Good and Evil

An interesting discourse on good and evil found in Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light by Sachiko Murata. It is a translated chapter of the Lawa’ih of Jami, and is followed consequently by a corresponding chapter from the Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Chih, which was written upon Jami’s work.  Jami writes:

The philosophers have claimed it to be self-evident that existence is sheer good. To clarify this, they have brought various examples. They say, for example, that hail brings about fruit’s corruption and that it is evil in relation to fruit. Its evilness is not in regard to the fact that it is one of the qualities, because, in this regard, it is one of the perfections. Rather, it is in regard tot he fact that it has caused the fruit not to arrive at its appropriate perfections.

In the same way, for example, killing is evil. Its evilness is not in regard to the killer’s power to kill, or the weapon’s cuttingness, or the receptivity of the bodily member to cutting. Rather, it is in regard to life’s disappearance, and this is an affair of nonexistence. And so on with other examples.

Liu Chih writes on this:

Therefore, it is said that all being is good, and evil is also good. However, goodness is completeness, and it is from the affair of the Root Nature; evilness is injury, and it belongs to a thing’s being receptive toward the endowment of ruin and such things.