Who but Him?

Auron ka hai Payaam aur, mera Payaam aur hai, / Ishq key dardmand ka tarz-e-kalaam aur hai! (Iqbal)

Written by

SYED HUSAIN PASHA

Published on

July 21, 2022

Auron ka hai Payaam aur, mera Payaam aur hai, / Ishq key dardmand ka tarz-e-kalaam aur hai! (Iqbal)

Things intervene, one after another. Some good, from our point of view. Some, again from our limited and often warped point of view, not so good. But all of them, if you ask me, the most wonderful things in fact and in and of themselves. Because they are all from the one who is most wonderful. And wonderful is really what Wonderful does!

Divine attributes. The Most Compassionate, the Most Compassionate! The Most Merciful, the Most Merciful! The Most Loving, Caring and Doting, the Most Loving, Caring and Doting!

Arrahmanirrahim!

Did you notice how no “and” – the Arabic letter Wauv (How do you write it in English anyway?) – separates the two glorious names? Not once! Nowhere in the Qur’ān!

It is one uninterrupted flow of mercy and love and rahmat! Unbroken by any barriers, no matter how small or big! Not even by a letter from the alphabet! The letter Wauv!

And yet that is what constitutes the biggest separation of all: the separation of human babble from divine speech. Humans seek linguistic excellence in their own rules. God seems to create his own levels of linguistic elegance and expressive profoundness by going beyond and above human rules of grammar and lexicon.

Allahu Akbar! What God and how he deals with his world! Laa Ilaaha Illaa Huwar Rahmanur Rahim!

If that is who he is, Arrahmanurrahim, then why would you want a God beside him? And even the least among us knows that he is that and much, much more than that! How foolish, rash, ingrate, ignorant and arrogant is it on our part to seek, serve and adore anyone but him?

 

SURROUNDED BY MIRACLES

All this brings me to that one point I have been trying to make forever: No matter how you look at it, Islam is a miracle! An endless succession of miracles in fact! From top to toe – from the beginning it never had to the end it never shall have – and proclaiming from every treetop that it is so.

But sadly – alas for human arrogance compounded by colossal human ignorance! – only those will see it, as the Bible says, who have eyes. And only those will hear it, as the Qur’ān says, who have ears.

And this fact will penetrate only those hearts that are not clogged and sealed with cumulated sin, selfishness, wrongdoing, greed and folly on the one hand and habitual arrogance on the other.

Miracles in the sky! We humans are still mostly wedded to look for miracles in the sky.

We either seek them in a sea right here on earth that parts as a Moses, Alaihis Salam, smites it with his mighty staff. Or we look heavenwards for them in the star that is said to have miraculously guided the Wise Men of the East to the baby Jesus, may Allah bless him – and his ever-virgin mother.

And we look heavenward again for the moon to split into two as Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihis Salam, points a gentle and noble finger at it.

And in doing so, we often miss the myriad miracles with which our own everyday life is teeming. Seldom do we pay heed to the miracles that surround us. In our own everyday life!

Let us take stock of some of them. Let us do an inventory, just like we do of so many things in our life. Let us inventory and document here a handful of miracles in our everyday life, even though I have done this earlier elsewhere.

 

LET US COUNT OUR BLESSINGS

The Qur’ān would like us to do that. Wa in ta’uddoo ni’amatallahi laa tuhsoohaa, it says. Go, inventory Allah’s blessings and you will never be able to complete the count. And then we are asked: Which one of the miracles around us would we deny?

Which ones indeed? So, let us start the count.

The sheer miracle of life! Is there anything more miraculous than human life on earth? See how the earth rotates on its axis to make life on earth possible. And see how that requires water from below and rain from above. And see how the winds do what they must to take the clouds from place to place.

Now you do some of the rest of this counting on your own.

Every intake and exhalation of our breath! What could be a greater miracle than that? And every beat of our heart! Allahu Akbar, what kind of a muscle is the human heart that it keeps on ticking and in most instances only stops at the end of the journey. And how much abuse it takes and still does its job.

And how many miracles does one human heart pack? How many supporting miracle systems does it come with in order to do its job?

And every flick of our finger! How many parts does the human skeleton have? Look at each part individually. And then see how these parts all fitted together. You are telling me you don’t get the picture? How can you not?

Every blink of our eyes! Every twitch of every muscle in our face! Every cell and tissue in our body! Every nail, every hair, every bone, every vein and every artery we are blessed with!

Did we ever consider our mouth? And the role of every taste-bud in our mouth! And what about the structure of our nervous system! Can you imagine a human body without a brain to match? What use is a car without an engine or a computer without an operating system to run it?

Oh, how we take Allah’s blessings for granted! And, alas, how we walk past millions upon millions of miracles and signs of Allah that stare us in the face every moment of our existence on earth.

 

MIRACLES NEVER END

The fact is the miracles in our life never end. I list below some more of them. But I want you to go out on your own and list everything that you think is a miracle in your – our – life. And in our world! So, here are some more miracles in our life.

How about the food we eat. I am not talking about the whole meal. I am talking about each and every individual piece that goes to make the wonderful meal we consume: starting with every grain of barley or wheat or rice and ending never.

And every drop of the water we drink. I don’t mean the whole glassful, but every individual drop and all that is packed in that one single drop.

Go look at every grain of sand in the desert or on the beach! And at every drop of water in the ocean! And at every blade of grass in the meadow or the prairie!

Examine every shimmering leaf in the tree! Every shade of colour in a flower! And every note in a bird’s song!

Do all that and then tell me that you know or understand the miracles of God in this world. Or you have figured out his blessings in your own life. Or that you have counted them all.

The fact is that they are puzzling and challenging to specialists and yet rewarding and comforting to commoners. But when all is said and done, a specialist’s – a scientist’s – dream, each one of them.

Armies of philosophers, scholars and scientists have been studying them forever. And they cannot fully fathom them. And yet to a commoner, there are still a million powerful lessons and signs in each one of them – signs that all point to the single divine source of their design, composition and creation.