CONTRARIAN THINKING
When individuals engage in balanced thinking, they will realise the importance of willingly accepting minor setbacks to avoid losses should they refuse to do so.
Sometimes, an individual or a social group engages in violence in order to obtain what it regards as its rights. In terms of results, this approach is actually completely counter-productive, because history shows that through violence, one loses, whereas through peace, one gains.
Throughout much of human history, numerous dictators, such as Hitler and Stalin, have engaged in violence on a huge scale, seeking thereby to obtain their supposed objectives. But without any exception whatsoever, the end result of the violence that was engineered by all of these people was just one—and that is, devastation.
The same is the case with Muslims. In present times, in different places, Muslims have taken to violence in the name of obtaining justice or securing rights, but the result of this has always been counter-productive. In the wake of this violence, their conditions only became worse.
One example of this is Palestine. In line with the Balfour Declaration, in 1947, Jews were given a third of the territory of Palestine while Arabs were given two-thirds, which included the whole of the city of Jerusalem. However, the Arabs did not accept this division and announced that they would push the Jews into the sea. This struggle of the Arabs was, from its very beginning, carried out by using violence, and it remains so even today. Despite, enormous sacrifices of loss and property, all that the Arabs obtained from this approach was humiliation and deprivation.
According to a hadith, the Prophet frequently emphasized that “God grants to gentleness what he does not grant to harshness.” (Sahih Muslim, Hadith No. 2593) From this, we can learn that if for some reason hostility arises between oneself and another person, one’s planned response to this should be on the basis of peace, not violence.
When a person adopts the method of violence, in many cases it is because he is overwhelmed with emotions. He sets off on the path of violence fired with negative emotions such as hate and vengeance. But instead, if he can keep his negative emotions under control, and, make an objective analysis of the matter in a realistic manner, if he plans the course of his actions wisely, he will never adopt the method of violence. Under all conditions, he will engage in action while remaining non-violent, even if in adopting the method of peace he might have to face some deprivation initially. It often happens that in adopting the peaceful method, a person feels that they have to tolerate some loss. But if they think in a balanced manner, they will realise that they ought to willingly agree to tolerate a small loss so that they will not be compelled to face a bigger loss if they refuse to do so.
