God's Rights, II

Standing Up for God's Rights, II (Part of Series on Happiness)

By John Taylor; 4 August, 2005

Yesterday we brushed on the teaching of the Bab that joy and purity
are allied and inextricable. The law of Huqquq, God's right, is
designed to turn wealth into a means for unalloyed joy by acting as
machinery for squeaky clean money. We noted Paul's caution that wealth
is dirty, infectious, and any love in the heart for it he calls the
"root of all evil." Like any filthy object, money must be clean and
antiseptic in order to be safely handled. The Bab makes it clear that
it is not money itself that we launder but the heart of its owner,

"Nor is there any wealth save in poverty in all save God and sanctity
from aught else but Him -- a state that can be realized only when
demonstrated towards Him Who is the Dayspring of His Revelation." (The
Bab, Selections, 89)

Once this huge caveat is behind us, there is no need to dichotomize
worldly riches and spiritual wealth. To a pure heart money and means
are light upon light and only good can come of their increase. In
evidence of this we concluded yesterday with this important citation
from the Qu'ran,

"And seek by means of what Allah has given you the future abode, and
do not neglect your portion of this world, and do good (to others) as
Allah has done good to you, and do not seek to make mischief in the
land, surely Allah does not love the mischief-makers." (28:77, Shakir)

The Qu'ran keynotes here several important aspects of God's right.
First, when it says, "do not neglect your portion of this world..." it
seems to imply a new moral obligation not only to run your household
well but to see that personal fortunes increase. Closely allied is the
use of the surplus for charitable ends, as a way to seek the "future
abode" after death. At the same time, such charity is not to be done
out of goody-goody hoity-toity motives but of run of the mill
reciprocity; God did good to us by providing the means and we pay back
the favor by performing good acts to our fellow man. Baha'i law
prescribes doing this specifically (among other things) by paying
Huqquq, 19 percent of capital worth, in regular payments. This money
is then dispersed by the trustee for general charitable ends.

Also notable from this verse of the Qu'ran is a warning not to use
money to work "mischief in the land," which seems equivalent to what
Paul called the "root of all evil." Clearly, there could be no social
ills and vices if funding for "mischief," everything from organized
crime to terrorism to gambling, were ever to dry up completely. But
that kind of a voluntary shift in spending would require purification
of hearts on a massive scale.

This is why I think that it is highly significant that the Huqquq is
structured as it is; this is surely the first tax in history not to be
imposed by a government or other higher authority but one completely
self-supervised by the payee. As the Kitab-i-Aqdas says, the payment
is to be made as a purely reciprocal leap of faith, an act of complete
trust for one's Creator:

"O people! Deal not faithlessly with the Right of God, nor, without
His leave, make free with its disposal. ... He who dealeth faithlessly
with God shall in justice meet with faithlessness himself; he,
however, who acteth in accordance with God's bidding shall receive a
blessing from the heaven of the bounty of his Lord, the Gracious, the
Bestower, the Generous, the Ancient of Days." (Kitab-i-Aqdas, para 97,
p. 55)

This makes the earlier Qu'ranic admonition into a concrete law, a
responsibility to pay out a percentage of the worth of a household as
a trustee of God's civil rights. As one Huqquq trustee, Dr. Iraj
Ayman, emphasizes in the title of his article, "Every Baha'i is a
trustee of the Right of God," (Baha'i Canada, Asma 161, p. 14), this
passage of the Aqdas in effect makes every Baha'i a trustee of the
Huqquq. To act as divine trustee is a very heavy demand on every
individual, one with utterly no precedent in history. Think of what it
involves, going over every possession and putting fair value on it,
not just once but at regular intervals. This is a difficult accounting
task that is normally only done by institutions. And consider when the
law was instituted, in an age when double entry bookkeeping had barely
been invented. Only now with computers and the internet can an
individual hope to keep a running tally of net worth and make anything
like reliably accurate payments.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com