God’s attribute in the Qur’an is said to be ‘The Compassionate’, ‘The Merciful’. That is, very kind and sympathetic. Similarly the Prophet of Islam has been called ‘A Mercy to the Worlds’ (21:107). That is, the Prophet of Islam has been sent as a blessing to the whole world. The most prominent quality of the Prophet is his being the instrument of universal mercy.

The Qur’an, as a matter of divine guidance urges people to exercise patience and compassion in their dealings with one another. This means that everyone should treat others with sympathy and kindness. Even when one experiences unkindness from others one should not return unkindness for unkindness, but should continue to behave sympathetically. Alqurtubi has interpreted this verse ‘and they exhort one another to patience and compassion’ to mean that creatures of God (human beings) ought to be dealt with mercifully.

A number of traditions have been related in the books of Hadith, which enshrine certain observations made on this subject by the Prophet of Islam. Here are three of them: “God will be merciful to those who are merciful (to His creatures).” “You should be merciful to people on earth, God on high will be merciful to you.”

This teaching of Islam spread so widely that it came to be included in Muslim literature all over the world. Every language reverberated with these ideas. An Indian Muslim poet composed this couplet:

Karo meherbani tum ahl-e-zameen par

(Be kind to people on earth)

Khuda meherban hoga arsh-e-barin par

(God on high will be merciful to you)

Of all matters, which are of great personal importance, the virtue of mercy is ranked as the foremost. That is why the Prophet of Islam observes: God will not show mercy to one who does not show mercy to others. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Tawhid)

According to a saying of the Prophet, related in the Sahih of Imam Muslim: “God has a hundred mercies, and one of them He has sent down amongst jinn and men and cattle and beasts of prey. Thereby they are kind and merciful unto one another, and thereby the wild creature inclines to tenderness unto her offspring. And ninety-nine mercies has God reserved unto Himself, that therewith He may show mercy unto His servants on the Day of Resurrection.

The mercy of a mother manifests itself in multiple ways. Should her infant baby strike her on the face, the mother will not take offence. She will not react by striking her child back. She will hold her child close to her, turning his apparent act of aggression into an act of love, rewarding him for what was a punishable deed. Incidents of this nature occur in every home. They provide us with a tiny glimpse of the mercy of God. Mothers are not the masters, or the makers, of their own mercy. It is a small fraction of God’s own mercy, which He has bequeathed to them—along with other living creatures—so that they may show compassion to one another.

Human beings do not have knowledge of the unseen, so they have to suffer all sorts of setbacks in life. They lack will power, so tend to give way to base impulses and commit grave mistakes. The resources at their disposal are insufficient for them to deal with external factors working against them, so they crash to defeat. Predicaments such as these have combined to turn man into an afflicted soul, constantly tormented by thoughts of having been a failure in life, of not having achieved what he set out to do. Rich and poor, powerful and weak, all human beings are a prey to such despair.

Can man hope for any improvement of his lot? Can our failures in life become successes at the end of the road? Is it possible that our faults will be counted as good deeds, that—despite our digressions—we will safely reach our destination? The glimpse of God’s mercy that we gain from a mother shows us that this can indeed come to pass. God’s mercy to us is many times more than that of a mother to her child; by His grace He will make up to us what we lack, but on one condition—that we make Him our everything, as a mother means everything to her child.