Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. Have you noticed how when you look at the wheels of other cars in a highway, sometimes they spin so fast that they look like they are spinning backwards. Or for example, Steve Jobs, he was so rich, that he started to look poor, always wearing the same clothes in public presentations:
A similar thing happens sometimes when someone is extremely righteous. He is so righteous, it looks bad. The society becomes suspicious about his motives. “What does he really want? This is not what we would expect a good person to do!” According to the expectations of the general society, it looks like an extremely righteous person just did a bad thing.
For example, when Abraham destroyed the idols, broke them into pieces. It’s so good, it looks bad. Breaking things looks like a bad thing. Well, it wasn’t a bad thing, because it was not property damage. Those people who built those idols did not claim that those idols belong to them, that the idols are their property. They claimed that they belong to the idols. So, they did not consider them property. So, when Abraham broke them into pieces, he was not doing property damage. Property damage is prohibited in the Quran, definitely, but the idols were not property. You can not own the statues by whom you claim to be owned. So, any physical idols built by humans can not be considered property. They can not claim to own what they claim owns them. So, at the moment when they worshiped the statues, they did not consider them property anymore, and so Abraham had the legal right to destroy what belongs to no one. Had those statues been simple property, like some statues today which are not worshiped, Abraham would not have the right to destroy them, but the people of Abraham did not just build the statues, they worshiped them, and by that very act, they declared them not to be their property anymore, at which point the statues either had the power to protect themselves, or Abraham destroyed them, and because he did, that proved that they did not have the power to protect themselves. But, you can see how easy it is to misunderstand Abraham as a property destroyer. This deed was so off-the-charts good, it made no sense to them, so it looked bad to them.
Or in the case of Mary. When she gave birth to Jesus, the Quran says that when she came to her family, carrying him, they said, “O Mary, you have committed something that is totally unexpected.” And the key word here is “totally unexpected” – beyond the expectations of the society. Similar to when an athlete is so good, he or she breaks a record by so much, that they start to suspect that he was taking performance enhancing drugs. In a lot of cases they do, but once in a while, the athlete is simply exceptional. Or when a villager goes to a big city for the first time, and the villagers are used to long greetings and being nice to anyone whom they meet, because they don’t meet people often, so when they travel to the city, and they are nice to the first people they meet, the city people become suspicious. What does he want? Why is he so nice to me? What are his true intentions? Once in a while, maybe someone is just being nice; exceptional in a large city, but not impossible. Something similar happens with messengers. To most people, because they don’t recognize the message, they will have to rely on judging the messenger’s intentions or character. “Why is he doing this? What does he want out of this, and things like that?”
Or when Joseph told his dream to his brothers: They probably were used to their father being a prophet, which was acceptable to them, because he was old, and they got used to it over a long time, “but Joseph, this little guy? This is beyond expectations.”
So, once in a while when someone does a very righteous deed, people will question his intentions. Of course, these days, this situation happens much more rarely then in the past, because the differences between extremely righteous people and extremely evil people are much smaller today.
But, it is part of God’s system to make extremely righteous people misunderstood by their society, because that is part of how those righteous people earn credits. However, we have to be careful how we understand this, because it is not necessarily true in the opposite direction. See, when you are extremely extremely right, the society victimizes you, but just because someone feels victimized, it does not make them right. A lot of people feel misunderstood or like victims, but that doesn’t make them right. People in the fringes of the society, in the edges of the society are misunderstood, and very often not because they are extremely righteous, but because of their other extreme characteristics, many kinds of extremes. They might be among the smartest, or among the least smart, or among the tallest, or among the shortest, or among the richest or among the poorest, and there are hundreds of extremes like that, and all of them are misunderstood, but those types of misunderstandings do not necessarily earn them credits, but misunderstanding people because they are too righteous, in that case, they get paid for it in the next world.