Why They Were Accursed

The final portion — the last few verses, from verse 78 to 82 — provides some understanding of why they have been accursed: why the Banū Isrāʾīl have been accursed. It says:

Luʿina alladhīna kafarū: those of the Banū Isrāʾīl who disbelieved. Not all the Banū Isrāʾīl were so; there were those who believed, and they were sound. But those who did not believe have been accursed on the tongue of Dāwūd (peace be upon him), their own prophet, and of ʿĪsā, the son of Maryam. This was because of their excesses. They did two things: they disobeyed — of all the rulings sent down to them, they disobeyed many — and they went beyond the remit. Those were the two failings.

Why is all this mentioned? Merely to condemn them? No: it is to rouse them, to warn them. But above all it is to tell the believers: do not go down that path. For there are hadiths stating that all the failings of the nations of the past, such as the Christians and the Jews — wherever they went, even into the hole of a rodent or a snake, you would follow them in the same way. This is generic human behaviour, generic human failing. Human beings have throughout history had certain weaknesses; it is human to feel jealousy and greed, to hold radical opinions on certain matters, to want to be different, to go against the grain, to be extreme. If they had these, we may have the same failings — and we do. Certain people will do certain wild things, going overboard or falling short: antinomian tendencies on the one hand, ultra-super-orthodox notions on the other. We have both.

At the end, in verse 82, Allah (swt) says something of great interest:

You will find — it is addressed to the Prophet (peace be upon him) — that the most severe in enmity towards you will be the Yahūd and the mushrikīn, for such was the nature of the time; and that the nearest in love and compassion, or affection, to those who believe will be those who say: we are Christians. The reason, Allah says, is that they have qissīsīn wa-ruhbān. This is not to say that they are hermits and that hermitage is thereby sanctioned. It is only to say that because they have many people given over to worship, who have nothing to do with the dunyā — who care nothing for who rules and who does not, and want only goodness — there are many good people among them. For that reason better people will generally be found among them; they will be closer to you and more compassionate towards you. And historically that may well have been the case.

In many countries one sees — in India, unfortunately, one sees what is happening with the mushrikīn, the Hindus. There is much good among them as well; but unfortunately, for many of them, in the last seven years — as in Assam. There is the account of a Muslim from Assam, a doctor working in one of the hospitals in England, who said that before those seven years there had been no trouble in Assam between the Hindus and the Muslims. In the last seven years, once someone wishes to create trouble, it has become very bad in the state of Assam in India; and not only there — it is now happening throughout. May Allah (swt) bring some relief. Where people wish to be good and do not create that sectarian trouble — whether Muslim or non-Muslim — that is where one of the problems lies.