the followers of orders
Waqala allatheena ittabaAAoo law anna lana karratan fanatabarraa minhum kama tabarraoo minna kathalika yureehimu Allahu aAAmalahum hasaratin AAalayhim wama hum bikharijeena mina alnnari
2:167 And those who were but followers will say: If a return were possible for us, we would disown them even as they have disowned us. Thus will Allah show them their own deeds as anguish for them, and they will not emerge from the Fire.
I came across this sad case of a US soldier who died (allegedly suicide) because she was apparently troubled by the torture orders that were given to her by her “superiors.” The news report had this sentence that caught my eye, and I was reminded of the above verse from the Qur’an.
“The reactions to the suicide were that she was having a difficult time separating her personal feelings from her professional duties.”
This above statement is one of the most insidious ways of alienating a worker, any worker, from their own fitri (innate) understanding of morality, and the tasks that we are made to do in the name of “professional duties.” “Personal feelings” can be one of our guides, when we are confronted with immoral or unethical situations.
The capitalist system, however, alienates the worker from what we feel, and says clearly that “this is your job” – and very soon the worker learns that in order to survive, s/he has to keep her “feelings” under wraps, and just do her/his job. The Qur’an says that the excuse of merely being a “follower” (following orders, in this context) is not going to be good enough, and that such deeds will cause anguish as they will be shown to us.
The verse is a call for us to wake up and change our condition – and applies equally, in my view, to military personnel, and to those of us who might be cogs in the wheel of corporations that are involved in ecological and human exploitation. This is especially true in our time and age, because so much information is readily available – and the notion that we “did not know” is really not something we can fall back on.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 2:46 am by altaf and is filed under Islam, Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“she was having a difficult time separating her personal feelings from her professional duties.” That was the same line that struck me when I first read that news item. As you point out, we stand in danger of making ouselves something less than human when we compartmentalize our lives and fracture our selves in order to participate in mutually contradictory activities. We live in tension, or dismissal of what we feel, or we deaden or distract ourselves to cope.
How right you are , brother! The phrase, “I was only following orders.” caused some of the worst horrors of the last century, and still are an excuse for the horros of today.
Ya Haqq!
Salam
Been thinking about that case myself a lot. I consider her a hero.
salaam ¬† yes Irshaad —- this is fracturing, or fragmenting ourselves – where you are supposed to be something here, and something else over there… such a fragmented self often ends up in survival mode.