Morality and Superior Orders

Unquestioning obedience to the chain of command is one of the hallmarks of Military which ensures discipline and proper execution of its activities without delay or halt. This obedience is practiced in other institutions as well albeit with varying degrees. Due to this obedience, certain acts which a person would normally have not undertaken are committed on the pretext of superior’s orders. For example in Police, some suspect is picked up from his house and put in jail, and some senior asks a junior to extract ‘information’ from that suspect using the infamous ‘Third Degree’ method – a euphemism for torture of extreme nature. The junior complies and result is the broken ribs and legs and heavily lashed back of the suspect; sometimes the suspect dies before seeing the face of the court even. Same goes for other superior-junior relationships in other places.
There are two questions to be asked here, one, why do we obey any order without questioning its morality, and two, is there any mechanism to ascertain whether a command is moral or otherwise.
The answer to the first question, to my mind, is composed of four reasons. First is, that we obey orders when the victim is alien to us; we would not most likely torture any of our acquaintances or relatives or even our own selves but we would not hesitate in beating a person who is not in any way associated to us. Second reason is, that fair amount of propaganda be done about the victim being the criminal, from whom you just have to extract a confession which means he deserves whatever cruelty is meted out to him. And the third reason is our System of Upbringing, which includes our educational institutions and our familial approaches to raising the next generation. We are always curbed to ask questions, and always inhibited to question the authority. Submission is rewarded with a pat while questioning is frowned upon. Unquestioning servitude brings an omen of great potentials of rising to fame while rebelliousness to crass inhumanity is seen as a malady not less than cancer. We are never taught that others are humans too, they also have feelings, they also breathe, they also think, they feel pain, they bleed, they cry, scream, they have kids, family, parents, they are just as human as we are. We don’t have any right to take what is lawfully theirs; we cannot deprive them of their freedom, we cannot kill or torture them. Our whole syllabi is devoid of such an education which emphasizes upon the moral aspect of a student, that is why we have most of the educated lot devoid of compassion for the poor and under privileged. The product of our education system is a materialistic, self-serving, carrier oriented, humanoid. Fourth essentially is the economic reason, we, most of the time obey immoral order just to keep getting the paychecks, as we don’t want to risk losing our jobs.
The answer to the second question is an emphatic yes. To decide if the orders given by superiors are moral or not, they must conform to Quran and Sunnah. But that also presumes a prerequisite i.e. the knowledge of Quran and Sunnah, which unfortunately has never been the concern of our Educational Institutions. So this amalgamation of various reasons amounts to the moral decadence in our all institutions.
These wide spread sub-human activities are not confined to our Pakistani society alone, they are present almost in all cultures across the globe with extraordinary uniformity. The war crimes of Nazi Germany’s generals were defended unsuccessfully during the Nuremberg Trials by citing that they were following superior’s orders. Actually Nuremberg Principle IV states:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

History of the use of Superior’s Orders defense is cited in the Wikipedia entry of Superior orders. In United States v. Keenan, the accused was found guilty of murder after he obeyed an order to shoot and kill an elderly Vietnamese citizen. The Court of Military Appeals held that

“the justification for acts done pursuant to orders does not exist if the order was of such a nature that a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know it to be illegal.”

Here I would like to cite an important discussion from the said Wikipedia article about the legal dilemma presented by the superior orders defense.

The superior orders defense is still used with the following rationale in the following scenario: An “order” may come from one’s superior at the level of national law. But according to Nuremberg Principle IV, such an order is sometimes “unlawful” according to international law. Such an “unlawful order” presents a legal dilemma from which there is no legal escape: On one hand, a person who refuses such an unlawful order faces the possibility of legal punishment at the national level for refusing orders. On the other hand, a person who accepts such an unlawful order faces the possibility of legal punishment at the international level (e.g. Nuremberg Trials) for committing unlawful acts.
Nuremberg Principle II responds to that dilemma by stating:”The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.”
The above scenario might present a legal dilemma, but Nuremberg Principle IV speaks of “a moral choice” as being just as important as “legal” decisions: It states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him”.
In “moral choices” or ethical dilemmas an ethical decision is often made by appealing to a “higher ethic” such as ethics in religion or secular ethics. One such “higher ethic,” which is found in many religions and also in secular ethics, is the “ethic of reciprocity,” or the Golden Rule. It states that one has a right to just treatment, and therefore has a reciprocal responsibility to ensure justice for others.
“Higher ethics,” such as those, could be used by an individual to solve the legal dilemma presented by the superior orders defense.

These “Higher ethics” in case of Muslims are definitely the injunctions of Quran and Sunnah. Here I’d like to quote Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer of the last century, when he refused to get conscripted for the Vietnam War, he said,

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

He was tried in court for the disobedience and later acquitted, but this set an example that morality is the supreme arbiter in the matters of illegal orders. I’ll end this article with a Hadith from Sahih Muslim:

‘Alī (rta) narrates that once the Prophet (sws) sent a battalion of soldiers on some military expedition and appointed an Ansārī Muslim over them. He commanded the soldiers to obey their commander. People disobeyed him in some issue. [This enraged him]. He commanded them to gather wood. People collected some wood. Then he commanded them to light a fire. People then put the wood on fire. Then the commander asked them whether the Prophet (sws) had not commanded them to obey him. All chorused that he had, indeed. Then he commanded them to jump into the fire. The people were confounded, gazing at each other. They exclaimed, “We have escaped nothing but the fire when we clung to the Prophet (sws). [How can now we jump into it?] They remained in this state of uncertainly for a while till he recomposed himself and the fire was out. The soldiers narrated the whole incident to the Prophet (sws) when they returned back. The Prophet (sws) explained to them that if they had jumped into the fire, they would never have been able to get out of it. He further explained that the rulers may not be obeyed when what they command involves disobeying God. This obligation only pertains to the ma‘rūf.

‘Chicken Karahi’ and Allama Iqbal

It is a common theme that pervades our culture that we as a nation commit certain acts while thinking of them as wrong and sometimes with a sense of guilt, due primarily to our incomplete knowledge of prevalent religious system or contemporary cultural norms. I was presented with one such instance when a modestly affluent and religious friend of mine said or rather issued an edict that buying a BMW or higher end expensive car is ISRAAF – a waste of money – when you can do with Mehran or some lower end cheap car. He said all this while owning two cars with one definitely from the higher end cars. My another friend of his ilk seconded him with another forceful argument that performing Hajj after Hajj can also come under the category of ISRAAF, since you have performed your obligatory Hajj once, now instead of spending around 4 Lacs on going to Makkah and back, you can spend that money in charity. During the course of our discussion another interesting argument was put forward as to eating of ‘Chicken Karahi’ that if you can eat that in less than a thousand, going for the same thing in a high class hotel in five thousand or so is ISRAAF, while we had been dinning out in quite many expensive places of the town together.
This dilemma is deeply rooted in our society that we do things which are in complete antagonism to our conscience or our perceived sense of morality. That makes us a nation of morally corrupt spineless zombies, who can not standup for what they think is morally adequate. That is the reason I say why the ‘Arab Spring’ can not visit us. This problem has been thoroughly dealt with in Allama Iqbal’s writings; especially the concept of Khudi is the reaction to this predicament. The ill effects of complete abandonment of desire and self-denial – ‘Tasawwuf’ – and the aggrandizement of the pinnacle of self-assertion replete with ambitious desires – ‘Khudi’ – is a common theme of Iqbal’s prose and poetry. We as a nation have yet to wake up to the idea of ‘Khudi’, despite putting Iqbal on the pedestal of ‘Hakeem ul Ummat’. What we understand to be morally correct, we must standup for it, always keeping a room of improvement; this is the message of ‘Khudi’.
The reason why we hide from our conscience is that we have been conditioned from the very childhood to obey orders from superiors regardless of their moral underpinnings, through a non-observable code of conformance organically blended in our education system and our cultural norms. You can not object to the wisdom of a teacher or an elder or an officer, if you want to be in his good books. And this culture of conformance has stifled creativity – you can never be creative if you don’t think anew – which is the most important factor responsible for the backwardness of our technological and scientific research. Inquisitiveness and curiosity is discouraged while conformance and servility is rewarded. So we as a nation make good clerks and best soldiers and our bureaucrats and generals always show their moral grit after they retire.
Coming back to the ‘Chicken Karahi’ arguments, it is worthy to mention that whoever pays his obligatory Zakat can enjoy his wealth however he deems fit within the confines of Islam; nonetheless it is advisable that he gives money in charity, but that is advisable not obligatory. I think it would suffice to quote here a verse or two from the Holy Quran:

[7:32] Say, .Who has prohibited the adornment Allah has brought forth for His servants, and the wholesome things of sustenance?. Say, .They are for the believers during this worldly life (though shared by others), while they are purely for them on the day of Resurrection. This is how We elaborate the verses for people who understand..

[7:33]Say, .My Lord has prohibited only the shameful acts, whether open or secret, and (every) sinful act, and unjust aggression, and that you associate with Allah anything for which He has not sent any authority, and that you attribute to Allah any thing about which you do not have sure knowledge.