Destiny is two days,
One for you
And one against you,
So when it is for you,
Do not be proud or reckless
-- Hazrat Ali
The other day at Lahore I had a long chat with Mohammedmian Soomro, Chairman of the Pakistan Senate. A banker by profession, Soomro is a graduate from FC College, Lahore. He is imbued with Sufi traditions and spends considerable time as a devotee at the darbars of departed saints. When in Lahore for a day visit, he visited most of the venerated shrines at Lahore. During his conversation with me he talked about the perils of arrogance (takaber).
Soomro’s contention is that Allah punishes man not for his sins but for arrogance (takaber). In his view of the matter, arrogance is tantamount to defying God Almighty. Further, he said, the breaking of covenants (wada-khilafi) is another manifestation of defying Allah because the breaker of pledges is least bothered about probity and is indifferent as to the moral consequences of his perfidy.
He also raised the issue of haq-telfi (usurpation).
It is a common phenomenon in Pakistani culture wherein the strong overpowers the weak and executes a takeover (qabza) of what does not belong to him. This happens a lot even within families, especially after the death of parents. This is also challenging the writ of the Almighty and is symptomatic of arrogance.
Soomro felt that the company one keeps, keeps one honest or dishonest. In this connection, he cited the counsels of Hazrat Ali who always prayed for good sohbet (company) whereas others often prayed for beauty, fame, wealth and property.
The CIA insider who anonymously authored the new book on America’s Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures fittingly entitled it “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror”. Describing the US invasion of Iraq as “an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war” and observing that “no one can predict how much damage will be caused by America’s blind adherence to failed and counterproductive policies”, he concludes by noting that “every religion warns its adherents of the danger of vanity.” About US leaders, he states:
They refuse, as Nicholas Kristof brilliantly wrote in the New York Times, to learn the Trojan War’s lesson, namely: “To avoid the intoxicating pride and overweening ignorance that sometimes clouds the minds of the strong.” … Instead of facing reality, hubris-soaked US leaders, elites, and media, locked behind an impenetrable wall of political correctness and moral cowardice, act as naïve and arrogant cheerleaders for the universal applicability of Western values and feckless overseas military operations . . . ignoring history and, as Stanley Kurtz reminded them in Policy Review, … “a foreign policy governed by ‘vainglorious’ missionizing spirit rather than a calculation of national interest promises dangerous war and strife.”
If one is arrogant one arrogates to oneself powers which lie in the divine domain. These powers are properly in God’s zone. The great English poet Percy Shelley (1792-1822) aptly captured the perils and consequences of arrogance through his poem “Ozymandias”:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
