Expectations for the New Millennium

Bismillah

The new millennium is coming – 1000 years

I was born in 1942 – 50 years or 1/20^th of a millennium - I will be 3 score years and ten in 2012 if I make it, you will reach that in 2050, 1/20^th into the millennium.

How many of you expect to reach the age of 70?

We might meet then, that will only make me 108 – I can manage that.

So, 1000 years – what are my expectations? Well, times are changing pretty fast.

I was born towards the end of the Second World War – you will have seen it in the black and white movies on TV – and by the time I was 3 they had invented the atom bomb. When I was young, food was rationed – there were ration books with coupons, no freely available sweets (though we could buy vanilla pods and liquorice root). During the years that I was in primary school hardly anyone in the country had a TV!

When I was in my early teens we mostly played in the street. In our street there were 120 houses and only four cars, so there was not a lot of concern about our road safety. Last time I checked it out every house on our old street had at least two cars parked outside. Strangely enough, there were no kids out playing street games. 

We had a black and white TV by then, but there was no Rock and Roll – that didn’t arrive until my mid-teens. In my house we had a few 78rpm shellac records that we played on a mechanical wind-up gramophone that we eventually replaced with something that could play the new 33rpm flexible vinyl long-playing records, of which we had no more than a handful. There was no stereo sound, let alone Bang & Olufsen Hi-Fi, or CDs or Ghetto Glasters, yet it was only 20 years to Walkman time.

In maths lessons we used slide-rules and logarithms – there were no electronic calculators. Remember, PCs have only been around for 10 years even though you now have Sega and Nintendo and a software explosion.

In my 20s men landed on the moon, yet when I was young there was virtually no air transport, whereas now jumbo jets circle in stacks of 20 over Benidorm and a couple of million people fly into Jeddah airport for the Hajj each year.

Could I have predicted the last 50 years? I managed it one day at a time. Even ten years ago I couldn’t have predicted the things that are now a large part of my everyday life. Who could? They say that scientists always woefully underestimate the speed of change. Science fiction writers do slightly better, but even they prove to underestimate when compared to the real thing. And the rate of change is speeding up (read Alvin Toffler about that) as is the speed of obsolescence.

So I have no expectations for the next millennium – it is beyond my imagination. But I do have hopes – that the world will become muslim and survive. I am a muslim –you have to let me believe that my way of understanding life is the best thing for humanity (if it wasn’t why would I keep thinking that way). You must also remember that when I use the terms Islam and muslim you don’t necessarily understand them in the same way that I do.

Muhammad said I come with a way of life based on Truth and Tolerance.

Truth – the thing you need as an individual to make sense of your life in the search of knowledge (which is a muslims sacred duty). 

And tolerance – the thing we need to survive together as a society. Accepting that other people see things differently from us and agree to differ. Society must define the agreed limits of acceptable behaviour in a system of law which must serve justice – and the understanding of the world on which those limits are decided must be based on a shared truth.

I hope that man will live his life in a way that I consider to be muslim, in the service of God, caring for the planet as God’s steward on earth, and caring for his fellow humans with mercy and compassion and love and affection, charitably and modestly, in peace and harmony. All that is supposed to be the muslim way.

Sound unlikely? Life is unlikely, and if I am to have hopes they might as well be those.

Whatever the extraordinary changes in our surroundings, some things are necessary to make sense of life in times of change. Some things are eternal – moral values – the recognition of good and bad and the preference for good. The preference for certain kinds of selflessness – sharing with others.

And no matter what some people say, for Truth of understanding not just how life works but the value and purpose of life, you need Faith - in God, the possibility of Guidance, and the Justice of the Afterlife.

Anyway, mark my words, God is coming back into fashion. For the first time in the west since Copernicus (which was not so long ago seen in the scale of human history), science is finding God inescapable. It’s true – because God is Al-Haqq, the Truth.

Salaamu aleikum.