God being the guarantor means that He has provided ways for everyone to live and earn livelihood; He has allowed everyone equal shares in his bounties – winds, rains, seasons, mountains, forests, rivers, sea, mines in the vast earth.
“HAPPINESS LIES in sharing” – Imam Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam.
His providing livelihood doesn’t mean that no effort is needed in searching the livelihood or going out of your house and enjoy the ’flight of pigeons’ or ‘kites’ and ‘smoking hubble bubble’ (huqqa) to kill time. Livelihood would never find its way to the seeker. Those who waste time, do nothing and wait for ‘Manna Salwa’ (food from heaven) and take refuge in this saying of ‘The Koran’ are deceiving themselves and no one else.
His being guarantor means that He has provided ways for everyone to live and earn livelihood; He has allowed everyone equal shares in his bounties – winds, rains, seasons, mountains, forests, rivers, sea, mines in the vast earth. He has given everyone the right to make use of them. His bounties are neither confined to any single person, single race or single continent nor is the door of ’sustenance’ close to anyone.
The order of the universe hinges on the concept of ‘sow and reap’. There could be no germination without sowing; no results without efforts. However, where He has not bestowed the power of seeking the livelihood, there He has taken upon Himself the responsibility to provide that. He has managed the feeding of embryo in the mother’s womb; a fish get oxygen inside the water.
Since, He has created the means of livelihood, and powers of seeking the livelihood have also bestowed by Him, the paucity and plenty of livelihood has been attributed to Him. Imam Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam who was born today, 13th Rajab of Islamic calendar, explained this seeming anomaly in the philosophical way: “Vapour rises from the sea with store of water spread over it in the sky in the shape of dark clouds and they ooze the water by drops till they form them slant in regular lines.
They irrigate plains as well the highlands thoroughly.” He referred the matter to human tendency to hog on and think for the selfish ends. If man’s greed and avarice exceeds its bounds, then just as the excess of rain ruins the crops instead of growing and bringing them up, so the abundance of articles of livelihood and necessaries of life would make man oblivious of God and rouse him to revolt and unruliness.
If the God lessens the rainfall, the land goes arid as the closure of livelihood would destroy the human society.
Consequently God, the wise, the omniscient has put the organisation of livelihood on moderate and proportionate lines.
When we waste water, when we waste food and try to capture more lands than justified and fell the trees; when we are cruel to animals and birds, when waste or squander the resources of cyclic energies we shouldn’t disregard the fact that this planet is inherited by many, who are different, who are weak and we alone do not stand to own it.
