Islam
is the response to humanity’s search for meaning. The purpose of creation for
all men and women for all times has been one: To know and worship God.
The
Qur’an teaches us that every human being is born conscious of God: “(Remember)
when your Lord
extracted
from the loins of Adam’s children their descendants and made them testify
(saying): ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said: ‘Yes, we testify to it.’
(This
was) in case you say on the Day of Judgment: ‘We were unaware of this.’ Or you
say: ‘It was our ancestors who worshipped others besides God and we are only
their descendants. Will you then destroy us for what those liars did’?”
(Qur’an, 7:172-173)
In
Christianity, the meaning of life is rooted in faith in the gospel of Jesus
Christ. However, the proposition is not without serious problems.
First,
if this is the purpose of creation and the precondition for eternal life, why
was it not taught by the prophets to all the nations of the world? Second, had
God turned into man close to the time of Adam all mankind would have had an
equal chance to eternal life, unless those before the time of Jesus had another
purpose for their existence! Third, how can people today who have not heard of
Jesus fulfill the Christian purpose of creation? Naturally, such a purpose is
too narrow and goes against divine justice.
The
Prophet (peace be upon him) teaches us that God created this primordial need in
human nature at the time Adam was made. God took a covenant from Adam when He
created him.
God
extracted all of Adam’s descendants who were yet to be born, generation after
generation, spread them out, and took a covenant from them. He addressed their
souls directly, making them bear witness that He was their Lord. Since God made
all human beings swear to His Lordship when He created Adam, this oath is
imprinted on the human soul even before it enters the fetus, and so a child is
born with a natural belief in the Oneness of God. This natural belief is called
fitra in Arabic.
Consequently,
every person carries the seed of belief in the Oneness of God that lies deeply
buried under layers of negligence and dampened by social conditioning. If the
child were left alone, it would grow up conscious of God — a single Creator —
but all children are affected by their environment. The Prophet of God said,
“Each child is born in a state of ‘fitra,’ but his parents make him a Jew or a
Christian. It is like the way an animal gives birth to a normal offspring. Have
you noticed any young born mutilated before you mutilate them?” (Sahih
Al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim)
The
Arabs would cut the ears of camels and the likes as a service to their gods in
pre-Islamic times.
So,
just as the child’s body submits to physical laws, set by God in nature, its
soul submits naturally to the fact that God is its Lord and Creator. However,
its parents condition it to follow their own way, and the child is not mentally
capable of resisting it.
The
religion which the child follows at this stage is one of custom and upbringing,
and God does not hold it to account for this religion. When a child matures
into an adult, he or she must now follow the religion of knowledge and
reason.
As
adults, people must now struggle between their natural disposition toward God
and their desires in order to find the correct path. The call of Islam is
directed to this primordial nature, the natural disposition, the imprint of God
on the soul, the fitra, which caused the souls of every living being to agree
that He Who made them was their Lord, even before the heavens and earth were
created, “I did not create the jinn and mankind except for My worship.”
(Qur’an, 51:56)
According
to Islam, there has been a basic message which God has revealed through all
prophets, from the time of Adam to the last of the prophets, Muhammad (peace be
upon them). All the prophets sent by God came with the same essential message:
“Indeed, We have sent a messenger to every nation (saying), ‘Worship God and
avoid false gods...’.” (Qur’an, 16:36)
The
prophets (peace be upon them) brought the same answer to mankind’s most
troubling question, an answer that addresses the yearning of the soul for God.
What
is worship?
Islam
means ‘submission’ and worship, in Islam, means ‘obedient submission to the
will of God.’ Every created being ‘submits’ to the Creator by following the
physical laws created by God, “To Him belongs whosoever is in the heavens and
the earth; all obey His will.” (Qur’an, 30:26)
They,
however, are neither rewarded nor punished for their ‘submission’, for it
involves no will. Reward and punishment are for those who worship God, who
submit to the moral and religious Law of God of their own free will. This
worship is the essence of the message of all the prophets sent by God to
mankind. For example, this understanding of worship was emphatically expressed
by Jesus ((peace be upon him
), “None of those who
call me ‘Lord’ will enter the kingdom of God, but only the one who does the
will of my Father in heaven.”
‘Will’
means ‘what God wants human beings to do.’ This ‘Will of God’ is contained in
the divinely revealed laws which the prophets taught their followers.
Consequently, obedience to divine law is the foundation of worship.
Only
when human beings worship their God by submitting to His religious law can they
have peace and harmony in their lives and the hope for heaven, just like the
universe runs in harmony by submitting to the physical laws set by its Lord.
When you remove the hope of heaven, you remove the ultimate value and purpose
of life. Otherwise, what difference would it really make whether we live a life
of virtue or vice? Everyone’s fate would be the same anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment