LOVE EVEN THOSE WHO REVILE YOU
The convenient response to those who revile your religion is to return the favor. The more virtuous position however is to forgive. Forgiveness as you know, while lessin virtue when compared to love, nevertheless, can result in love. Love, by definition, does not require forgiveness. What many Muslims today seem to forget is that ours is a religion of love and our Prophet, upon him be peace and blessings, was the Habib, the Beloved. How did love, the defining virtue of our community, come to be replaced by an urge to redress wrongs, to punish instead of to forgive?
It is the result of Muslims seeing themselves as victims. Victimization is a defeatist mentality.
It's the mentality of the powerless. The word victim is from the Latin “victima” which carries
with it the idea of the one who suffers injury, loss, or death due to a voluntary undertaking.
In other words, victims of one’s own actions.
Muslims never really had a mentality of victimization. From a metaphysical perspective,
which is always the first and primary perspective of a Muslim, there can be no victims. We
believe that all suffering has a redemptive value.
If the tendency among Muslims is to view themselves as victims which appears to me as a fall
from grace, what virtue must we then cultivate to dispense with this mental and physical state
that we now find ourselves in?
The virtue of patience is missing. Patience is the first virtue after tawba or repenta