The Lowest of Lowliness

by Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani Sahib

EVERY person has his own temperament and his own approach; he has his own priorities and natural inclinations; it’s not necessary that everyone should feel the same way. Ever since I have read this report and seen the torn and dead remains, and the faces of those tiny newborns, I have a peculiar feeling inside me. Their picture does not leave my eyes. A question relentlessly goes round and round my mind: have we really become so vacuous, so low, so heartless, and so wicked that we fail to have the least pity for tiny, innocent lives? Are we really so powerless at the hands of momentary pleasures and fleeting gratification that we have lost all sense? Neither Allah’s commands nor the teachings of the Prophet sallallahu ‘alaihi wassallam, or the family’s honor, or moral constraints and principles, or conscience, or humanity stop us?

This report is in context of an organization that buries unclaimed bodies and picks up babies still alive but abandoned by their immoral mothers who wish to veil their sin by throwing their babies on heaps of rubbish, sewerages, backstreets, empty parks, and in those cribs that have specially been provided for the purpose.

90 percent of these babies are killed before being thrown away. Some are torn from limb to limb, some are burnt, some have the life squeezed out of them, and some of those that are abandoned are bitten and gnawed to death by stray cats and dogs, while some cannot endure the hunger, weakness or rigors of weather. Some mothers leave behind their babies on the benches of hospitals they were born in or tell the nurses to take them and give them away to anyone they like. 80 percent of the abandoned babies are female which shows that couples too prefer sons and daughters are left to die. The ultrasound has made it easier now to know before the birth whether a baby is male or female. A lot of unborn females never see daylight. It has been discovered that 600 such babies are found annually in the country, out of which 100 are alive and 500 dead. What becomes of these children? Where do they go? This is a different discussion.

Anyway, this report is enough to open our eyes. It shows the degeneration, low morals, heartlessness of the society, and the propagation of immodesty. This degeneration and lowliness has not befallen us suddenly. Multinational companies, filmmakers, the actors and actresses dominating the media, and we ourselves have worked at it for years. It has taken billions of Rupees and tens of thousands of minds to get us there. When nudity and obscenity rule, when the roads are overflowing with naked splendor, when the papers and magazines are filled with semi-bare, nay, bare pictures; the TV is rife with arousing scenes; films and dramas are fanning dormant desires; when schools, colleges, homes, and streets are festooned with the mixing of sexes; when sharai pardah is cast off as a remnant of backwardness; when adopting the cursed western styles becomes all the rage; when tying the knot is made an arduous procedure with the tough walls of dowry, standard, and traditions and custom to scale; when the yardstick for a proposal becomes not a good character but riches, cars, and bungalows; yes! When all is done to fan and heighten the flames of desire and then all possible actions taken to impede legal courses of action…………in that case we will just have to witness such horrifying and chilling sights. We will just have to pick half-burned, torn, twisted, and bewailing bodies from rubbish heaps, sewerages, backstreets, empty parks and dismal lanes. Even animals cannot equal such savagery that a deluded “single mother” metes out to her baby.

You must have seen the common enough sight of a sick, hungry bitch offering her pups the last drops of life and nourishment in her body, who will jump at any threat, however great, to her babies. But who are these people who have made the “woman of the east” first shameless and then so hard hearted that no family value, no code of behavior, no religious law, no stab of the conscience stops her from treading the path of sin. In the days of Ignorance it was the man who squeezed the life out of his daughter, but today, in our society it has become the mother who dumps the life of her life, the life nourished with her own 'blood to the mercy of buzzing flies, poisonous insects, hungry alley cats, and brutal, ravenous dogs. If the clandestine meetings that stripped her shame and honor was one sin, then this is the next: of murdering an innocent life.

You may remember when one woman of the days of the Prophet sallallahu ‘alaihi wassallam was guilty of such a sin and she was restless with the thought of her indiscretion. She came to the blessed Prophet sallallahu ‘alaihi wassallam to ask him to impose the had (Islamic law) on her and thus purge her of her sin. RasulAllah sallallahu ‘alaihi wassallam had answered,

“You have sinned, but what fault is it of the innocent life growing in your womb? What should I punish him for?”

She went away but came back after the baby was born and repeated her request. He sallallahu ‘alaihi wassallam argued that if she were gone, who would bring up her child? Then she came when she had weaned the child and it held a piece of bread in its hand. She said, “Ya RasulAllah! Now he is weaned of milk.” After that she was punished for her transgression.

To kill an illegitimate child is undoubtedly murder. But the question is how to prevent such murders? By adding to the number of cribs? By validating illegal births? By encouraging the unmarried parents to carry on with their heads up in society? No! Certainly not! We will have to find a solution not with the glasses of the west but under light of the Islamic Laws. We will have to rein in those papers, magazines and journals that have made woman’s body, her beauty, her bareness, and obscenity the means to further their circulation. Our papers and magazines consider it their loyal duty to highlight any obscenity anywhere in the world or any scandal of actors or actresses or sportsmen. We will have to ban those films and dramas that have nothing but violence, romance, and abductions in them. We will have to keep an eye on those mixed gatherings, educational institutions, and clubs where the germs of indulgence nourish and seeds of sin take root. Unless we make marriage a lot easier it will be impossible to stop illegitimate relations. No one will be able to stop the advance of unlawful means of fulfilling natural desires when lawful means will be held back.