Salaam All
The very word "Islam" comes from a word meaning "peace". The most basic principle of the religion is Unity:- first the unity of God, who is One without equal, without associate, then the unity of His creation in which every element, however tiny, has its place and its function, and finally the unity achieved in every man and woman once they know who they are and where they are going, at peace with their Lord, at peace in the world, at peace with themselves.
That peace is closely bound up with the awareness of beauty. In one of his most famous sayings, Prophet Muhammad (p) told his people: "God is beautiful and He loves beauty!". Now that is not a statement about feelings or impressions. It is a statement about the nature of Reality. And that, in turn, suggests something very important. It suggests that ugliness – and, Yes!, there's plenty of that in the world in which we live – is not on an equal footing with beauty. It's not one of a pair, like hot and cold, black and white; it represents the spoiling of beauty, the unmaking of what had been well made, the denial of God or His seeming absence. You might compare it to a hole in the pattern, a stain on the fabric, and it belongs to that class of things which, so the Quran tells us, last for but a short time and are then wiped away, while beauty endures. To know this is to possess a sense of the sacred and so to be aware of the radiance that illuminates unspoilt nature from within and which may be found also in the things we make, when these are well and lovingly made. The tragedy of modern man, in the midst of his riches and his technological achievements, is that he has lost this sense of the sacred and lives in a world drained of light.
Politicians should be deeply ashamed of presiding over a city as ugly & nasty as Georgetown. They are people who have lost all sense of purpose, who live in a grey, monotonous world and who need contact with the splendours of virgin nature (of which we have vast swathes all across this beautiful country) if they are to be healed. But what we have to understand – and perhaps what they need to understand – is that their "grey" world is an illusion. The fault is not in their surroundings but in themselves. "It is not the eyes that grow blind," says the Quran in this context, "but the hearts that grow blind". So Parliament is an institution of the blind. Go figure where you are heading if you are being led by blind people. Blind also are the "cook & eat" leaders also known by the euphemism "religious" leaders...their stomachs are bloated and if you follow them you will topple into Hell via your gluttonous mouths. They overeat because they cannot think...of how to build a World of Nur (of light)...they have lost sense of the sacred. Jesus & Muhammad (p) called such "religious" leaders, hypocrites.
We live in a city from which beauty has been banished as an irrelevance, as though it were a luxury which we can do without, and this is an environment in which it is difficult to believe in God since it has been constructed in forgetfulness of Him; and – in Islam – to forget God is the greatest sin, or the root of all other sins. Those who have told us, over the past century, that "God is dead" should have had the honesty to complete the sentence:- "God is dead, therefore man is dead!" When nothing in our surroundings reminds us of Him, then He does – in a sense – die in our hearts, and all that makes life worth living dies with Him.
Shamal...enjoy reading Muslim Art...for God is Beautiful...if your heart is (still) alive then clean your surroundings...waiting on blind people is not an option
