Abundance and Want

Now, to come to qadr: this is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in the Islamic tradition. A lot of Muslims even misunderstand it. But let it be related to two very important concepts in the Qurʾān. Generally khayr is understood to be good, and sharr is understood to be evil. But from the Islamic cosmological view, the one is related to abundance and the other to want, and the actual moral component in these concepts is played down in a way that it would not be in Christianity.

Take an example. For a lot of people there is a hard time with the idea of a God who could create evil, and this is a classic philosophical problem in the West: if God is all good, and He is all powerful, then there should not be evil — because if He were all good He would not want evil, and if He were all powerful He could do something about it. This is a common philosophical problem; they call it the problem of evil, and there have been attempts to resolve it. But from a Muslim point of view, we believe that good and evil are both from God.

Before saying, you mean God is evil, look a little deeper at what this means in terms of its philosophical implications. The word sharr is related, for instance, to poverty. Poverty in the Arab tradition is sharr. Why? Because it is a want. There is no moral judgement there in a poor person. One is not saying a poor person is evil; one is just saying poverty is sharr. It is a want. There is a lack of something.

When we talk about good and evil from a Muslim perspective, good means that there is a divine presence; sharr means there is an absence of the divine. Looked at in terms of a moral action: if a person saves somebody drowning, that would be called khayr; but if a person kills somebody, that would be called sharr. Why? Because if you save the drowning person, there is a divine quality that is embodied there, which is raḥmah. But if you kill a person unjustly, there is the absence of the divine quality, which is justice: you have been unjust. And the Qurʾān says that God is not unjust.

So in the absence of good, we have evil, and this is how the Muslims view it. They literally view evil as an absence of good. To the degree that the divine qualities are not present in the world, we have evil; and to the degree that the divine qualities are present in the world, that the immanence is present there, we have good. And this is why there is a hadith in which the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: Allāhumma al-khayru bi-yadayk — O Allah, good is in Your presence — wa al-sharru lā yaʿūdu ilayk, and evil never returns to You. So while we believe that God has created a world of opposites — abundance and want, good and evil — we do not believe that evil goes back to God, because evil is the absence of the divine. The divine is absent from the act.