Human Responsibilities

Responsibilities comes form the word ”response,” and one might say, in the Islamic context, that all of our responsibilities issue form that original response to Allah, when, according to the Quran, before the creation of the world Allah addressed all the children of Adam asking them, “Am I not your Lord?” and they said, “Yes”. I this affirmation lie all our responsibilities as human beings, for in saying “yes” we accepted the Divine Trust (amanah), which we must bear I this world. At the heart of this trust resides the affirmation of Divine Oneness and acts of worship and service. The very word for servant (‘abd) of Allah is related to the word for worship and service(‘ibadha). To accept to be Allah’s servant and to represent Him in this world means, above all, worshiping and serving Him. All the rights we have issue from the fulfilling of our responsibilities, and in the Islamic perspective responsibilities always precede rights. Although everyone these days speaks all the time of human rights and little of human responsibilities, in practice, even in the modern West, in many cased responsibilities precede rights. For example, we have to be responsible drivers before we are given the right to drive on public roads, and we have to accept the responsibility of mastering the laws of the land before being given the right to practice law. In Islam this relationship is not a matter of expediency, but of principle, and its acceptance dominates the cultural and intellectual landscape.

Now, we have responsibilities not only toward Allah, but also toward His creation. Traditional religious texts, in fact, delineate a hierarchy of responsibilities for human beings. At the apex are our responsibilities and duties toward Allah through acts of worship and service and obedience to the to His Law. Then there is the responsibility one has toward oneself. Since human life is sacred and is not created by us, we are responsible for trying to keep our souls as well as bodies healthy and not causing ourselves spiritual or physical harm (unless it is in battle or some other cause for the welfare of others or in self-defense). Therefore, as already stated, suicide is considered a grave sin in Islam. The modern idea that “This is my body and I can do whatever I want with it” is totally absent from the Islamic perspective: Islam states, “My body is not mine, for I did not create it—-it belongs to Allah.” Responsibility to ourselves also, of course, involves our soul and mind. Our greatest responsibility to ourselves is, in fact, to try to save our soul and to be good. This is not at all a selfish act, because one cannot do good unless one is good, and to save one’s soul is also to introduce virtue and goodness into the ambiance in which we live. We also have the responsibility to our minds to seek knowledge and the truth to the extent possible.

Next in the hierarchy we have responsibility toward society, starting with our family. This set of responsibilities ranges all the way from working honestly to support ourselves and our families, to performing acts of charity, to respecting others and strengthening community bonds, to supporting and sustaining all that is positively creative in human society. The vast spectrum of these social responsibilities is delineated in traditional works on the Shari’ah and ethics and cannot be enumerated here. Furthermore, the world around us is not limited to the human sphere—we also have responsibilities toward animals and plants and even inanimate parts of nature such as water, air, and soil. This latter set of responsibilities involves what modern Western writers now refer to as environmental ethics. Our rights on all different levels derive from the acceptance of our responsibilities, which precede our rights in a principal manner. To flout responsibilities in the name of inalienable rights is not at all within the Islamic perspective and is considered putting the cart before the horse.


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