What Do You Believe? (Part 1)
On April 4th, during our regular meetings in New York City,
we discussed Chapter 33 from Dr. Abdulhameed’s book entitled "The Quran
and the Life of Excellence."
The chapter is based on the Sura 16 Aya 35:
Those who ascribe divinity
to other than God say: “Had God so willed we would not have served anything
other than Him – neither we nor our forefathers; nor would we have forbidden
anything without His sanction.”
Thus also said those
who went before them. Yet what is the mission
of messengers except to communicate clearly.
This chapter explains that the above quoted ayas address 4
questions that deeply impact everyone’s life:
1) What do
we think about God?
2) How do we
relate to what we have been taught by the previous generation?
3) How do we
decide what we can and can’t do; i.e. what prohibitions are important?
4) What is
the role of a teacher?
1) It is
important that each of us examine what we are thinking about when we think
about God. The reason for that is that
depending upon what we think about, those thoughts shape our lives and our
lives will develop according to the beliefs that result from our thoughts. Many people have believed in God for
thousands of years, but often in ways that have limited them. The first aya cited above refers to the
argument put forth by those who ascribe divinity to other than God and it
states that if God is in charge of everything, why doesn’t He make everyone
believe in Him? This argument is based
on the notion that God controls people.
If that is the case, then we don’t have the freedom to choose and we are
told by God Himself that we are free to choose what we are going to believe in.
2) It is of
utmost importance to our lives to pay attention to what we are thinking about
when we think of God in order to improve our notion of Him. This needs to be an independent examination
as we work through the process of clearing out our previous ingrained notions
of God that we heard from others as we were growing up. Each of us alone builds a relationship with
God in an effort to raise his/her life above commonality and traditional views
of what we should believe. Our spiritual
power begins to gather when we focus on improving our personal view of God. We must recall Hadith Qudsi in which God
says: “Whatever My servant assumes of
Me, that is how I am to him, and I am with him as he remembers Me.”
3) The
second part of the first aya cited above states: “...nor would we have
prescribed prohibitions other than His.”
This is where the limiting aspect of an unexamined belief clearly comes
to forefront. Precisely because our
families and people that make up the culture we grew up in believe that, for
example, smiling is forbidden, or that music is forbidden, or that a man
without a beard cannot lead prayer, or that we should never speak of a good
thing that happens to us because it can bring bad luck, we now have a sense of
God, and consequently of religion, that is contrary to everything that is
natural which in turn causes strain in our minds. It is clear that this aya is asking us to
reflect and examine what it is that our forefathers believed in and question
the taboos prevalent in our surroundings.
The next aya cited above states: “Thus also said those who
went before them”. If we allow superstitions
and prejudices of those who lived before us dictate how we will live our lives,
then we ascribe divinity to other than God.
It cannot be stressed enough that this aya, along with so many others,
ask us to reflect on what we believe so that we may reflect on what we are
doing. Without examining and
reevaluating ideas and notions that we have been told by previous generations,
we are not really living, but stifling our own nature and our own individuality
and by the same token, we are closing the door to one more expression of God’s
wishes for the humanity that He expresses through the potential of human
beings, His vicegerents, on Earth.
4) The last
aya refers to the role of the messengers.
The aya explains that the role of a teacher is to explain to the best of
his/her ability and not to control or judge people who do not respond in the
way a teacher thinks they should. Each
person understands in accordance with his/her own capacity and responsibility lies
on each individual soul.
Some of the thoughts that were expressed during this meeting
include the idea that we try our best to be the highest selves and that each
day we need to understand that He helps us raise the standard. One considerably damaging aspect of following
practices we were taught by prior generations without our reexamining the same
is the fact that it can be quite difficult to discard those ideas because they
become ingrained within us. We don’t
realize to what extent we labored under a false notion that those ideas are what
God means to us without us coming to any conclusion as to what God means for
us. Beliefs have great power even over
thought. Faith is expressed by challenging our beliefs.
The exercise for this chapter states:
1) Is there
an experience or an aspect of your life that shows that God is helping
you?
2) Consider
a prohibition that your parents believed in but you have discarded it. What are the reasons for this change?
The benefit from doing these exercises increases greatly if
you not only think about them but also write
down your responses. It is very
useful to keep a journal for this purpose.
Reading what you wrote over a period of time will make you aware of the
insights you have gained.
We will be discussing the same chapter during our next
meeting in NYC on April 18th. Stay tuned!
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