Friday Nasiha

Living The Quran

The Divine
Al-Baqara (The Cow) - Chapter 2: Verse 255

"God. There is no God but He, the Living, the Everlasting. Neither slumber seizes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and on earth. Who is there shall intercede with Him, save by His leave? He knows all that lies before them and what is after them. Nor can they grasp aught of His knowledge, except as He wills. His Throne extends over the heavens and the earth, and upholding them wearies Him not. He is the Most High, the Sublime."

This passage is the heart and soul of the Quran. It begins with the verse that is second only to al-Fatiha in familiarity to Muslims. Known as Ayat al Kursi, the Throne verse, it was considered by classical commentators to be the most excellent verse in the Quran. It is a popular subject for calligraphy, and in a great diversity of calligraphic forms finds a place on display in millions of Muslim homes around the world.

Ayat al Kursi is the most beautiful statement of the power and majesty of the Almighty. It reveals God as the creative and sustaining force behind all existence, the Divine who is all-knowing and always aware, a ceaseless, unwearying presence conscious of each individual in all their activities: what we show as well as what we conceal, what has happened to us and what awaits us. Such power and majesty can only be made evident to human beings by God alone. It is only by God's will that we can come to know the Divine that is far beyond human consciousness or capability.

Knowledge is a crucial aspect of the Divine. And the emphasis throughout the Quran on God's knowledge is reflected again and again in the impetus this gives to the exercise of human intellect to understand and appreciate better both God's creation and the meaning and operation of God's guidance to humankind. The use of reason is essential to making the right decisions, making the right qualitative judgements on how to act in this world and how to distinguish right from wrong. The word Kursi means throne, but in Muslim thought and parlance it has become inseparable from the concept of knowledge. Knowledgeable and learned people are referred to as 'People of the Chair', and this is the origin of the professorial 'chair'. Many of the terms we associate with universities derive from Arabic, a legacy of the institution's origin in Muslim civilisation, from which it was borrowed wholesale by European society during the Middle Ages.

Compiled From:
"Reading the Qur'an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam" - Ziauddin Sardar, pp. 179-180

From Issue: 933 [Read original issue]

Understanding The Prophet's Life

Contentment

The fear of poverty is an instrument of deception and a common cause of misguidance. A person can grieve over a plethora of concerns and problems that he or she may never have to face. These phantom concerns can be controlling. A person who has wealth is constantly worried about his estate and its potential loss. Often, wealthy people enjoy no peace of mind and their lives are rife with conflict, contention, and treachery. People who are righteous do not suffer anxiety that tears down the body and mind. They are content to do good and trust in God.

People who harbor good thoughts about their Provider deflect insidious whisperings about Him and the subtle provocations that create irrational fear. His dominion is never diminished in the least when He gives to His creation all that they need. And if someone is given more than another, one should not harbor bad thoughts toward that person. Wholesome thoughts about God express themselves in one's contentment with what he or she has, and not stretching one's eyes toward the assets of others. The Prophet said, "Contentment is a treasure that is never exhausted." [Tabarani]

Compiled From:
"Purification of the Heart" - Hamza Yusuf

From Issue: 979 [Read original issue]

Blindspot!

Humans

Humanism and humanity are both derived from the word man and have a higher moral connotation. This double meaning of ideas connected to man's name is a result of man's double nature, one of them originating from the earth and the other from heaven. The materialists always directed our attention to the external aspects of things. "The hand is not only an organ of work," writes Engels, "but also a product of it. Only through work ... the human hand attained that high degree of perfection in which it could produce Raffaello's paintings, Thorvaldsen's statues and Paganini's music."

What Engels is talking about is the continuation of biological and not spiritual development. Painting, however, is a spiritual, not a technical act. Raphael created his paintings not with his hands but with his spirit. Beethoven wrote his best compositions when he was already deaf. Biological development alone, even if stretched out indefinitely, could never have given us Raphael's paintings nor even the crude prehistoric cave pictures. Here we are faced with two separate aspects of man's existence.

A human being is not the sum of his different biological functions, just like a painting cannot be reduced to the quantity of the paint used or a poem to its syntax. It is true that a mosque is built from a given number of stone blocks of definite form and in definite order, from a certain quantity of mortar, wooden beams, and so forth: however, this is not the whole truth about the mosque. After all, there is a difference between a mosque and military barracks. It is possible to write a perfect grammatical and linguistic analysis of a poem by Goethe without coming anywhere near its essence. The same goes for the difference between a dictionary and a poem in the same language. A dictionary is exact but has no plot; a poem has a meaning and an unattainable essence. Fossils, morphology, and psychology describe only man's external, mechanical, and meaning-less side. Man is like a painting, a mosque, or a poem rather than the quantity or quality of the material of which he is made. Man is more than all the sciences together can say about him.

Compiled From:
"Islam Between East and West" - Alija Ali Izetbegovic, pp. 8, 9

From Issue: 902 [Read original issue]