The signs of Allah,

Signs of Allah.

Today, driving West on Malaysia’s best road surface – the federal highway – I saw heavy rain in the far distance. That great continuous sheet originating from the dark grey clouds stretching to the ground – whilst I was bathed in warm sunshine – triggered me off in pondering about how amazing rain is;  that rain which is “practically guaranteed” to fall on land to enable life to grow so that we may eat and thrive; the rains WILL come.

Past thoughts soon resurged in my mind as I was struck at the awesomeness at the workings of the natural world. I also thought how unfortunate are those that never see the beauty of the natural world or science, and those even more unfortunate people who believe such things are purely by accident.

As a youngster treading a small path of wondering just what was the truth about life, I came across discussions on science in the Qur’an. One discussion was on embryology and how in the Qur’an features of embryology were mentioned. One such feature was that of almudghata which was helpfully translated to a ‘chewed lump’.

In the literature I saw, (I think the one below is the one)

http://www.abbas.dircon.co.uk/Image597.gif From
http://www.abbas.dircon.co.uk/Embryo.html

there was a picture of an embryo placed beside some substance which was labelled as ‘chewed lump’ and they looked pretty much the same.

To be honest, I wasn’t impressed. It occurred to me that the thing that was chewed was chewed in such a fashion so that it would look like the embryo.

Anyway along the journey I concluded I had seen the ultimate truth and that was when I was reading the Qur’an about how prophet Jesus (as) or Isa as he’s known to Muslims was taken away from the eyes men. I became scared. Scared that I might die before I would have the opportunity to declare my Shahada in front of witnesses. Getting to the mosque was a nervous affair watching all the traffic for any potential accident that would deny me my goal of uttering ‘Laa illah ha illAllah, Muhammadar rasoolul la.” (Which by the way, I said because nobody tried to help me say it correctly – which was strange).

For years, I still never felt satisfied with the ‘chewed lump’ thing, even though I was now trying to be a Muslim. But one day I was eating a chewy sweet. My head was tilting down for some reason and while I was chewing it my mouth must have opened and the sweet fell out. I was stunned at what I saw. Immediately the shape of the chewy sweet that fell from my mouth made me recall the images of the embryo and the chewed lump that I had seen many years before. In my mind, all three looked exactly the same and of course, I had not put any effort into consciously shaping the sweet in that way. subhanAllah. Had this happened by accident? Surely not. Surely this was the All Mighty giving me peace of mind about some nagging feeling I had held for a long time. Surely this was a sign from God.

To some, like the rain, this event is “trivial, stupid and laughable even, a tiny ‘meaningless’ spec of dust of an event causing me to have such feelings. There is no sign from God. It’s was all an accident. To believe that my heart soothed with Grace of Allah from this/these experiences is the height of folly.” I can appreciate those thoughts as before I became a Muslim, I believed that rational science dispelled God. There was NO way hearing such a tale would make me believe in the traditional accounts of God. I would have said of people for whom good things had just happened (remembering good things happen to non-believers as well as believers!) that believers were simply attributing the good things as an act of God with no basis (or perhaps thought about it) whatsoever. But having become a believer (of the Muslim variety) I somehow now, had/have what I regard as an “insiders view” as to the things that I see happening around me (including, but less easily, the bad things too) without particularly having to ‘force’ myself to think of the God dimension to it; but of course the God dimension quickly comes along anyway.

Today at the museum I say two old Qur’ans. The script was beautiful. I imagined the person who hundreds of years ago wrote this whole Qur’an. Carefully writing out each letter and sound markers [The Qur’an is a protected communication from God All Mighty to Muhammad (saw) through the angel Gabriel]. I thought that the author could never ever have imagined that his efforts would be displayed in the Malaysia’s national museum hundreds of years later. At first thought, you might, as I did, think the author did imagine such a travelling point for that Qur’an, that such a though may have caused the scriber to smile and be happy, but I then began thinking the author would not actually be happy at the fact it was stuck in a glass box with people unable to turn its Unique and Majestical message. I also felt a bit down when I started thinking that nowadays most of this script is just printed from computers and that almost nobody is likely ever again to scribe the words of Allah by hand in such a beautiful fashion. I thought this way because the handwriting appeared to the same as the computer generated script – itself an amazing aspect relating to those who scribr the Qur’an.

So as the rain today reminded me, I feel ‘sad’ (not the right word perhaps but I cant think of a better one right now) that some people will never understand this and some people will never ‘find’ God. May He breathe God consciousness into your soul dear reader and may he do it soon, so that you too will experience these tremendous feelings and get close to Him. Amin.

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