When it comes to violence, is it just about hate? Or is it also about accountability and belief in consequences? Let's be honest, there are a lot of things out there we all hate, but we know there are consequences that make us control ourselves. The idea of all-love and no-hate is not realistic and literally makes no sense, for if you truly love a thing, you must have the equal and opposite feeling towards that which negates your love.
Everyone hates stuff. You don't hate rape? You don't hate oppression? You don't hate racism? Me as a Muslim, I hate atheism.
But violence is not just about love and hate. It’s about belief in accountability and consequences, which can take different forms. Peace is more a function of self-discipline than the emotions of love and hate.
Accountability itself has the pre-requisite of having a law to begin with. By law, I mean a sacred. Something every individual carries within them when nobody is looking.
In the absence of the sacred, the secular solution seems to be to soften everyone from having any firm beliefs at all. Just be a fluff ball that never hates anything because once you hate something, what will stop you from going off the cliff and getting violent?
This is that the only way to feel secure around someone is to make sure they hate nothing about you. This really reduces the human being to a creature that has no ability to separate between issues or control themselves. It speaks more to them than anything else. Maybe they lack any impulse control so they assume everyone else does too.
My response is that in Islam the same source that told me to hate something because it's negative is also telling me to separate between an idea and its people and to be fair, patient, and even kind & merciful towards those people, in the hope that they change. And even if they don't, and we are boiling out of hatred for an oppressor, we have limits placed on us by Allah. If we have no executive authority, we have to swallow our anger. It's called sabr.
It's because we have a Sacred that we can balance both. We don't just follow our emotions wherever they drag us.
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