More Thoughts
(Extract from a speech I made in Kansas City)
During my course of discussions and dialogues with non-Muslims I have come across a couple of major issues and objections against Islam and today I would like to address two of them.
Number One, the question of "is God a Just entity?” this is one of the main arguments of the atheist against theologies. For centuries people have had different concepts about the Creator. Some considered him to be One entity that has no equivalent, some assumed him to be a group of entities, some assumed him to have different forms, however one thing that almost everyone agrees on, and I even found some atheist literature supporting this notion, that if there is a God, he has to be Adil, he has to absolutely fair and just. We see our whole universe precisely balanced but on the face of it the mankind looks to be in a sort of imbalance, why is a baby born with an inherited disease, why are people born blind, why is somebody born poor and somebody born rich ? these questions have been bothering the humanity for centuries and different religions tried to answer this issue in different ways, some of them like Hinduism and Buddhism made the concept of time sort of cyclic to answer parts of this question, however the problem still remained, okay assuming that the concepts of multiple lives is true, that would mean the lifestyle that i am enjoying today is the result of my good or bad deeds in my previous life, this theory in my opinion does not solve the question, rather it actually shifts the problem, if I am being punished now in my 4rth life due to the sins that I committed in the third one, then how was I in my first janum, was everyone born equal in that era ?, secondly why am I being punished or rewarded for something that I cannot recall at all ? I had a lot of problem in understanding this concept and discussed it at length with my professor, we went through hours and hours of discussion unsuccessfully then he told me that he would explain using a very analogous situation. The next day he gave all 40 of us in the class a test, as soon as we realized that everyone test was different we raised shouts of protest, why do I have 10 questions to answer when the one sitting next to me has just 3, why are my 6 questions lengthier and tougher than that of my neighbor, the professor instead of heeding to our protests also closed the fans for those sitting at the back of the class and promised us that please be assured that everyone will be graded justifiably, there was a lot of confusion in the class, this is not fair, I have more questions to answer and do not even have the fan open, the ones who had just a few questions to answer and were sitting in the cooler area of the class were feeling very lucky. However all of us were pleasantly surprised to see the test scores the next days, the ones who had difficult questions were given much more credit even for their limited and partial answers, infect those who had the easiest questions and were sitting in better conditions were marked much more severely, what we realized that day was that, that half an hour test was not unfair, its just a way of testing, as long as the result is marked in consideration to the conditions and the type of questions being asked, today exams like GRE and SAT are marked by a similar kind of process by giving a different test to everyone and then marking accordingly. 5 years from then I do not even remember which section of the class was I in, all I remember is that I got a very good grade and was marked justifiably and the reward that I got was proportional to how I performed in those circumstances and conditions.
This life my friends has no comparison to the life hereafter, and to eternity, those of us who are being tested with Sabur should know that this test is not long and should have the confidence that we will be marked accordingly, infect those amongst us that Allah has blessed with lots of wordily comforts are being tested with shuker and we should be more careful as we will be asked about how we used those blessings in the way of Allah.
The 2nd issue that I intend to address today is the issue of 'oppression of women in Islam', there is a lot of media hype about Islamic women being oppressed and put in 2nd place as compared to men because they are cover themselves with Hijab. The true concept of pardah in Islam is that for both men and women the worth in the society for that person should not be equivalent to the looks and charms of that person. The respect that she or he commands should be proportional to his or her intellectual capabilities and skills and not proportional to how he or she looks, for the people who are not hyped by the portrayal of this concept in the western media it is a concept that gives dignity and decency to a person. In Sprint I am not allowed to wear half sleeve shirts or joggers, if I can dress in a particular way for a few thousand dollars and do not find it against my freedom etc. why is it so hard for us to dress in a way that is defined to us by our creator, our Lord and our provider who has given us so many blessings in this world that it would be absurd even to compare to the package that sprint has given me to the one that Allah has allotted to me. Why is that I do not find my freedom attacked by following a dress code by Sprint but find it very hard to follow the one defined by Allah in Quran. And who decides about what is the right way to dress?, in my grand mother's time it was considered awkward to go out with a chadar, even for Christians around a 100 years back it was very common to wear a scarf and dress modestly, today we would be considered 'backward' or 'orthodox' for observing a hijab and tomorrow our children would be considered orthodox for wearing a longer bermuda and shirt, where do we stop and where do we draw a line, should be take our guidance and reference point from current times ? or should we be more worried about the answering to the imam of our time, this is question that each one of us needs to explore and think about. Observing pardah to ensure that you are not physically attractive to the general public is way of giving protection, decency and dignity to men and women and is not a form of oppression.
