One Person's Evil Is Another Person's Good

Now, the other problem, when we look in terms of khayr and sharr, is that the Qurʾān says: maybe you detest a thing and it is khayr for you, it is good for you; and maybe you love a thing but it is sharr for you. And then it says: and God knows and you do not know.

So there is an idea here, in this concept of good and evil, that we are in a relative situation. We do not have all of the information here. One person's evil is another person's good. One person's evil is another person's good. And this happens all over; one can see this. Somebody loses a job, another person gets the job: so for one person it was sharr, and for another person it was good. And this is the nature of the world.

If one looks in terms of the giver of life and the taker of life: if there were no taking of life, then there could not be a continuation of life. This is the nature of it. We generally relate the taking of life to sharr — it is a want, a lack of. But in relation to the next world, there is a khayr, because death in this world means life in the next world. So this is related to the fact that we are not putting moral components here; we are not judging things for ourselves.

Now the Qurʾān has given the Muslims a criterion. It is evil to kill another person unjustly, and a person is taken to account for that and killed. In relation to the big picture, we do not know, and we cannot make an eternal judgement; we can only make a temporal judgement. If somebody murders another person, and by all outward appearances it was an unjust murder, that person is taken to account and his life is forfeited — or, in certain circumstances, those who are called the wulāt al-dam, the holders of the blood claim, can forgive him.

Islam has an interesting attitude towards the death penalty: the Muslims allow for a family to forgive the person, so the Christian ideal of forgiving is there. And the Qurʾān actually says that to forgive is higher. So if a person killed another person, the family has the right to say that they forgive him; they can do that. But in terms of highway robbery, brigandage — anybody who threatens the security of a society, in other words indiscriminately — there is no such provision. If there was a fight between two people and one killed the other, then the family could say: we do not want to take him to account for it, we are going to forgive him. They can do that. But if it is somebody who goes in and robs a store and kills somebody, then they have forfeited their life by Islamic law.