Does every person have the same chance to be good at birth?

Yes. According to Islam, every child is born with a pure nature, without inherited sin and with a disposition towards good. Evil only arises when a person moves away from this good beginning under outside influences.

Some people seem to lean towards wrongdoing from an early age. One might conclude that God creates some people good and others evil. Islam teaches something different. Every person begins life with a pure nature. There is no inherited sin that weighs on a child from birth.

The first verse above calls this disposition the nature with which God has created human beings. Every child is given an excellent start that reflects the attributes of God. If the child were left entirely to itself, it would not become a criminal of its own accord. The good qualities it was born with would grow within it.

Why, then, are there so many different people and so much evil? The hadith above gives the answer. The child is born with this pure nature, and it is its parents and surroundings that shape it in one direction or another. No child grows up untouched by society. That is why parents and society carry a great responsibility for what becomes of a child.

Evil, then, is not something God creates. God is good, and He creates what is good. Evil is more like a shadow. A shadow forms when something comes between the light and the place that should have received it. It can be very deep and seem almost like the darkness of night, and it has many shades. Yet none of these shadows comes from the light itself.

Every person, then, is given a good beginning. Whoever understands this will not regard anyone as a hopeless case from birth.