Is Man the Roof and Crown of God's creation?

We should first understand the differences between man and other creations of God in order to appreciate or renounce the ideology that man is the greatest of all creations. Let us explain this concept in view of the Quran which is the last of the scriptures in the Abrahamic or Semitic faith. 'Man-above-all' is a view highly regarded by the Judo-Christian faith, if not by other cultures all around the world. God speaks of the creation of mankind in allegorical terms as such:

Your Lord announced His Plan to the angels, “I am about to place on earth a new creation that will have supremacy over it.” They exclaimed, “Will you place on it such creation as will cause disorder therein and shed blood! - whereas we strive to manifest Your glory (in the Universe)!” He answered, “I know what you do not know.” And God endowed mankind with the capacity to attain knowledge. Then He showed the angels certain things and said to them, “Tell me if you have the capacity of learning about these, if you are truthful (and better qualified to have supremacy on the planet earth).” They humbly said, “Glorified are You, High above all! We only know what You have taught us (the tasks assigned to us). Most certainly, You, are all Knower, all Wise.”

Holy Quran, Ch. 2, V. 30-32

(English rendition by Dr. Shabbir Ahmed)

Knowledge and wisdom is what is unique to mankind. The capacity to think rationally and deduce from the abstract structure of the world the difference between truth and illusion, right and wrong, is what places us above all creations of God, as rulers of the planet Earth. In the language of science, homo sapiens are social animals. But there are other kinds of social animals too such as ants, bees and elephants. In fact, some creatures appear to be more social and altruistic than human beings. Take the example of squirrels. If a squirrel finds a forsaken infant squirrel it adopts the baby and raises it like its own child. Whereas even today some human beings dispose off their own girl infants in dustbins and never look behind. However compassion is as natural as violence. The famous biologist Richard Dawkins remarks,

“I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals.”

It is indeed a scientifically proven fact that everyone of us are selfish by virtue of our genetic instincts. No matter however generous and altruistic an animal might seem at first sight, deep down inside its genes are serving some selfish purpose. But there is a huge difference when it comes to human beings. We can choose to be different. We are endowed with the power to act different from what millions of years of evolution has brought us to. To quote the words of Richard Dawkins again,

“Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.”

And that is exactly what makes us the roof and crown of God's creation – our intelligent choices!

Therefore the real question to ask is this: do we act today like the roof and crown of God's creation is supposed to act? Are we making wise and intelligent choices?

No, we are not! We are not using our brains these days. We are giving in to our basic animal instincts and forgetting who we truly are. The world is not at peace. There is violence all over. People are divided, each with their own set of beliefs and dogmas, intolerable towards other people who share a different opinion. This is all the result of ignorance and a mockery of human wisdom. Mankind is capable of doing miracles – setting voyages out for infinite space, traveling unimaginable distances at the blink of an eye, creating machines that can think and dream, and many such wonders that are yet to be witnessed in future. Art and science are but signatures of mankind's noble design. But as Voltaire said, “with great power comes great responsibility.” We must understand that. See what we have made of ourselves. Look upon history and you will find a world soaked in blood and gore. God made just one mankind. We made the Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews. God gave us one planet to live in. We made India, Pakistan, America and Iran. Lo and behold! We are fighting our own kind and gradually moving towards the destruction of this majestic race called mankind. We are blinded by some persistent delusion that makes us think that we are obliged by some divine command to murder innocent people, rape their women, slaughter their children, pillage their cities and leave them burning.

See what Hitler did to the Jews. The Nazi bureaucrats sat together and worked out ways for the systematic slaughtering of all the Jews in Europe. Almost fifty million people were killed because of the war waged by Hitler – the World War II. Nearly twenty three million innocent civilians who wanted nothing but a simple life of peace, were brutally killed. Nearly six million Jews were murdered mercilessly in unimaginable barbarian ways. One million gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, homosexuals, political dissidents and the disabled were murdered. Of the nearly seven million thus murdered, more than one and a half million were innocent children who knew nothing of the world.

This kind of tyranny is not new or old. Take for example the cannibalism and bloodbaths of the “Holy” Crusades. Of all the religious wars that have ever been waged in the history of mankind, none have been more bloodier, more genocidal and more barbaric than the two-hundred-year “holy war” by the Western Crusaders against the Arabs and Muslims. Their motive was simple and clear: to cleanse the holy land of Palestine and its vicinity by murdering all the Arabs (whether Muslim or Jew) “...on the ground that they had no right to inhabit their part of the earth, while for a Christian the whole world is his country.” (James David Barber)

Take the recent communists for an example too. Their goal was noble: to achieve an utopia where there was no poor and no rich, and everybody lived as equals in peace. See what they did in the name of this cause. In less than a hundred years, communism has claimed more than hundred million lives. Hundreds of thousands of Cossacks were destroyed. Forced famine was introduced in Ukraine and more than six million people were starved to death. Mao murdered tens of millions of Chinese peasants for this cause in his “Great Leap Forward”. Eight hundred and fifty thousand Vietnamese were sent to their graves in education camps. Many such atrocities happened in the name of socialism.

The United States' eleven years of aggression against countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and now Syria, have resulted in civilian deaths far in excess of military casualties. Then we have the tyranny of the terrorists too! There is no need to light much upon this topic because everybody knows. Most of the terrorist organizations in the world are Muslim. Islam is seen as a fascist and violent religion because of these people. There are other groups of terrorists too, like the Maoists and Naxals in India. The oppression on Muslims in countries like Burma and Myanmar is also well known. The religious bigotry between the Hindus and Muslims is a classic example. In 1984, more than four thousand Sikh men, women and children were slaughtered. Women were raped while their terrified families pleaded for mercy, little or none of which was shown. In 2002, Hindu fundamentalists carried out a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Gujarat. Nearly twenty thousand Muslims were brutally killed. Over one hundred forty thousand were thrown out of their lands. Businesses and houses were burned. And thousands of women were gang raped and burned alive.

As long as we do not learn to rise above our animal instincts, we cannot call ourselves the best of creations. Indeed we have proved ourselves before God to be the meanest of all creations. Sigh!

“Surely, greater than the creation of the humans, is the creation of the heavens and the earth. But most people never know (what it implies).”

Holy Quran, Ch. 40, V. 57

(English rendition by Dr. Shabbir Ahmed)