wrong without the help of Divine guidance, the institution of
nubuwwah would lose its significance. Why then should God have
raised Anbiya from among men and entrusted to them the task of
directing His people on the right path? Again, if the power to
distinguish between right and wrong were inherent in the nature of
man, the whole of mankind, from its beginning to this day, would
have been following one and the same moral code; but, as already
stated, there are no universally accepted moral standards. Each
group has its own ethical code and what is more, this code has also
changed with the passage of time. The verse cited above does not,
therefore, mean that "human nature" – or man's conscience – is
qualified to know, of its own, right from wrong, or has within it the
power to discriminate between khair and sharr. The words in the
verse referred to above, (i.e., 91:8) on the contrary are the statement
of a fact, the fact of man's potentialities for becoming good or bad,
as he decides for himself. Since the human personality (or self) is
given in an undeveloped form, there are, the verse says, equal
possibilities of his attaining the highest good, or wasting himself in
wrong doing. The correct translation of the verse is: "Human self
has been endowed with the capability of both integrating itself or
corrupting it.”
Again, those who believe that conscience is an absolutely
trustworthy guide for man appeal to verse (30:30) which is usually
translated as:
The nature of Allah (fitratullah) in which He has made man.
It should, however, be noted that the Arabic word ''fitrat"
occurring in the verse does not mean the same thing as the English
word "nature''. The word "nature" means the constitution or the
essential properties of a thing which are unchangeable. On the
other hand, fitrat merely means creation or bringing something into
existence. We cannot, therefore, construe the verse as meaning that
man has the same nature as God. It is just to remind us that man has
been created according to the same Divine law of creation as other
things in the universe. If we were to concede that man has been
created in "God's nature," how are we to reconcile this with some of
his "qualities" as given in the Qur'an? For example, man is said to be
"created weak" (4:28), "created of haste," "being hasty" (17:11),
"ungrateful" (17:67), "covetous" (17:100), "impatient" (70:19), "a
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