if this is all a game, and nothing means anything.

If only we know the reality of the weight we carry on ourselves when we commit an offense in Allah’s eyes, we would not do anything, but cry our eyes and heart out over what we have done for ourselves and where have we fallen in Allah’s eyes. The realization of the inevitable consequences of those sins will leave us absolutely unable to do anything; we would stop ‘carrying on’ unless we make good the wrong we committed. When we should have been so sorry for what we had done, when we should have left everything and beseeched Him for His gracious forgiveness, we go about doing pointless things in a blithe, let’s-not-think-about-serious-things manner. 

Ignorance is bliss? Not at all. Sometimes the consequences result in problems in this lifetime, and sometimes they are delayed till the next. Even when the weight of our sins is translated for us, we don’t understand and resort to fallacies. Even then we neither accept nor connect that it was us all along.

We don’t seek forgiveness for the countless sins we commit almost the whole day which becomes a week, then a month, then years and ultimately a lifetime. We don’t understand that the matter is serious, very urgent. What a loss, that we don’t repent, what a loss.

‘Those are the societies We destroyed when they persisted in wrong, and We had set a time for their destruction.” (Al-Kahf, 18:59)