In a recent Khutbah, I heard Allah’s divine name, Al-Afoo, The Pardoner, and a very touching
qudsi hadeeth that exemplified it: A servant [of Allah’s] committed a sin and said: “O Allah! Forgive
me my sin.” And Allah said: “My servant has committed a sin and acknowledged he has a Lord who
forgives sins and punishes them.” Then the man sinned again and said: “O Lord! Forgive me my sin.’ And Allah said: “My servant has committed a sin and acknowledged he has a Lord who
forgives sins and punishes them.” Then the man sinned again and said: “O Lord! Forgive me my
sin.” And Allah said: “My servant has committed a sin and acknowledged he has a Lord who
forgives sins and punishes them. [My slave!] Do what you wish, for I have forgiven you!” (Bukhari and Muslim) This is no free ticket to sin as you please. But it did make me realize we should always have hope that Allah will forgive our sins and guide us to become better Muslims. How many times have we sat down to count our mistakes and recognized we’ve sinned so much we can’t even keep track anymore? We think that there’s no way Allah can forgive us now. To our minds, we don’t even deserve forgiveness. This shows only the extent of Allah’s mercy, which no human mind can even imagine. “And do not despair of Allah’s mercy. For, most surely, none despairs of Allah’s mercy except the disbelieving people.” [12:87] Take note. Hope is no luxury to make our lives better. It is a Muslim obligation, part and parcel of faith.
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When God Answers
THE STARTLING ADVENT of the Quran’s revelation, in about 613 c.e., announcing the prophethood of Muhammad, sallahu alayhe wa sallam, in Makkah, immediately set off an unremitting tide of anxiety and spiritual awakening among his people, the Quraysh, which sparked a profound and virtually illimitable obsession with questioning the traditional Arabian way of life. Nearly everything about the emergent experience was strange to “authentic” Arabness. No Arab (since hazy antiquity) had professed himself a prophet. No culturally paradigmatic Book—and
expressly one so clearly Arabic and arrestingly eloquent as the Quran—had ever appeared in the decisively defining tongue of this still nomadic-minded people, whose community (ummah) had come to be objectively identified in the human setting of Arabia by its complete scriptural
illiteracy (al-umiyyûn). No heavenly revelation, in any form, had reclaimed provincial Arab purpose in the larger world since Ishmael, alayhe salam, and his father, Abraham, alayhe
salam, raised the Ka‘bah in ancient millennia. And no Arab heart had conceived of a belief, an idea, even a chimera, that would have remotely moved the individual—any individual—to the center of human existence, independent of familial connection or tribal association, let alone envisaged
a religion that would declare all of humanity—irrespective of language, lineage, or affluence—a single family under one, sole, unseen God, without likeness, to whom every individual human being was immediately and ultimately responsible. Here, of course, is the new call’s single-most “novel” assertion in the ancient Arabian milieu: That their provincial idols—like every other graphic, iconic, or mental commingling of God or His divinity with His creation, whether of physical or metaphysical human manufacture—must go. The new faith’s by-word, Lâ ilâha illa-Allâh, there is no god but the God—as the compatriots of Muhammad, sallahu alayhe wa sallam, directly and correctly apprehended—spelled the end of the legitimacy of Arabian life, and of
every inference that fed into the fountainhead of their particularized tribal ethos or that flowed from it. More significantly (though this could not have been fathomed by the Quraysh in those early years)
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O humankind! Worship your Lord,who created you and those before you, so that you may become God-fearing.
(Worship none but) the One who (alone) has made the earth a furnished habitation for you, and (who alone has made) the heaven a (sheltering) edifice, and who (alone) has sent down from the sky water, whereby He brought forth with it the (varied) fruits of (the earth) as a provision for you.Therefore, you shall not set up rivals to God when you know (well that such deities cannot exist) 2:21-22].
IN THESE TWO verses of the Qur'an, Allah Most High is directing
mankind's attention to the factors that sustain our entire existence.
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CHANGE IS THE law of the universe and life, the sole constant in creation. In fact, change is so persistent in our lives that it almost defies description and analysis. This is so true of change that some philosophers consider the constancy of it baffling:
How could something, which changes in property (due to change), remain the same thing? Some of them believe change makes sense only if it is held to be an inconsistency. Others believe it to be a case of nonidentity. These approaches take analyzing the process of change to extremes. They warrant no worthy results for us because they seek to restrict their analysis of change to an absolute frame of mind that ignores other major facts and laws of life. Most importantly, this line of thinking ignores that this life has a Creator and a Master who is the only absolute there is. He is the One who gave both life and man their transformational nature-as eloquently argued, with respect to man, in this issue's cover article. Let me give you two reasons I reject what they say about change. First, complete understanding of change as the law of life may not be possible without knowing the basic nature of God's laws or sunan as described in the Qur'an. In essence, Allah created life and the universe based on the physical laws that are responsible for the "cause-effect" phenomenon we all know and experience. The first scientist to coin this interesting phrase was Isaac Newton, who famously stated that "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." This was given more meaning and relevance by Einstein who said: "Nothing happens until something moves."This is true not just materially but spiritually and emotionally also-at least metaphorically.
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