The ways of the Almighty are simply unknowable!
Dear sister, if indeed there is something I desire to know perfectly well, it is the ways of the Almighty; it is His Will; it is His style. To be in possession of the knowledge of His ways is to be free of all anxieties about His Ways. I have since learnt this to be […]
Dear sister, if indeed there is something I desire to know perfectly well, it is the ways of the Almighty; it is His Will; it is His style. To be in possession of the knowledge of His ways is to be free of all anxieties about His Ways. I have since learnt this to be true: to know His will is to make my will permanently subservient to His. Abdul Hamid Kishk, the late Egyptian popular cleric, once said: “The Almighty once communicated this through one of His prophets to humanity: ‘O! My servants! Submit, by choice, that which you love for what I love; but if you choose not to submit that which you desire for that which I desire, I would make you sweat and toil in vain in the pursuit of that which you desire, and nothing would happen ultimately except that which I desire and love.”
Now, what does knowing His style, or rather, styles entail? This is the most uncanny of all. To know his styles and methods in nature and in the cosmos is to be awed by the indescribability of His styles, the inimitability of His methods and the unpredictability of His proclamations. The revelation of the last testament, a thousand four hundred and thirty-nine years ago, is partly meant to teach this to us. But again, for a thousand four hundred and thirty-nine years, humanity has continued to grapple with what it means to know His styles, what it means to know His methods and what it means to know His ways.
In other words, take a copy of the last testament, I meant the glorious Quran, then you would begin to make sense of the sense in the above. You would begin to read about, for example, His Iradah (His Will), His Mashiah (His Volition), His Hukm (His Judgment) and His Qada (His decision). Each of these categories, laced as they are with extremely profound linguistic, spiritual-temporal and rhetorical cues and significations, are employed by the Almighty to assist us understand that which we cannot fully understand; they are encoded with the sole purpose of assisting us understand His unknowable styles in us and in the cosmos. I am awed permanently by this: that He grants favours by His will; that He punishes by His volition; that he ennobles by His judgment, subhanah!
I equally know this like my knowledge of the rising of the sun on the horizon in the morning: that it is He who has asked us to work, to strive, to take action. It is He who has given us freedom and the consciousness that we are free. Yes, two types of freedoms He has granted unto us: freedom and the consciousness of freedom. But no mortal ever knows at what point his exercise of that freedom brings him round to His will. The other day, that man gave full expression to his freedom to drive at a hundred- and forty-kilometers power hour. He never knew that it was a freedom granted unto him in order that he might meet with the Qada of the Majesty for him to expire in our accident!
In other words, of His in relationship to us, His creatures, I know very little indeed; I know that we are like pawns in His chessboard. I know that one way towards knowing His path and working with same is to constantly be in His penitence. He is the gravity which orbits our reality. I am awed by Him, by His Ways. To work with the notion that a man is righteous is to know that his righteousness would become known through his successful interface with evil. The knife is not sharpened except it is brought to the rock, to the hard stone, to that which it is destined never to cut.
The first of such righteous personalities was our progenitor, Prophet Adam (a.s). From his loins emerged a saint; from his body was birthed a villain. Qabil committed the very first and second sins on earth: envy and murder. To be righteous is not to bear a saint; it could mean to bear an iniquitor. Please pray.
He was a righteous man. Here reference is to Prophet Lut (alayhi salam). But it is not in all cases that the righteous get to have the righteous as a spouse. Prophet Lut’s destiny was such that he found an unrighteous woman as a soul mate. While he was building the empire of the celestial, she concentrated her energies on erecting pillars of incivility and shame. But that is not all.
Yes, that is not all. Remember Prophet Nuh (a.s). There, you have a righteous man whose sole business and vocation in life consisted of inviting humanity back to their Lord. He did that for nothing less than nine hundred and fifty years. Bear this in mind: the notion of years, in the Quranic parlance, between then and now is extremely disparate. Now, despite his commitment to truth, it was his destiny that he would bear a child who would disbelieve everything his father stood for. Could you imagine how the parent in Prophet Nuh would have felt seeing his ‘only begotten son’ drown in the deluge, not as a martyr but a disbeliever? Please pray for your children.
But in order to prevent that style from becoming the only style of the Almighty, consider the story of Azar, the chief idol-worshipper in that city. It was from his loins that Prophet Ibrahim (a.s), the patriarch of faith in Islam and Christendom, emerged. When the seed gushes forth from your phallus, there is no way you can predict the wonders that the Almighty would make out of it! When your wife’s womb becomes distended because of the pressure being exerted upon it by the fetus, spare lots of moments that you
I am constantly fearful of His styles. I am permanently panicky of His ways. It is he who is destined for ruin that goes to bed at night in the certainty that the cock will crow while his soul is still in his body at dawn! Is it not a wondrous experience that in the mixture of pleasure and pain, the unknowable wonders of the world are birthed? His Ways, for me, are simply awesome!