FROM MAULANA’S DESK
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, born in 1925, in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, is an Islamic spiritual scholar who is well-versed in both classical Islamic learning and modern disciplines. The mission of his life has been the establishment of worldwide peace. He has received the Padma Bhushan, the Demiurgus Peace International Award and Sayyidina Imam Al Hassan Peace award for promoting peace in Muslim societies. He has been called ’Islam’s spiritual ambassador to the world’ and is recognized as one of its most influential Muslims . His books have been translated into sixteen languages and are part of university curricula in six countries. He is the founder of the Centre for Peace and Spirituality based in New Delhi.
LIFE WITHOUT GOD
IN the post-scientific age, it became commonplace for many to register themselves as following ‘no religion’. People started to introduce themselves as ‘nonreligious’. It is true indeed that science opened up for human beings hitherto unknown knowledge. Man has penetrated macro- as well as microworld. Facilities and ease of life that a person enjoys today could never be conceived without science. Science proved many ideas about the physical world as unfounded. Scientific enquiries continued, by leaps and bounds, shattering one cherished article of faith after another. Though major scientific minds refrained from making a direct claim about the non-existence of God, a crop of academicians emerged who fashionably started calling themselves ‘atheists’. This practice had gained ground.
The question arises then if religion indeed is a vestigial part of human life. Is the universe as far as we know it, which is just 4% of the cosmos, enough to convince of looking no further? Is there nothing beyond this material world? Does science account for every question that is posed by everyday human experiences? These questions can be summed up as: Does science provide meaning to life?
The New Year celebrations of 2020 were shadowed by an imminent
pandemic, which then became a reality. The blissful world we were
accustomed to turned upside down. With the constant threat of
contracting the disease, we were forced to stay away from our families
and workplace. Suffering the loneliness and the pangs arising out of
lockdown and the mental burden of a future that doesn’t bode well,
our very ideas of life became shaky. The
Guardian columnist John Harris contrasts a
religious and a nonreligious person in this
regard. March 28, 2021 issue of The Guardian
carried a very insightful piece (How do faithless
people like me make sense of this past year of
Covid?) by John Harris that directly touches
this question. He writes:
“I felt a pang of envy that has occasionally
surfaced in the past – this time to do with a
year of lockdown, the sudden fear of serious
illness and death, and the sense of all of it
being wholly random and senseless. Was this,
I wondered, how religious believers were feeling? Or were they able to
give their recent experiences at least a semblance of coherence and
meaning?
Like millions of other faithless people, I have not even the flimsiest of narratives to project on to what has happened, nor any real vocabulary with which to talk about the profundities of life and death.”
Thus, it becomes quite clear that an ideology that negates the
authenticity of the religious narrative is quite incapable of finding
meaning in seemingly negative experiences. When the limit of human
intelligence is reached without providing credible answers, where do
human beings turn to? The same article provides the following statistics:
“In the first phase of the pandemic, there were clear signs that a lot of
us needed much more. Across 95 countries, Googling the word “prayer”
increased by 50%, surpassing the level associated with Christmas and
Ramadan. In April 2020, a service led by the Archbishop of Canterbury
from his kitchen table drew 5 million viewers, described by the Church
of England as the largest congregation in its history. And since then, as
churches, mosques, synagogues and temples have been at the heart of some communities’ Covid experiences, the symbols and rituals of
religion have made very visible comebacks. They were seen again in
(…) doorstep vigil, complete with candles and massed silence, for the
people lost to Covid.”
This human tendency is described in the Quran in these words: When man suffers some affliction, he prays to his Lord and turns to Him in penitence, but once he has been granted a favour from God, he forgets the One he had been praying to. (39: 8)
When an affliction befalls men, they cry out to their Lord, turning to Him in repentance. (30: 33)
The truth of the matter is that religious narrative is an integral part of human life. Disbelief makes this world meaningless. The bad experiences in life are part of the divine test. Those who respond positively to this test would be rewarded in the Hereafter. The only possible explanation of this universe is to believe in a ‘universe with God’. The other option, according to John Harris, poses questions: “(…) life without God has turned out to be life without fellowship and shared meaning.”
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
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Follow Maulana at http://www.speakingtree.in (The Times of India)