When an engineer sets out to build a bridge, he chooses steel as the principal material to be used in its construction (as opposed to wood, bamboo, weaker types of metals, etc) for he knows in advance that it can be depended upon to bear very heavy loads. If he were not at all certain of this, he would not venture to construct a bridge made of steel. Everything in the world has been endowed with certain properties—just as steel has been endowed with strength and each element can be relied upon to display its own particular properties. The behaviour of each element can, therefore, be predicted when subjected to different sets of conditions. It is because of this reliability of performance in the world of nature that human civilization has been able to advance. Were material objects to lose their properties, the whole edifice of human civilization would fall to pieces.
Such is the importance of the physical properties of the material world. In the human world, too, there are properties which are equally important: they are the elements which together add up to strength of character—a cardinal virtue without which no flourishing society can be built. A society composed of individuals who are weak in character can never be anything but weak itself.
For a society to function in the best possible way, its members should be so dependable that their behaviour under specific conditions should be easily predictable. In other words, in one’s dealings with them, one should be able to trust them to do as they say they will do. One should reasonably expect that they will accept the truth and that, even if they have a sense of personal grievance, they will not, therefore, treat others unjustly. Individuals of this nature are true ‘men of steel,’ for they fulfill the expectations placed in them, just as steel will forever go on bearing the heaviest of loads. A society made up of such people cannot but flourish and progress.
A society in which this is not the case is inevitably doomed to ruin. When people do not keep their promises and refuse to accept the truth when confronted with it, when they take prompt action against others out of a sense of personal grievance, regardless of whether it is humane to do so or not, their society becomes like a world in which steel has ceased to be steel, in which the very rocks have begun to break up into splinters like so much old, rotten wood.
Source: Islam As It Is
