Offering One’s Self to God

If someone is injected with blood that is other than his blood group, his body does not accept it. At once, his body produces antibodies, and the injected blood is expelled. In the same way, a part of the body that is badly burnt is sometimes treated by skin grafting, by stitching on a bit of skin from another part of one’s own body. But if you try using someone else’s skin for this purpose instead of yours, in a few days’ time your body will recognize it as alien. Blood will stop circulating in that part of your body, and the grafted bit of skin will fall off.

Remarking on this, the Scottish-Canadian pathologist William Boyd (d. 1979), author of a book on Pathology, explained:

Self will not accept non-self.

The small self – man – is an example of self-respect. From this, one can draw analogies with regard to the honour and respect of the Bigger Self, which is God. The fact is that God is more respectful and honourable than all human beings who seek self-respect, put together. He loves unity more than all unity-loving people put together. God cannot tolerate any sort of dualism, under any circumstances whatsoever.

Who are those fortunate people who will be declared as God’s accepted servants in the Hereafter? It is they who have shattered the shell of self and have agreed to lose themselves in God’s Self, who are selfless and have prostrated before the one God. They have made God their sole concern and are no more enmeshed in the superficialities of the material world.

It is difficult for a person to acknowledge anyone but himself, thinking it to be an affront to his self. Whenever someone appears to acknowledge someone, often it is just out of fear or some self-serving motive. An individual hesitates to offer his self to anyone. But the Creator has demanded of a person this gift of the self which he is not ready to give to anyone. This is the meaning of Islam. A Muslim is he who is willing to give his very self to his Creator, who surrenders himself totally to God, who obeys God in every situation. There is no doubt that for a human being this is to make what he otherwise simply cannot tolerate into something that he can. God had made this very thing the price of His Paradise. The blessing of Paradise is for those fortunate souls who can offer its price in the form of this gift.