Why is there evil in the world?

Sikhism does not treat evil as a separate cosmic force locked in battle with God. There is no devil, no opposing power that rivals Waheguru. Instead, the Sikh Gurus taught that what we experience as evil arises from within the human condition itself, rooted in a state of spiritual separation called haumai. Haumai is often translated as ego or self-centredness, but it points to something subtler than ordinary pride. It is the fundamental delusion of believing oneself to be separate from God and from creation, of placing the small self at the centre of everything. From this one root, the Gurus identified five thieves that corrupt human behaviour: lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride. These are not external tempters. They are tendencies that grow within us when we lose sight of the divine presence that permeates all things. This understanding shapes everything about how Sikhism reads the presence of cruelty, suffering and wrongdoing in the world.

The Guru Granth Sahib, the living scripture and eternal Guru of the Sikhs, returns again and again to the image of a person wandering in darkness, caught in what is called maya. Maya is sometimes loosely translated as illusion, but the Sikh understanding is more precise than that. It does not mean the world is unreal. It means that we become captivated by the world's surfaces, by status, wealth, pleasure and fear, and in that captivation we forget our deepest nature. When a person is deep in maya, the five thieves flourish. Anger leads to cruelty. Greed leads to exploitation. Attachment leads to possessiveness that can become violent. The harm people do to one another flows directly from this forgetfulness. Evil, in this sense, is not a mystery sent down from outside. It is what happens when human beings live disconnected from the truth of who they are.

This raises an honest and difficult question: if Waheguru is all-loving and all-pervading, why does this forgetfulness exist at all? The Gurus did not shy away from the difficulty here. They acknowledged that Hukam, the divine will or cosmic order, encompasses everything, and that human beings are given the capacity to either align with that order or to move against it through their choices. The Sikh tradition speaks of God's grace as the force that awakens a person out of haumai, and this grace is available to all, but it cannot be forced. There is something in the teaching that respects human freedom and human responsibility, without falling into the trap of simply blaming individuals for all suffering. The Gurus themselves witnessed injustice on a grand scale. Guru Nanak spoke directly against the violence and oppression of his time. Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur gave their lives rather than submit to tyranny. The tradition carries within it a serious reckoning with evil as a social and political reality, not just a personal one.

What Sikhism offers is not a tidy explanation that makes the pain go away, but a path of response. The practice of Naam Simran, the continuous remembrance of God's name, is understood as the antidote to haumai. When the mind is turned toward the divine, the thieves lose their grip. The company of others on a similar path, what the Gurus called the Sangat, matters deeply here, because isolation feeds ego and community cultivates humility. The practice of Seva, selfless service, pulls a person out of self-absorption and into genuine care for others. These are not abstract remedies. They are concrete daily habits that the tradition offers to anyone struggling with their own capacity for harm, or trying to make sense of the harm they have experienced.

If you are sitting with this question because of something real, something that has happened to you or around you, Sikhism would not ask you to pretend that suffering is fine or that it serves some hidden purpose you simply cannot see. The tradition has space for grief and anger. What it would gently insist upon is that evil does not have the final word, because at the deepest level of reality, what the Gurus called Ik Onkar, the one divine reality that underlies all things, is not corrupted by it. The world as it is, full of both beauty and cruelty, exists within that reality. And the human being, however lost in haumai, carries within them the capacity to wake up, to return, and to act differently. That possibility is, in the Sikh understanding, always open. It does not close.