THE attempt to understand human nature or the nature of the human being, has been a central focus of thinkers and philosophers for centuries, and the subject continues to provoke lively philosophical debates, continuing into modern times.
The rather timely trigger that prompted me to reflect upon this very deep and fundamental subject of human nature, were two folds — firstly, a ‘hadith’ or saying attributed to the Holy Prophet Muhammad, PBUH, the translation of which goes as follows: “Your worst enemy is between your two sides”.
Secondly, a video clip about what happened in the tiny island nation of Nauru, which aptly illustrated the veracity of the statement about one’s worst enemy being between one’s two sides, caught my attention. The link to the video clip is provided further down in this article.
Coming back to the saying that the worst enemy is between one’s two sides, what could that really mean, I wondered? The question kept churning in my mind and so I decided to find out what I could about it.
Since I like reading translations of Rumi, especially quotes attributed to him, I decided to find out what he had to say about the hadith in question.
For the benefit of readers, Rumi or his real name Jalal Ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (September 301207-December 17 1273) was a Persian mystic and poet and one of the Islamic world’s greatest poets.
Apparently, Rumi is also one of the most popular Sufi mystics and poet philosopher in western circles, since his works and poetry have been extensively translated or interpreted into English.
Actually, there are many Sufi mystics, one of whom is Hafez, my other personal favourite mystic cum poet.
In his elaboration of the subject hadith mentioned earlier, Rumi stated that the ‘ego’ is the culprit. As he expounded it, “Your worst enemy is hiding within yourself, and that enemy is your nafs or false ego.”
The false ego or ‘nafs’ is an Arabic word occurring in the Quran, which literally means “’self’, and has been translated into equivalent English words such as ‘psyche’, ‘ego’ or ‘soul’. The Hebrew word equivalent is ‘nephesh’, rather similar to ‘nafs’. The equivalent Malay word is ‘nafsu’, clearly an adoption of the Arabic word ‘nafs’. So, we now know the enemy and it has a name, ‘nafsu’, the false ego.
It is axiomatic that ‘nafsu’, as represented by uncontrollable greed and base desires, is the root cause of many ills, destructions and disasters attributed to the handiworks or actions of man.
One can safely say that almost everyone can give examples upon examples of stories to illustrate this assertion just made about uncontrollable ‘nafsu’. For the purpose of this article, and by way of illustration, I would like to highlight the example of Nauru, the Pacific Island nation that was said to have been “the country which ate itself”!
The following YouTube link will give you the story of Nauru, to view at your leisure https://fb.watch/7f1SUxoAQ7/.
It behoves us to pay attention to what I’d call the ‘Lesson Of Nauru’. Nauru is a lesson for all right-thinking people and the morally upright. But are we repeating the same mistakes and walking in the footsteps of Nauru?
For example, the most important existential challenge of our times is climate change, ahead of the risk of a catastrophic nuclear war that could destroy the Earth many times over.
There is no doubt that climate change is contributed by man’s relentless and ungodly attack on nature.
Nauru was just a small island in the Pacific but her lesson is loud and clear to the whole world, a cautionary tale that the whole planet could easily go down that same slippery slope of no return.
The world could be Nauru. What is our equivalent of phosphate? Have we depleted our own natural resources? When we bet our prosperity and future on depleting natural resources, we should not be surprised that the certain ending will be a just a matter of time.
The Amazon rainforests, perhaps the last bastion of its kind, is being destroyed at an exponential rate. Other forests covers have already been decimated all across the globe.
It looks like our greed has no limits. We have destroyed, and are still destroying, whatever is left of our forests, land, sea and air resources.
Will anyone learn the Lesson of Nauru? Or the myriads of other lessons in this Blue Bubble classroom called Earth? Or should we heed the truth in what John Muir said: “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
You may also want to learn about the parable of the empty beggar’s bowl:
http://spiritual-treasures.blogspot.com/2008/02/beggars-bowl.html?m=1
The writer is a regular contributor to New Sarawak Tribune.
