The Blog

Religion and Religious Differences

I came accross this web page today. I was forced to reflect upon what maybe the gravest tragedy in human history, the greatest misconception, the most widely confused phenomenon: religious differences and the violence that results from it. I took the quiz located on this web page and even though it was a bit of a shock to me, it didn’t completely take me by surprise to find out that the result said that I was a good christian and praise the lord!! (i answered everything honestly and frankly). It may or may not surprise you, dear reader, to know that I am not a christian. I am a practicing muslim. And I’ll bet that apart from a few very minor details, all religious beliefs are essentially the same.

We all believe in one Almighty God, we all believe that there is a life after death in which we’ll be accountable for our actions. We all believe that being good to others, giving charity to the poor, helping the needy, taking care of the sick, respecting our parents and elders, being kind to children, caring for the animals, plants and our environment, speaking truthfully…and the list goes on…are all good deeds and we will be rewarded for them. We all know that evil thoughts and actions, hostility and violence, racism, cheating, lying, back biting, killing, stealing…and the list is endless…are all bad deeds and we will be punished for them.

True that there are many differences in our beliefs but they are just the details, they are all negligible. So what if the Muslims have Friday as the sacred day, the Jews have Saturday and the Christians, naturally, have Sunday. So what if the Muslims go to the Mosque to pray, the Jews to the synagogue, and the Christians go to the Church. We all pray to the same one almighty God…we read the Quran (the holy book of islam), they read the Torah (the Old Testament) or the Injeel (Bible)…True the differences between their beliefs and ours’ divide us…we believe that the Almighty God does not have a son and he is not our father…and we believe in David, Moses and Jesus and regard them all as God’s messengers to human kind just like Mohammad…we believe in the Bible and the Torah, just as much as the Christians and the Jews, as being the word of God.

Why, if we believe in essentially the same things, is there so much hostility? This is specially surprising because neither religion says that you have to force your belief on anyone. Specially not Islam: the Prophets beloved Uncle (Abu Talib bin Muttalib) did not accept Islam.

Another surprising notion: Muslims believe that followers of David, Moses, Jesus, Abraham, Zachary, Joseph, Mohammad were all Muslim (not Christian or Jew!). The Quran tells us that. Mohammad did not bring a new religion into this world. Islam has been the name of the religion that every messenger of God preached to his people.

Its the fundamental principles that should govern our actions, not the opinions and the biases we form. We should think about what is fundamentally right and what is fundamentally wrong…not what is deemed right by the media or the government or the society or the clergy or the imaam or the priest or the countrymen or the community or the relatives or the family or the co-workers! We should reflect upon our creator and ourselves and think.

I invite all of you to read the Quraan (translations are available in numerous languages) and learn what Islam has to say…I invite all of the Muslims to read about other religions as well. We should learn about different religions and learn to respect everyone as a human being. This is the fundamental teaching of every religion. Forgive me if I made mistakes or if I offended anyone. God knows best!

I got this story from a good friend of mine just yesterday. Normally, I don’t paste e-mail forwards into my blog, but this is a short and thought provoking story. Ready, copy and forward to your friends and family.

The Boy & the Apple Tree

A long time ago, there was a huge apple tree. A little boy loved to come and play around it everyday. He climbed to the treetop, ate the apples, took a nap under the shadow: He loved the tree and the tree loved to play with him. Time went by the little boy had grown up and he no longer played around the tree every day.

One day, the boy came back to the tree and he looked sad.
“Come and play with me” the tree asked the boy.
“I am no longer a kid, I do not play around trees any more the boy replied.
“I want toys. I need money to buy them.”
“Sorry, but I do not have money but you can pick all my apples and sell them. So, you will have money.”
The boy was so excited. He grabbed all the apples on the tree and left happily. The boy never came back after he picked the apples. The tree was sad.

One day, the boy who now turned into a man returned and the tree was excited.
“Come and play with me” the tree said.
“I do not have time to play. I have to work for my family. We need a house for shelter. Can you help me?”
“Sorry, but I do not have any house. But you can chop off my branches to build your house.”
So the man cut all the branches of the tree and left happily. The tree was glad to see him happy but the man never came back since then. The tree was again lonely and sad.

One hot summer day, the man returned and the tree was delighted.
“Come and play with me!” the tree said.
“I am getting old. I want to go sailing to relax myself. Can you give me a boat?” said the man. “Use my trunk to build your boat. You can sail far away and be happy.”
So the man cut the tree trunk to make a boat. He went sailing and never showed up for a long time.

Finally, the man returned after many years.
“Sorry, my boy. But I do not have anything for you anymore. No more apples for you the tree said.
“No problem, I do not have any teeth to bite” the man replied.
“No more trunk for you to climb on”
“I am too old for that now” the man said. “I really cannot give you anything…the only thing left is my dying roots” the tree said with tears.
“I do not need much now, just a place to rest. I am tired after all these years” the man replied.
“Good! Old tree roots are the best place to lean on and rest, Come, come sit down with me and rest.”
The man sat down and the tree was glad and smiled with tears.

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This is a story of everyone. The tree is like our parents. When we were young, we loved to play with our Mum and Dad…

When we grow up, we leave them only come to them when we need something or when we are in trouble. No matter what, parents will always be there and give everything they could just to make you happy. You may think the boy is cruel to the tree, but that is how all of us treat our parents. We take them 4 granted we don’t appreciate all they do 4 us, UNTIL it’s 2 late.

Wallahi May Allah 4 give us of our shortcommings and may He Guide us, Insha’allah w Ameen Ya rub. Please enlighten all your friends and your families by telling them this story.

Love your Parents!

And your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him. And that you be dutiful to your parents. If one of them or both of them attain old age in your life, say not to them a word of disrespect, nor shout at them but address them in terms of honour.

And lower unto them the wing of submission and humility through mercy, and say: “My Lord! Bestow on them Your Mercy as they did bring me up when I was small.”

The Pact

I made a pact with myself yesterday: get rid of all the bad habbits. Some of my bad habbits are as follows: I don’t stay focused (see the previous post for details on this), I procrastinate, I waste time, I forget my commitments to myself, I get easily seduced by the desire to relax and enjoy, I get lured in by invitations to party and play, I (sometimes) get mad for no apparent reason, I am not as outgoing as I’d like to be, I am not as athletic as I’m built to be, I do not refine my talents as much as I could and the list continues. If I got rid of all my bad habbits, I may not be the same person at all…but that’d be a change for the better. I’ll get to work on that right away.

I’ve made pacts with myself before. Some of them I’ve kept while others I’ve led myself to believe were silly or I must’ve been insane to have even thought of making a pact to never eat rice again…and later: what am I crazy, I can’t stay away from rice, I love rice… [I'd read somewhere, that one of the major causes of a pot belly in men from my background is the consumption of rice and upon getting disgusted, I made a silent pact to myself to never touch rice again in my life...how silly is that? i love rice dammit!]. Quitting smoking also required pacts made to myself…that has been successful indeed.

I ran into this web site while web surfing today: Islamic Philosophy Online which has a lot writings from great Islamic scholars like Al-Ghazali and Allama Iqbal. Looks like a good place to do some reading on philosophy. You may be wondering why I’m going on and on about silly little nothings in my blogs recently. Well, its mostly a warming me up to do some real writing later on. I haven’t been writing for so long that I’ve lost my touch, so to speak, that I thought I had for writing. This is hoping that it’ll come back. I used to be able to read a lot too, but I just haven’t the time any more.

If you’re wondering why I was web surfing if I made a pact (above) not to waste time, right? I wasn’t really surfing the web looking for philosophy…what am I nuts? I actually got a link from my wife’s web page. So you know that I’m keeping my pact and not wasting time. Neither am I wasting time writing this blog. Writing her is getting me ready to write meaningfully, thoughtfully and for a purpose. I am thinking about writing a regular column like feature on this blog (maybe color it a little different to differentiate it from other text) about Quran and its study, a chapter or a page everyday. But let me focuson the matters at hand…

The Challenge of Staying Focused

Spent most of today figuring out Perl/CGI scripting for creating online Forms and Counters. I know I shouldn’t go off on tangents when I have a mission to pass an exam, but I started revamping the web site and got too involved in trying to find an easy to use Form and Store…I found what I needed by trying to configure the darn thing took the whole day and I still haven’t done it. It’s pretty complicated.

That’s pretty much the story of my life…I wish I could keep myself concentrated in one direction for long enough to complete what I started. Thinking back, the first instance of not completing what I’d started, I remember when I was kid and memorizing the Quran. I lost my concentration and focus after about a third of the way. I memorized 10 parts out of a total of 30. That, I’m afraid, has been a trendsetter in my life. I started studying Arabic and left it when I would have been able to speak if I’d pushed a little further. Then my school, I started studying Biology as early as highschool, aiming to go into Medicine in college, but, of course, lost my interest within a couple of years of College. And the list continues…the most recent being my struggle to study Java and my desire to create an online store. And at work, I’m being asked if I’m interested in developing Visual Basic .Net, even though I’m totally involved in getting our Intranet Web Site developed, both content and infrastructure and it has nothing to do with VB!

It’s not that I don’t have the passion it takes to accomplish something great, because I’m very passionate about certain things. I am just in the extremely bad habbit of getting involved in more than one thing at a time and mess it all up..! It’s like ADD or something, but its not. Speaking of bad habbits, I get addicted to things too easily, too. Which may have something to do with the problem of not being able to stay focused on one thing at a time. Gotta work on that.

“View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.” – these are not my words and I forget exactly who wrote them, but they describe the following web site really well.

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html

Enjoy!