The story we call the environmental crisis is nothing more than a human crisis. If we pay attention, we will hear in it our own story, echoing back to us from a deep horizon. Learning to listen is so important now because, in a way, we have all recently been blinded. Everyone learns to see the world through the lens of culture. For tens of thousands of years, those countless cultures all of them cultivated the natural curiousness of children about creation into knowledgeable adulthood.At their root, they taught people to see the environment as enchanted, brought to life by a Creator. Creation was not called ‘nature,’ or the ‘natural world,’ then. Nor was the immense knowledge of the world people acquired and passed on named ‘the natural sciences.’ Most importantly, cultures accumulated a continuous treasure of beneficial knowledge piled generation upon generation as a whole and recognized the living connection between everything on earth beneath its soils, above its skies, and in its sweet and salty waters. They further connected this with the spirit of life that ran through it all from a Living Source beyond in the realm of the Unseen. Never would they flatten the multi-spherical cycle of creation into a one dimensional chronological line. Never would they sever worldly creation from its otherworldly origin, splitting life in two, calling this part “sensible,” and therefore real, and that part “insensible,” and therefore irrelevant.
Because of their holistic understanding of the world themselves in creation and creation in them, come to them from a Life-Source apart they understood that they were to live in it, work from, with, and on the portion of it in their immediate grasp, and take care of it so that it would remain there for them and their children, grandchildren, and furthest descendents.They also knew that their offenses against creation were violations against the Creator and would inevitably be met with creational disaster directly affecting their vicinity, if left uncorrected.They called this Divine Judgment, or the Judgment of Heaven.
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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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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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Most of us might be on a high right now- a spiritual high that is. In the wake of Ramadhan and with Hajj in our midst, we feel our spirits lifted. Our spirituality gets a boost and we get this sudden burst of energy. We become enthusiastic and energetic. While once we might not have been participatory, our newfound energy encourages us to volunteer for committees; while once we may not have joined organizations, we now spearhead coalitions for some cause or other. We have joined Muslim Student Associations and organizations around campus around the globe, wondering what we can do to offer assistance and support to our community and our Ummah. Maybe you cooperated in some relief efforts to hand out food and clothing to the homeless or maybe you collected toys for a toy drive for needy children. Whatever it is you might have
done recently, you likely felt a wave of spiritual uplift. You were probably riding a spiritual high.
And now what? Are we still coasting on that spiritual high? Do we still feel as enthusiastic about finding out what others need? Do we still care about what’s happening around us, to our neighbors the next home over or the next continent over? Or have we slowly but steadily slipped down a
notch or two in our spirituality? This is the Rollercoaster Iman phenomenon. Now that the whole excitement and hustle and bustle of Ramadhan has passed, we’ve kind of felt a little lull in
our spirituality. There aren’t as many activities to keep us going; there aren’t
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By
Sakina Binti Erik Marx
As
parents, we worry about many things
for our children. Their health,
social skills, and provision are of
great concern to us.
However, the
greatest concern which plays into many of our decisions regarding our children
is their education. As our children grow,
we fantasize about what profession they will work at when they are adults.We
make great sacrifices and even relocate to different places around the world to
facilitate what we believe is the best way for our children to learn. The
concern in the Muslim ummah for education resulted in a world conference in
1977, in Makkah, Saudi Arabia.
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