Certain part of the world, people go through suffering for an extraordinarily long period of time. Is it because of some sins or related to… Not necessarily. Individually, I mean. But the Holy Quran speaks of such people, in larger groups, who suffer until they are more prosperous. baldatun tayyabatun wa rabbun ghafoor This is where this description culminates. This is how it culminates. So, largely speaking, when the whole society has become sinful, many suffering automatically crops up from that state of crime.
And people begin to suffer, not necessarily individually for a certain crime which they have committed, but because the whole social setup has become criminal. The whole society has become criminal. So the innocent might suffer then, because it’s the law of large numbers which that operates. And in that, no distinctions are made of who has committed a crime and how he should be punished. The social punishments are then common for everybody.
And the Holy Quran also speaks of this. It tells us that beware of that calamity which will not discriminate between the pious and the unpious. Such calamities are these larger scale calamities which are created by human society themselves. It may mean something else as well, but this is also what it means. For instance, the suffering here in Britain and other parts of Europe and other Western societies, if you analyze them, a great majority of those sufferings are caused by human evils. Despite the fact that they are prosperous, they are well-to-do societies, they have no reason to indulge in crime. I mean, that is to say, no compulsion. Like in some poor societies, people are compelled to indulge in some crimes, although still you can’t justify that, but there is some reason somehow.
Somebody is poor, dying of hunger, if he steals a few things, somehow it can be justified, a little bit at least. But in such rich societies, prosperous societies, where Allah has provided them with everything, most of the crimes committed here are unnecessary crimes. And most of the evils faced by the society of today here is because of man-made situations. And when these crimes go beyond a certain limit, then the whole society begins to suffer and then you can’t discriminate between the innocent person and the criminal person. The suffering may be shared by an innocent person and an evil person may remain caught free for a while, but as a whole, the whole society begins to suffer.
So this is what’s happening nowadays, you know, these most horrible crimes of killing of small children and looting and drug addiction and the resultant crimes, you know, dependent on drug addiction initially, so many nowadays, as I told earlier, I once happened to see a program on crime and an experienced police officer who was responsible for that particular branch, gave it on authority, on his personal experience, indicating a certain town, that in this town, every third house is a seat of crime, where the crime of this particular nature, that is, what do they call, when they are criminal to children, they do… Child abuse. Child abuse, yes.
Every third house is an arena for child abuse, ranging from small abuse to very big, most horrible abuses. And he said before he was attached to this branch, was it every third or every seventh? I don’t remember exactly, I think last time I spoke here, then it was fresh in my memory. But let’s call it every seventh even. That is a very big percentage. Every seventh house being a seat of unseen crime, of child abuse. And children are sometimes maimed, sometimes killed, sometimes they suffer from psychological traumas which last for life. And then they showed some interviews of such people who were indulging in such crimes.
Their faces were covered by some masks and shamefacedly they said, yes, we do this and we do that and this is all right. And some people admitted that we have been doing it for thirty years. They were brought from jails for this particular interview. Or perhaps the person who interviewed them went to jail. And also those were shown who suffered at the hands of such criminals and some of them were in a very bad, very rotten shape. They had lost interest in everything. Those who were sexually abused, they said they are horrified with the idea of sex. It’s a terror for them now even to think of it.
So they were, I mean, they were to live single lives all their lives because of such crimes having been perpetrated upon them, not only by unrelated people, by parents sometimes, by fathers. And such fathers gave their interview and they said it was all right. So what is this? This is the crime of the whole society. So those also suffer who know or learn of these things. Not only those suffer who go through the experience but the whole society aches.
This is what I mean, that human crime sometimes is responsible for these large scale sufferings. And generally in prosperous society this is the main reason. Natural calamities are responsible for only a very small percentage of total human suffering. Mostly it is man-made suffering which we experience in this age. Thank you.
