How Many Injustices Have Been Committed in the Name of Duty

The call of duty resounds in the depths of the conscience and the hidden places of the soul. If the conscience is awake and the soul alive, the call is answered with ardor and met with sincerity and devotion. Otherwise, the voice is strangled, drowned out by clamoring inclinations that stray off into the bottomless unknowns of human character.

And just as the individual rises up, and the masses surge forward, to demand their legitimate rights, driven by human dignity and a strong sense of pride and self-respect, so too do they hasten to perform their duties, spurred by human nobility and a deep sense of the ideal self — and this in varying degrees on the scale of perfection, according to how far they have climbed the steps of advancement toward the perfect.

Then you will see among them those who hasten to complete their duty, sacrificing self and treasure, and those who trample duty underfoot, passing over its victims, seizing the benefit for themselves and relishing the pleasure of doing harm.

The greater a man's weight, the wider grows his grasp of a more comprehensive portion of these many, countless duties.

If we wish to define them briefly, they divide into personal duties — those a person owes to himself — and duties toward others — those a person owes to his fellows. The latter widen to embrace the homeland, and stretch across borders and barriers to take in all humanity.

As for personal duty, many are those who are ignorant of its effect in forming the individual and developing the ideal personality.

The instinct of self-interest is often a spur to the performance of those duties. But it just as often leads its possessor astray, if he lacks the moral motive and the educational guidance toward goodness and perfection.

Then a person errs in his understanding of duty, and errs in the means and in the manner of working to shoulder its burdens.

Among the most important personal duties are guarding the body from evils and diseases, and fortifying the soul, cultivating it, and preserving it from the slips and falls that dissolve its moral substance and leave it hollow and empty — save for whatever likens it to the souls of dumb beasts, if indeed anything there permits us to call it a soul in the true sense.

And when the qualities of goodness vanish from the soul in human existence, the human meaning has vanished from the individual, or from the whole.

There is no doubt that neglect of the duties of the soul exposes a person to decline, weakness, and backwardness, and to all the failure and defeat that follow in the train of sloth.

One of the wise men said:
"My care and my grief are 'lifted' when duty is 'lifted' by being performed in full!
Most of the careworn are careworn because they have not completed their duty!"

So says the sage. Accordingly, the call of duty admits of no slackening: its ring is perpetual and its echo recurring in every act of the individual and of the group.

And the public interest lies in keeping alive this absorbing concern that urges every individual to perform his duty.

But how many names there are that carry in their meaning contrary and opposing senses! Here is the world's great problem. How many battles in which powers have clashed for the sake of an imaginary duty, which appears to the combatants in other than its true form. And how many injustices have been committed in the name of a patriotic duty whose true knowledge escapes those who undertake it.

We have seen the claims of humanitarian duty in the twentieth century call for cutting a country away from its own people, driving them out, stripping them of their belongings, and leaving them to roam the lands barefoot, naked, and hungry, with disease assailing them and misery and wretchedness attacking them.

And that is because self-interest in world politics dressed up humanitarian duty — or hid behind it — in sheltering those whom the Nazis had driven out, in aiding them, and in establishing a national home for them at the expense of an innocent, upright, unarmed people. We have seen in the pages of history that humanitarian duty forbade individual injustice, and laws were enacted to suppress it. But the story of the wolf and the lamb repeats itself between one evening and the next morning, on a wider and more sweeping scale.

For humanitarian duty has not stood in the way of this injustice, which has taken on dreadful, terrifying forms in the colonizing of peoples and the enslaving of nations.

And how many selfish interests color injustices in whatever hues they please, giving them, by way of names, white and gilded curtains — which can never hide the blackness of their shadow and the red of their victims' blood!

And we ask ourselves: what is the individual's guide to his duty, and what is the group's guide to its duties in life?

True human awareness, if it is perfected in the individual, is the guide to sacred duty. And the garden of goodness in the heart, if it is watered and blossoms, is, in its fragrance, the spur to the rapture of triumph in doing what is right and dutiful. And the conscience in the depths of the soul, if it awakens and life envelops it with its luminous spirit, is the leader to all the duties required.

Then man will not mistake the path. Then the communities of mankind will come to their duties drawn by their magic, intoxicated with the pleasure of performing them, as things are drawn to a magnet, without resistance or obstinacy or stubbornness.

There will then be no occasion for sophistry, for the lights are lit, illuminating meanings in their proper colors and their true qualities, and showing them in their real and settled truths.

Zayd ibn Thabit held the office of judge in the days of Umar, may God be pleased with him. Once Ubayy ibn Ka'b and Umar ibn al-Khattab, Caliph of the Muslims, came before him that he might judge between them in a case. When the judge saw the Commander of the Faithful, Umar, he rose at once and yielded to him the best place in the room. Umar grew angry and said: "This is the first injustice in your judging! It is right that I should sit beside my adversary!" And when Zayd had finished hearing the case, Umar said to him: "O Zayd... a judge is not just unless chief and subject stand equal before him!"

Is there not, in Umar's alertness to duty, that which lifted injustice and set up the foundations of right and justice?

In a man's alertness to duty lies the awakening of truth in the hidden places of the soul, and the triumph of righteousness within it, so that a man may be upright, master of his soul's whims, holding the reins of his own affairs.

For Umar was not beguiled by pomp of appearance away from the call of duty; the flattery of the moment and its softness did not distract him from the approval of conscience; and he did not accept the judge's partiality toward him — he, the Caliph, who ruled over the necks of mankind.

If every man, great and lowly alike, listened to this voice, which is from God, injustice and hatred would not be found among men.

In the year 1870 it happened in North America that the sky suddenly darkened, red tongues like flame appeared in the heavens, and a stormy wind blew up with them, so that people imagined the Day of Judgment had come. The American House of Representatives was then in session. Most of the members left their places, and those remaining demanded that the session be adjourned. The Speaker said to them: "The Judgment may be at hand this hour, or it may not. If it is not, there is no sense in adjourning the session; and if it is, then I prefer that we meet our Maker doing our duty."

If every individual awaited the meeting with his Lord while performing his duty, mankind would not fall into confusion in their dealings. The performance of duty is according to individual capacity, and the higher an individual rises, the greater his responsibility toward his duties, the wider their horizon opens before him, and the greater their weight becomes.

Therefore the great man bears duties under whose load weak souls would stagger, and ordinary individuals — the vast majority of mankind — cannot match their strength against the gravest of duties.

And I do not wish to end before reminding woman that among the duties of greatest moment in life is the mother's duty toward her children. It is a personal duty, a patriotic duty, a human duty — a sacred duty with which God has singled her out. She must listen for its call at every moment of her life, for its effect passes beyond personal bounds and goes beyond the family to the wide world, in which the child will one day fight his battle as a man, and makes ready, sooner or later, to deal with its affairs.