ISLAMIC OUTREACH - Lesson One

Why Religion, & Man's Quest for Happiness

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim

Salaamu aleikum!

Why Religion? This is a question which surely requires that we ask another question first. Just what is religion? Ask a random group in Sauchiehall St. what they think about religion, and you can be sure that you will get a lot of different answers. The fact that you get so many answers surely shows that there is something very personal about religion. Yet at the same time we can see all sorts of gatherings for religious purposes but of a much more social kind, people joining together in a formal public display of the religion that binds them together. 

The Prophet said that he came with the religion of Truth and Tolerance, that is a religion to satisfy the needs of both the individual and society. 

What do I mean when I say that an individual needs Truth? We are all born into this world and have a completely different experience of life, and we are all trying to make some sort of sense out of it. We try to find a shared truth, but ultimately we all have to make up our own minds - nobody else can do it for us - we all must believe in a truth that agrees with what we experience in our lives, and when people feel that they cannot believe what their senses tell them, we usually call them mad. 

But Truth can concern matters beyond our experience, beyond our senses and beyond logical reasoning - yet for some reason we still want to know the answers. Questions like "What happens after we die? " 

As the priests used to say during the war in which I was born, "When the bombs are falling all around, hardened atheists have been known to cross themselves" - " Well why not?" they say. 

Like the old Jewish joke concerning the healing powers of chicken soup. A funeral procession going slowly down the street passed by an old woman who at the top of her voice kept shouting out to the mourners "Give him some chicken soup" They said "Be quiet - the man's dead, chicken soup can't help him now" To which old woman mumbled to herself "It can't do him any harm." 

Is that enough reason to be a muslim? Not for me, though the prospect of death does have a lot to do with it. If there's one thing that sorts out the men and women from the boys and girls it's the close prospect of the Day of Judgement, or as the muslims put it, the Yaumideen. The Day of Deen, about which more later. 

We created not the heavens and earth, and all between them, in play; We created them not save in truth; but most men know it not.

Surely truth leads to virtue, and virtue leads to paradise.

 Truth and Tolerance - Truth the thing necessary for our inner peace, and Tolerance, what we need to live at ease together. I may not find it easy to be tolerant of other people, but I'm not at all happy if they aren't tolerant of me.

Now I asked earlier what is religion, but muslims don't actually have one. It's an English word that we use to translate various words in Arabic, but they don't mean quite the same thing. There is one word Millah which can be translated as religion, and may well be close to many peoples view of the same, as it based on a root word meaning to be bored or weary, and the word that most non-muslims associate with our religion is Islam, which has a formal meaning relating to the five pillars of our worship. Islam also has a more general meaning of Peace, or Submission, and the way that peace comes with submission. But the term that really is closer to the meaning of religion is Deen. As in Yaumideen.

As well as faith and the customary rites of religion, Deen also implies the ideas of indebtedness, duty, and obedience, as well as judgement and justice, the idea of each person receiving his precise and just earnings, and all the inequalities of this life being redressed.

This justice is not something other worldly that comes to you on the Day of Deen, but is to be fought for in this life.

Say: My Lord has commanded justice. Set your faces in every place of worship and call on Him, making your deen sincerely His

Fight them, till there is no persecution and the deen is God's entirely

But when it comes down to it, all we can do in this world is try our best, and in the end it is up to God. The deen belongs to God alone.

Judgement belongs only to God; He has commanded that you shall not serve any but Him. That is the right deen; but most men know not.

To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth; His is the deen for ever.

As Abraham spoke of the Lord of all Being, "Who created me, and Himself guides me, and Himself gives me to eat and drink, and, whenever I am sick heals me, who makes me to die, then gives me life, and who I am eager shall forgive me my offence on the Day of Deen"

You see, the deen is not something that started with Muhammad 

He has laid down for you as deen that He charged Noah with, and that We have revealed to thee, and that We charged Abraham with, Moses and Jesus: "Perform the deen and scatter not regarding it."

The deen is something that was taught by all the prophets, so what is there that we can see to be common to them all? It is the idea of submission to the will of the Creator

Say: "We believe in God, and that which has been sent down on us and sent down on Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob, and the Tribes, and in that which was given to Moses and Jesus, and the Prophets, of their Lord; we make no division between any of them, and to Him we surrender." Whoso desires another deen than submission, it shall not be accepted of him

O.K. To avoid confusing non-muslims, and myself, I'll go back to using the word religion. 

They were commanded only to serve God, making the religion His sincerely, men of pure faith, and to perform the prayer, and pay the alms - that is the religion of the True.

Those who have made divisions in their religion and become sects, you are not of them in anything

So it is our duty to the Creator to submit to His will, and this binds us to Him and to all men who are sincerely trying to do the same, in bonds of brotherhood.

If they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then they are your brothers in religion.

It can be seen from this that prayer and repentance is balanced by worldly action in the form of alms, or charity. We are not in any position to judge our neighbours sincerity of worship, and this sincerity is of course essential

I have been commanded to serve God, making my religion His sincerely.

He is the Living One; there is no god but He. So call upon Him, making your religion His sincerely. Praise belongs to God, the Lord of all Being.

It is a bit easier to judge someone's sincerity, however, when you are considering their worldly behaviour. Their selflessness in the various forms of charity.

Have you seen him who cries lies to the religion? That is he who repulses the orphan and urges not the feeding of the needy. So woe to those that pray and are heedless of their prayers, to those who make display and refuse charity.

So to such expressions of the Will of God, a man is bound by duty. He is not forced to accept these bonds, he is a free man.

There is no compulsion in religion

But sincere submission to the bonds of brotherhood, the duty to give your wealth in charity, and fight for justice, are the religion that will show you the truth about the way this creation functions.

There is no changing God's creation. That is the right religion; but most men know it not.

It is He who has sent His Messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may uplift it above every religion. God suffices as a witness.

God has promised...that He will surely establish their religion for them that He has approved for them, and will give them in exchange after their fear, security

In the last few weeks of his life, the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, made what is known as the Final Pilgrimage. 

Before a vast crowd of his friends and followers, he received the last few lines of the Qur'an, with the words of God which muslims usually translate as

Today I have perfected your religion for you, and I have completed My blessing upon you, and I have approved Islam for your religion.

To put it another way -

Today the unbelievers have despaired of your deen; therefore fear them not, but fear you Me. Today I have perfected your deen for you, and I have completed My blessing upon you, and I have approved Submission for your deen. But whosoever is constrained in emptiness and not inclining purposely to sin - God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate

Truth and Tolerance. What else do we need for society besides tolerance.

Even non-believers need certain things for society that seem to make no logical sense when we demand them of ourselves, things we tend to class under right action, or good behaviour. Good behaviour is not confined to the overtly religious amongst us, but can be seen in all human beings who display its various guises - mercy, compassion, justice, honesty, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, generosity, courage, and such like. 

"Goodness", good behaviour, right action, is one of the easiest of principles for a man to understand, and is accepted by the most irreligious of men. We've all heard of honour among thieves, and even the most atheistic of philosophies needs to formulate concepts of good and bad, or there is no basis for any kind of social law. Atheists can understand generosity and self sacrifice, even dying for the sake of family and friends, and on a day to day level, what really matters when you do business with someone is not whether a man claims to believe in God, but whether he will give you the right measure and charge you a fair price. By now I have learned that when a shopkeeper waxes lyrical about our brotherhood in Islam, I need to double check my change.

None of you believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.

You will see the faithful in their having mercy for one another, and in their love for one another, and in their kindness towards one another like the body; when one member of it ails, the entire body ails, one part calling out to the other with sleeplessness and fever.

Whoever believes in God and the last day should not harm his neighbour.

The most perfect of the believers in faith is the best of them in moral excellence, and the best of you are the kindest to their wives.

and of His signs is that He created for you, of yourselves, spouses, that you might repose in them, and He has set between you love and mercy. 

So how can we make society have more of this quality of goodness that makes life so much better for us. We can't. We can't force people to be good - there is no compulsion in religion - we can only try to make ourselves more good and hope that they get the idea from watching our example. But what do we need for our own goodness. To see what might be involved in a specifically Islamic approach, let me tell you some of the chapter headings of one authors survey of what is required for goodness. 

This is from the work of Shaykh Uthman dan Fodio, written about 200 years ago in Northern Nigeria. 

The purification of the heart from the whisperings of Shaytan.
(Shaytan, or Satan, is the thing which directs you towards the fire, pain and torment, the thing which divides man and sets him in opposition to himself.)

The purification of the heart from conceit, vanity, and ingratitude.

The purification of the heart from pride, arrogance and self-exaltation.

The purification of the heart from false hope.
(putting off right action or repentance until later, saying "Oh there's plenty of time, I'll do it tomorrow.") 

The purification of the heart from groundless anger, envy, and showing-off.

Turning away with regret from all acts of rebellion.

Doing without in this world.
(this doesn't mean doing without your needs, but what is superfluous and excessive. The goal is strength and vigour, not just food, drink, and pleasure.)

Safeguarding oneself out of fear of God. 

Trust and reliance in God, and Entrusting the affair to God.

Contentment with the decree of God.

Fear and hope

But why would anyone want to get rid of anger, envy and ingratitude? What logical reason can there be? But then why would anyone risk pain and death going into a burning building to save someone else? Illogical - does not compute! 

When Uthman dan Fodio said what we needed for goodness he used some strange illogical terms, however, like the word "God", for instance. What on earth is this word supposed to mean? Can you show me what it is? Can you touch it, hear it, smell it, taste it? In fact, if I can't see it, why should I believe that this thing exists? Can you prove it to me? Well, no, you can't. For that you need faith.

Now I'm not going to go too specifically into God and other things requiring Faith, because they will be dealt with more fully in following lessons. But I will deal with one viewpoint that one very commonly hears from unbelievers, which is the idea that man is capable of thought not based on faith.

It's all very well saying there's a God, they say, but I am a Rationalist, a Scientist, I don't need to believe in anything that can't be proved. If you believe in God it's up to you to prove it. Now even Billy Connolly  can see through that one. "If you want to believe there's a God, of course there's a God." he says "Who can prove otherwise?".

You see, the flaw in the argument is that we are talking about something that can't be proved one way or another, and in fact to say "I don't believe in God" is just the same as saying "I believe there is no God". It's a matter of faith either way.

Look at the sun and the moon and the stars and the galaxies and the expanding universe, what do we think about it all.

Well if you were an Ancient Greek, when you got up in the morning what did you see? Somebody driving a blazing chariot across the sky, a really big blazing chariot mind, and at the end of the day, when it splashed into the ocean, there was no light left down here so you could see through the holes in the pudding bowl sky to some bright region beyond. And why not? Who could prove otherwise?

Now we Western Europeans know that it was Galileo and Isaac Newton who found out where the Greeks had gone wrong. There was Sir Isaac, doing his experiments, all very logical, when down comes an apple, or so the story goes, and thwacko there was gravity. Now you may say that such a moment of inspiration was not strictly speaking the product of scientific experiment and logical analysis, but everyone knew that this time we'd got it right, there were all these balls of stuff going round each other, all held together by gravity, and experiments proved it. Well they didn't prove otherwise.

Most of them didn't anyway, but as any good scientist knows, if the results don't fit the theory you throw them away, because there must be something wrong with the way you did the experiment. The theory is presumed to be right, and in this a scientist puts his faith. 

Based on acquired understanding they may be, but the great changes in scientific thought come from inspiration not logic and experimentation, just as Newton's ideas were changed by Einstein, but I won't go into that as I don't have the space-time. 

So can we prove that the nearest star is four light years away? Until we build the Starship Enterprise to warp our way there to measure it we really can't prove that what we think is there agrees with our present scientific understanding of truth any more than a hole in an Ancient Greek pudding bowl. But there again, we can't prove otherwise. It requires an act of faith. The new version is not necessarily more correct than the other. You must choose whether to believe it or not.

It is He who made the sun a radiance, and the moon a light, and determined it by stations, that you might know the number of the years and the reckoning. God created that not save with the truth, distinguishing the signs to a people who know. In the alternation of night and day, and what God has created in the heavens and the earth - surely there are signs for a godfearing people.

"There is no compulsion in religion" says the Qur'an, "The truth is from your Lord; so let whosoever will believe, and let whosoever will disbelieve." 

"If thy Lord had willed, whoever is in the earth would have believed, all of them, all together....It is not for any soul to believe save by the leave of God ..... Say: `Behold what is in the heavens and in the earth!' But neither signs nor warnings are any use to a people who do not believe."

So as we go through the lessons that deal with Faith, we will discover half a dozen unprovable things that we need to believe in if we are to understand the truth of Creation. That's not so many - the White Queen could believe in as many impossible things before breakfast. The trouble is that when you bundle them up with all that intangible stuff about "goodness", it all starts to seem overwhelmingly vague. What we need is to bring all that airy fairy intellectual talk down to earth with something a bit more practical. I mean, not everyone at the Old Firm match is interested in the outer reaches of philosophy. What you need to counteract all this theory, is something you can practice. And what you can practise is that part of our religion known as Islam. 

It only took the Prophet 29 words to define Islam, but over the next 23 lessons we will be dealing with Islam in a bit more detail. I'm not going to say much about it now, but I will pass on what he said. "Islam is to testify that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, to perform the Salaat, to pay the zakat, to fast in Ramadan, and to make the pilgrimage to the House if you are able to do so." 

Five times a day prayer, a month of fasting, and a tax on your wealth, does this really have anything to do with man's quest for Happiness? Indeed it does. It may well seems like a tormented way to live your life, but let us consider the Prophet's example. His wife said he was the most smiling and laughing of men. Everybody loved him. And what did he think of frequent prayer, was it a sore trial? 

Well it was actually one of his three favourite things, the other two being sweet smells and women's company. 

Does it start to sound like it could be fun? What about fasting? Qur'an says  "God wants things to be easy for you and does not want any hardship for you, so complete the period and magnify God because He has guided you, so that you may be grateful."

What about the poor tax then? "Those who recite God's Book, keep up prayer and spend both secretly and openly from whatever He has provided for them, may hope for business which will never slacken, so that He may repay them for their wages and grant them even more out of His bounty. He is Forgiving, Appreciative."

The Prophet said : Religion is easy, and no one exerts himself too much in religion but it overpowers him; so act aright, and keep to the mean, and be of good cheer, and ask for God's help at morning and evening, and during a part of the night.

And for those who wish to ease their heartache, the medicine is to bear in mind the words of Qur'an - In God's remembrance are at rest the hearts of those who believe and do righteous deeds.

May God forgive me such mistakes as I have made. 

The Truth and the Glory belong to God alone.

Assalaamu aleikum wa rahmatallahi wa barakatahu.