Falsehood

Falsehood is a bad moral characteristic, but widespread in communities of the ignorant. A great majority believes that there is no problem about telling a lie which they, to their own minds, have cleverly planned that others cannot detect it because such people regard themselves as being responsible solely to others.

They believe that once they have deceived and convinced others, no problem remains. But in fact, the whole of human responsibility is to Allah.

In the Qur'an, Allah instructs people to avoid lying in the verse, "... have done with telling lies" (Surat al-Hajj: 30). No matter how clever a lie may be or how well it deceives others, Allah knows the truth and He sees that the person is lying.

Believers know that lying is a type of behavior which Allah has forbidden and they strongly abstain from telling falsehoods on even the most trivial matter. But some in their ignorant lives, influenced by their own selfish drives, persist in this moral defect which should be left behind.

When asked, these people will naturally deny that they would ever do anything at all that is forbidden by Allah, but under pressure, their desires may still prompt them into lying.

A person telling a lie, who knows this is forbidden by Allah, may at first believe that he has protected himself or gained something, but this is not true. Lying troubles a person's conscience and makes him uncomfortable.

Such a person always remains afraid that his lies will be discovered and that as a result, other people will demean him. He lives with this tension all the time. Deep inside, he feels uncomfortable because he knows he has done something forbidden by Allah.

Furthermore, once a person tells a lie, he feels the need to tell more lies, one after another, in order not to let his first lie be discovered. Each time he is drawn deeper into the swamp of falsehoods and feels stress in his heart because he cannot escape from it.

In addition, liars are suspected right away by those around them and as a result, are neither trusted nor respected. This makes a liar feel even lower. People who tell lies to exalt and benefit themselves find that the reward they receive is exactly the opposite.

Allah tells us in the Qur'an that such people are acting under the influence of satan:

Shall I tell you upon whom the satans descend? They descend on every evil liar. They give them a hearing, and most of them are liars. (Surat ash-Shu'ara': 221-223)

As with all forms of insincerity, the solution is to take refuge in Allah with sincere repentance and live out the morality of the Qur'an in full. If people do this, their worldly troubles will end and they will be able to hope for salvation from eternal torment in the Hereafter.