You don’t need a medium to reach God. He is there for you all the time
Ramazan has come a long way since the Y2K bug. It has cycled into the season of longing, the fall as Americans call it. The green leaves prepare for a stunning transformation of autumnal colours; the coolness of the air mixes with the inner selfness that fasting brings. It is a time to reflect the present; a time to excogitate the future. But the past too demands a place in the scheme of life. Remember New Year’s Eve 1999? I do in America.
Bottled water and batteries, lots of them, were slugged out from stores by a nation preparing for a complete collapse at the stroke of midnight. Energy was to end, order was to disintegrate. No lights, no water, no system; plunging the digital age into a pit of confusion. The computers which control our world and our lives were the culprits overspreading hysteria. Software geniuses had not calendared the new century and computer networks could crash, triggering nuclear explosions, plane collisions and runaway trains at 12:00am on Jan 1, 2000. Sucked in the meltdown were Muslims anxious how they would eat their sehri and offer their fajr if Y2K struck.
Heavens did not fall; computers did not crash.
The birth of the new century in itself a stunning event, kept us glued to the television sets. We were a part of history deftly steered by airwave mariners like Peter Jennings of ABC News and the CNN who swept us along in their space satellites as their cameras orbited the earth and touched the capitals around the globe where crazy fireworks danced in the sky to herald the new century. The millennium marathon brought into our living rooms tickled our urban fantasies as our hearts and souls joined in the mass rejoicing of fellow humans, God’s creation on earth. That moment we became one, pulled together by the gravity of space and time. We shared a common experience.
Outside snow was falling. As a new morn dawned, far in the horizon, the flush of salmon pink and silvery gold was the first to greet the eye. It was a day of divine beauty; nature’s palette has splashed the landscape with pristine blues, greens and pinks, sparkling off a land where fairies live, not humans. Sehri was over; it was time for a cerebral engagement with the Creator of our universe; a heart-to-Heaven talk on the shape of things to come.
There are surreal moments in life, when we feel light and airy. We all do. At such times, the spirit locked within our ribbed cage wants release. It wants freedom from the flesh and all things material that make life mundane. It seeks purity of thought in the company of the soul. The two combined: spirit and soul walk with God. Yes, they do. Who knows what tomorrow brings. Did the megastar of television Peter Jennings, who rung in the new millennium with his brilliant commentary, guess he’d only be on earth for less than five years? He died this past summer when the lung cancer proved too powerful for chemotherapy, leaving behind a 50-million-dollar estate. You have to go, when the call comes; you have to leave your fortunes behind and your fancy multi-million homes and settle for a narrow strip of grass in a mass manicured cemetery with just a tombstone saying who you were, once upon a time.
When we exist, lost in our day-to-day struggle to live, who knows when life leaves us? None. Joan Didion, a wonderful writer of literary journalism, a genre that sits supreme on her, lost her husband of 40 years, as they sat down to dinner in their Manhattan apartment a night before New Year’s Eve. “Life changes fast,” she wrote recently in a moving article for the New York Times, “life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
Was this famous writer of life and its daily minutiae expecting to lose John Gregory Dunne, her soulmate, her husband and companion of four decades? It “cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself,” writes Joan Didion in her gut-pulling memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. Reconstructing the last moments of their life together, Didion gives details of the words he uttered and then went silent, while she continued to talk. A massive heart attack cut the couple asunder.
Twenty months later Didion lost her only child, Quintana, 38, to abdominal infection. Acknowledging the frailty of human beings who consider themselves in control of their destinies, she says: “(I) shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful: They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favour at State or Justice.”
Lost in the cavernous hole of power and plenty, of fun and frolic, of love and family, few want a reminder all can end in the instant. But it can. So why not be prepared? One month in a year (Ramazan), is a sensible time to set aside for the soul and the spirit. When you fast you flush out poisonous waste from your system to detoxify the body and discipline your intake. (Yes, you can survive without endless cups of tea and chain-smoking.) When you pray, you prostrate before your Maker. When you open the Quran, God speaks to you direct, as though you were on your daily walk with Him. The verses, whether read in Urdu or English translation, clarify the truth for you.
“He has turned to you (mercifully), therefore read what is easy of the Quran ... therefore read as much of it as is easy (to you) ... whatever of good you send on beforehand for yourselves, you will find it with Allah; that is best and greatest in reward” — the Holy Quran, Surrah LXX111
You don’t need a medium to reach God. You don’t need an appointment with Him for a heart-to-Heaven talk. He is there for you all the time. One can pick up the Book when the heart desires; fathom its simplicity when the mind is clear; read its beauty when art in us turns aesthetical; practise its advice when perception reached perfection; and consider the Holy Prophet (Pbuh) the finest among humans, worthy of emulation. He was human too. Just like you and me. But he was God’s chosen through whom the Holy Quran was revealed to us. It is now for us to unlock its power and grace bringing in our homes the daily routine of sitting aside with God’s Book, a page-turner, speaking direct to us of worldly wisdom and intellectual conception, providing us with a code of life.
Thomas Cleary, who holds a PhD from Harvard, in his book The Essential Koran, says “The Quran is not only called the Reading or the Recital but also the Criterion: it is called a Reminder and also a Clarification ... it is undeniably unique ... it offers a way to explore an attitude that fully embraces the quest of knowledge and understanding that is the essence of science, while at the same time, and indeed for the same reasons, fully embraces the awe, humility, reverence, and conscience without which ‘humankind does indeed go too far in considering itself to be self-sufficient’ (Quran 96:6-7)”.
Ramazan has come a long way since the Y2K bug. It has cycled into the season of longing, the fall as Americans call it. The green leaves prepare for a stunning transformation of autumnal colours; the coolness of the air mixes with the inner selfness that fasting brings. It is a time to reflect the present; a time to excogitate the future. But the past too demands a place in the scheme of life. Remember New Year’s Eve 1999? I do in America.
Bottled water and batteries, lots of them, were slugged out from stores by a nation preparing for a complete collapse at the stroke of midnight. Energy was to end, order was to disintegrate. No lights, no water, no system; plunging the digital age into a pit of confusion. The computers which control our world and our lives were the culprits overspreading hysteria. Software geniuses had not calendared the new century and computer networks could crash, triggering nuclear explosions, plane collisions and runaway trains at 12:00am on Jan 1, 2000. Sucked in the meltdown were Muslims anxious how they would eat their sehri and offer their fajr if Y2K struck.
The birth of the new century in itself a stunning event, kept us glued to the television sets. We were a part of history deftly steered by airwave mariners like Peter Jennings of ABC News and the CNN who swept us along in their space satellites as their cameras orbited the earth and touched the capitals around the globe where crazy fireworks danced in the sky to herald the new century. The millennium marathon brought into our living rooms tickled our urban fantasies as our hearts and souls joined in the mass rejoicing of fellow humans, God’s creation on earth. That moment we became one, pulled together by the gravity of space and time. We shared a common experience.
When we exist, lost in our day-to-day struggle to live, who knows when life leaves us? None. Joan Didion, a wonderful writer of literary journalism, a genre that sits supreme on her, lost her husband of 40 years, as they sat down to dinner in their Manhattan apartment a night before New Year’s Eve. “Life changes fast,” she wrote recently in a moving article for the New York Times, “life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
Twenty months later Didion lost her only child, Quintana, 38, to abdominal infection. Acknowledging the frailty of human beings who consider themselves in control of their destinies, she says: “(I) shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful: They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favour at State or Justice.”
