In the name of God, Most Beneficient Most Merciful.
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Relating to my personal experience, I go through life, unsuspecting of evil and mischievous deeds happening around me. Life actually extends to beyond the walls of my own little universe to the horizon of the society, the global community, where there exist people with their own set of agendas and to influence the masses in their community with their set of idealogy. This is done to achieve what has been set of their agenda and main goals. From the worlds of global politics to what transpired in the small place called Gombak.
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As what was reported in the newspaper of the scientists’ findings that all of human being that currently resides on earth are genetically linked to one man. It doesn’t matter whether you’re of Chinese descents, Malays, Caucasians, Africans; we’re all linked to one ancestor. I don’t know if this finding contradicts Darwin’s absurd theory of evolution, but this has certainly not come as a surprise to all Muslims. This proves that all of us kind of like ‘distance relative’, we’re of one big family of billions residing on various areas of the planet. We’re one. “Semua Bersaudara” or “All are brothers”. But what has made us view each other differently to set apart from one another, made us view each other as aliens? The two main things that made human beings categorised themselves apart are Religion and Race. It’s like in sports at schools for example, whereby the students are divided into groups of houses distinguished by colours. My school had six houses: Green, Blue, Black, Red, White and Yellow. These six groups are further categorized as the “North” (Green, Blue & Black) and the other three as “South” due to the location of the hostels being on the North and South area within the school border. The division is actually to create the competitiveness and not disunity. When we’re competing against other schools, the members of all the different houses unite and the best among them chosen to represent our school. Let’s leave aside the facts about my school.
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In the real world, we can see that the difference between “groups of human” whereby the colour of the skin or religious belief being the criteria of division. When this division exists, there is no unity or the philosophy of “We’re of one family”. When there is no unity, the emotion, the urges to compete and be above the other group are fashioned inside of them. This is normal for human beings with their passion running inside of them. The competitiveness usually creates animosity amongst each other and thus all the evil scheming exists. Each group have an agenda in their mind, of wanting to come out tops in terms of advancement in knowledge, technology, economic, ideology and political dominance. In terms of religion, the concrete faiths of the teachings or theological ideology made them want to spread them out as much as they can, this could be termed as “recruitment exercise”. The bigger the group, the more powerful they are, and the more likely that one of their members could achieve high feats in politics, economic, and knowledge wise, as such resulting in greater means and resources to spread out their ideology and to protect “their kind”. It is important to have unity within one “group”. War amongst human exists because of the competition and unacceptance of the enemy differentiated by mere skin colour or belief and to have peace we must tolerate. Each group have differentiation of culture and morality. This differentiation made their thinking being uneven or not on the same ground. Unfamiliarity and lacked of understanding of others on the minds of the fanatics or radicals in one “group” propagate hate which could lead to war. Why such disunity between groups exists? Why can’t we all human beings around the world be united, throw away all the prejudice? Some of you might say what’s this mambo jumbo? I’m actually relating what is recently experienced in my life through this brief summary without the specifics.
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I was watching my one year old nephew playing around the house the other day. The technology around him such as television do made him acted weird as he is in a learning stage. He’s absorbing and learning about the things around him. The other day, we were watching some movie on the telly. When the movie ends, as usual there are credits coming out on the screen. The lists of actors, people involved in the making of the movie are all in the list of credit. The list kept on moving up and disappeared through the top of the screen (try watching the credit and you’d see what I mean). My nephew was in awe; he went to the telly and tried to touch the screen because in his eyes, he saw something moving. But he didn’t feel any movement. He was confused as what he saw is deceiving him. All the sounds and pictures coming out from the box intrigued him. As he grows up I suspect, he’ll be like the rest of us, uninterested in the credit as the movie ends because all of us are so used to the television that we’re not in awe anymore of the technology. We take the technology for granted. We’re so used to hand phones, laptops, calculators, cars, etc that we had not stopped and say, “Wait a minute, this is incredible” to express our appreciation of the ingenuity of the creation.
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What I want to relate with the experience of watching my nephew is that what happened around us in nature is really a work of a genius. Who creates all this? I was driving through a heavy rain the other day, and a sudden realisation struck that it is something extraordinary, something magnificent that such abundant of water could come out of the sky, falling onto earth, freshen up the air with smells of the soaked earth, and that whoever thought of creating this must have brilliance beyond human capability. It is the work of God the All-Mighty. All praise be onto Him the Lord of the worlds.
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In pondering upon the nature, we will be like my baby nephew, discovering all the obvious things around us of which we never thought of before because we’re so used to the things surrounding us. In discovering all the things around us we realised there’s a law unto them. So, who dictated all the laws? Who determined the laws of gravity, or the moon must follows its orbit without fail, fuel can be burned and water can’t, the plants grows through the existence of water and sunlight, photosynthesis, etc? Who actually determined this? We’re discovering these laws by research onto the nature. And our findings help us create technology. Force equals mass times acceleration. It is the laws of physics using mathematics. Helps us design F1 cars, turbo machineries, etc. While our understanding of nature is compressed in mathematical formulas and whole heaps of facts and names given, we stopped in appreciating the ingenuity of the creation, we stopped to philosophise on what we had found, and that there exists greater power that govern the entire universe with all the laws abiding them. With this, we should be more of a believer of religion and that God exist.
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So, what is our mission in life? If everything in nature abides by a “Law”, what’s the definition of our law or ‘human law”? What should humans do to abide by the “Law”? By this I mean what’s natural to us? If the moon’s job is to circle in its orbit around the earth and the earth’s job is to rotate and circle around its own orbit around the sun, what’s ours? To rephrase, what’s the purpose of our existence? Does our limited intellect can define our “Law”, our purpose? The most important set of questions for us to ponder. For Muslims, that’s to know our Creator, worshipping Him and abiding by His rules. It is to follow the holy Quran and our Prophet.
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I’m really tired, I can’t think of what to write anymore. I just want to say that toleration among different race or religion is most important.
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Cheers
