Worship and Service
Recognising God as the promotion of the moral order and the judge of good and evil, we are asked to synthesise the concepts of love and justice. If God is a loving and just God then man must only serve him, obey and worship. We should acknowledge this every day; “Thee do we worship and only you we beseech for help”. The word Ibadat in Arabic has a wider significance than is conveyed by the word service. It means whole-hearted obedience as well as worship. It means the total surrender to the will of God. The word Abd means slave, whose life and will are at the disposal of his master. Islam which means total surrender to the will of God necessarily leads to that type of action and attitude which is denoted by the word Ibadat.
In human relations we witness something approaching surrender either in the case of lovers or in the case of slaves. Human relation to God is ultimately indefinable and hence is expressed only in analogies. Lovers are in the different category from slaves but they call themselves the slaves of love because of self-abnegation demanded by love. What is demanded of us by God is voluntary and loving service. If God is our ideal we asked to serve Him only. If the ideal is the sum total of all values of life then surely no man can rightly serve anything else. When we serve other things besides the ideal we go astray and jeopardise our lives. If we serve money or power we are not true to our higher selves. When we serve our individual instincts without subordinating them to the ideal we create chaos in our lives. When we serve other human beings out of fear or love for gain we do injustice to ourselves and to others. When we superstitiously serve gods of our own making or the forces of nature, being overawed by them, we are injuring the dignity of humanity.
True freedom lies in only in the service of the ideal. The man, who serves many ideas and diverse urges mutually hostile and uncoordinated, disrupts the harmony of his being. Life cannot be lived completely unless all our ideas and urges are merged in a single all embracing ideal whose service should be completely satisfying by doing justice to all the aspects of our being. The tragedy of human life is that man is dominated by false fears and tempted by illusory gains which draw him away from the ideal. Exclusive service to God means identification with the will of God. Total surrender also means not the negation of our personality but its fulfilment; it is the only way of self realisation.
There are others who say that religion was born out of ignorance and fear, and man by his knowledge and effort must conquer both. They assert that religion concocted by the exploiters of humanity; man henceforth shall not serve any power except the dignity of his own humanity.
All such objections are nullified when we keep in mind the Islamic conception of God, and the service and worship that is due to him. God is a creative being, he is a life force, the cherisher and fosterer he is a God of development, a guarantee of the preservation of life and its values. When we are asked to serve God we are asked to serve and advance Reason and Justice in life. There is no commandment which is not in the interest of our own advancement.
Man is a worshipping animal. If he will not worship the true God he will worship the idols of his own creation. There is no greater calamity for a man than to worship things that are not only below God but even below himself. He, who serves and worships anything or being except God, degrades himself. Worship in Islam is not a magical act to bring about supernatural intervention in a causally regulated world. It is not flattering an Infinite Power to win favours from Him merely by asking. It is the dedication to the Spirit of life. It is the winning of independence by the repudiation of all powers except the one that gives us life, purifies us and exalts us.
