along with humility, selflessness is another great quality with which Islām arms every Muslim to fight the battle of life. There are repeated injunctions in the Holy Qur’ān that God’s pleasure is to be the only motive for one’s actions and not one’s personal gains or losses.
Great stress has been laid in Islām on faithfulness to agreements and trusts: “Those who are faithful to their trusts and their covenants” is a twice repeated description of the true believers (23:8; 70:32). Elsewhere too, it is enjoined: “And fulfil the promise; surely the promise will be enquired into” (17:34); “O you who believe, fulfil the obligations (‘uqūd)” (5:1), where ‘uqūd (sing. ‘aqd, a tie) stands not only for covenants, contracts, agreements, leagues, treaties and engagements but also for Divine ordinances (LL.). The obligation to fulfil both the covenant of Allāh and covenants between man and man, particularly between nations, is again mentioned together in 16:91, 92. Thus respect for law, both religious as well as temporal, has been placed on equal footing. True to this teaching the Holy Prophet and his followers stood firmly by their agreements under the most trying circumstances.
There is not a single instance on record in which they broke their agreement with any other nation. A typical example of this, in the Holy Prophet’s time, is that of the truce of Ḥudaibiyah, under which Abū Jandal, a refugee convert to Islām, who had been tortured by the enemy, had to be returned under the terms of the truce. In the time of ‘Umar, the Muslim general Abū ‘Ubaidah was obliged to evacuate the occupied territory of Ḥimṣ, which the enemy was going to occupy, and he ordered that the tax received from the people as a condition for their protection should be paid back to them as Muslims could protect them no longer. Another example of such scrupulous honesty and regard for agreements can hardly be met with elsewhere.
Hypocrisy has been condemned in the Holy Qur’ān in the severest terms. The hypocrites have been described as “in the lowest depths of the fire” (4:145) and uttering words from the mouth which are not in the heart has been condemned again and again.
All qualities which make man stand on a high moral plane were inculcated one after another. Thankfulness was one of them. “… If you