Of Sin and Crime

I was fervidly persuaded that day by my neighbour molvi sahib to attend this Jum’a congregation in a madrassah near the city centre. We got a bit late in hitting the road and so molvi sahib was left with no choice but to violate every traffic signal on our way in anticipation of finding a shaded place inside the madrassah. When castigated, molvi sahib would grin and with an infallible sense of poise and contentment would rule out the possibility of those who sought the path of Allah being held for such mundane felonies.

The madrassah is situated along the periphery of one of the busiest avenues in central Lahore. We arrived in its vicinity well in time for the Jum’a prayer but found the road blocked by barriers in order to reserve more parking space for the attendants, leaving the ever-so-dire traffic of Lahore completely turbulent. We witnessed a couple of ambulances stuck in the traffic jam too, howling for way, cursing the lengthy diversion. Nevertheless, holding our heads high out of vanity for such a privilege, we parked the car somewhere in the middle of the barred segment of the road and entered the madrassah. The maulana was standing on the mimber and vigorously delivering the Friday khutba:

“Islam pays tremendous importance to the rights of your neighbours. You should be extremely considerate about their needs as well as their peace and should cause them no harm with your tongue or your act. Those who do not observe the rights of their neighbours are sinners of the highest order and will rot in hell. To attain harmony in both this life and the one hereinafter, you should make sure that your fellow Muslims in no way suffer from your deeds.”

“Could you touch any greater heights of bigotry?” I thought. Maulana’s assertions altogether failed to relate to the situation just outside his very madrassah where fellow citizens, majority of them being Muslims, had been denied their mere right of passage with a chaos of sorts inflicted upon them. Nor had the acts of his devout followers ala my neighbour molvi sahib extracted any inspiration from his fiery speeches. But it didn’t surprise me much, for such dual standards of judgement have got rooted deep in our collective psyche as a nation. And the reason is quite simple: from the religious circles to the ordinary man in the street, we tend to draw a very firm line between the concepts of sin and crime, unable to fathom that there subsists a strong connection between the two.

During all these years as a regular recipient of the Jum’a sermons in various mosques across Lahore, I am yet to experience a single one that chided the attendants for their apathy towards social issues such as traffic laws, racial discrimination, indiscipline or even the overall anarchic state of affairs. By and large, the emphasis has always gone into the physical disposition or the piety and religiosity of men belonging to an era of some fourteen hundred years ago. While, ironically, the concise set of basic guiding principles these very men strictly abid and which reflected in their every act, be that of a personal, social or spiritual nature, is thoroughly overlooked.

Religion in many respects imitates the description of a country. Just as a country brings together people sharing geographical orientation, culture and history and binds them by a system of government, laws and a constitution, religion brings together people who share a belief system and knots them by an assortment of codes and rituals. In its case the boundaries are spiritual rather than physical. Ostensibly, in order to enforce the law, a country’s government has to deploy certain groups of people who protect it, people who undertake a constant surveillance ascertaining that the law is being obeyed and punishing those who wouldn’t succumb.

A slight re-characterization of human behaviour and interaction in this framework gives a much broader interpretation to the notion of crime. In the case of religion, going by the human psychology, the conviction that there’s one supreme entity perpetually vigilant of one’s acts would provide one with a much greater cause for restraint. He’d be compelled to avoid any wrongdoing lest being held for it, in much the same fashion as the fear of being apprehended by the law-enforcers would urge the criminals to at least think twice before committing an atrocity publicly. This is what invokes the whole idea of the day of judgment with an ensuing afterlife, which form a part and parcel of many organized religions of the world.

In my opinion, what comes to be known as a sin is but a crime when the identities of a religion and a nation overlap. In other words, separate religion from a society, and the sin is reduced to a crime. For instance, majority of the actions that are labeled sin in Islam were nothing but social evils being practiced and proliferated by the Meccan society at the time of the prophet (pbuh). Apostasy, savagery, burial of infant daughters, looting and vandalism; actions that would be tagged crimes by any law of the civilized world today were banal customs of the day. And in order to prevent them a set of codes referred to as shari’ah was devised. Whether or not it is the divine law is a debate best left for another time. The essence here is that as far as a Muslim society is concerned, every crime is undoubtedly a sin, entailing by this definition all such acts that result in social disorder and panic and are thus prohibited by the country’s law.

It is a very common belief in Pakistan that the worst drivers on the roads are the ones with beards. Such stereotypes inevitably emanate from the fact that in a way people look up to the bearded fellows, expecting them to be more submissive to the country’s law just as they have been, or at least appear to be, to the divine law, and which they fail to. Another case in point would be that of Muslim illegal immigrants in wealthy countries, who are prone to be very religious somehow and would let no chance of preaching Islam go by. They turn a blind eye to the conspicuous truth that by breaching their host country’s immigration laws, by Islam not only do they render themselves sinners but also every bite they earn there haraam. To summarize, Muslims rigorously need to revisit their construal of the word crime and realize that just as the affairs of the afterlife ought to manipulate their present lives, those ascribed solely to the latter could very well trigger their penalization in the former.