Brethren, in my never-ending search for the meaning of life, I am constantly humbled by the reality of my origin. Each time I contemplate my own children, they remind me of the truth that I am equally a child of another person and that that other person is also a child of another person. But what mattered in this introspective exercise is not that I belong to a long chord in the seemingly unending chain of life and living but that I and my forebears share the same origin. Those who bore me were once like my humble self – a dirty spermatozoid agent which became mixed with blood in order to become a weak and seemingly inconsequential object (Q23:12-13).
Those who bore me, like the children I claim are mine today (in reality how valid is that claim to what I actually do not create?), were once kept away in three levels of darkness which they could not by themselves illuminate. The Quran refers to that darkness as a triad – the darkness of the stomach, the darkness of the womb and the darkness of the amnion fluid. These are levels of darkness in which the fetus is tucked away and protected from the exigencies of life of the bearer of the womb. Thus each time I contemplate how the fetus of yesterday has become the man and woman of today, each time I ponder the miracle in the birth of man, in his growth and ultimate death I become attentive to the fact that all of us are actually signs (ayaat) from and of the inimitable creation of the Almighty. We are all programmed (scientists would call this the genetic code), to be what we are today, to age and die.
Thus this sermon is interested in pondering the inner meaning of the choice you and I did not have in coming to the world (Q28:68), in determining where to be born and which womb to bear us. These realities function in reminding me of my destiny, in making me aware of my station and my ultimate destination. My destiny and yours, brethren, is in the first instance, enframed in between the knowable and the unknowable. Ponder the knowable: “Indeed We have created man from an essence of clay, then placed him as a drop of semen in a firm resting place, then changed the semen into a leechlike mass, then leechlike mass into a fetus lump, then fetus lump into bones, then clothed the bones with flesh, and then We brought him forth as quite a different creature from the embryo – so blessed is the Almighty, the best of all creators.” (Quran 23:12-13).
Dear brother, if it is true that none of us came to the world by choice, it means none of us would leave the world by choice; if it is true that an authority took charge of our being from non-being, it is only proper that the same authority should take charge of our ultimate transition from being to non-being. But dear Sister, is it not true, and strange at the same time, that the moment we are in this world, we begin to plot ways by which we can outlive the world; is it not true that as soon as we emerge from non-existence into existence, we forget the essence of our being and the consequence of our existence?.
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What about the unknown? What about the unknowable in regard to our destiny? Again let us listen to the Quran: “Surely the Almighty alone has the knowledge of the Hour …. (Q31: 34). Now the Almighty says: “He alone has the knowledge of the Hour”, at least two issues are implicated here: the freedom that He grants us from the pursuit of the unattainable and the responsibility He gives us to search for the obtainable. By the unattainable, the Quran refers to the exact knowledge of the day of resurrection; by the unattainable it gestures to that moment you and I would exit the world. By the obtainable, the Qur’an reminds us that we are created to act and be acted upon; that we have to work in order to eat; that the heavens would not rain gold; that you cannot plant yam and expect to harvest maize. As subjects that are destined for extinction, we shall continue to pursue the attainable and the unattainable until the unknowable intervene to transmit us to the Inimitable.
On the day I was born it became clear to me that my mother’s womb was indeed not the destination but a station in my life. If I had been told while still in her womb that there are better pleasures and enjoyment in this world such would have made no sense to me. If I had the chance, I would have preferred to remain in her womb forever. But immediately I came to ‘know’ this world, I forgot the pleasures of the womb. The moment I tasted life on earth, I pooh-poohed all the pleasures my mother’s womb afforded me. This world became my destination. It feels as if I am in another ‘womb’ – the womb of the world. Here all information about another life after this world is a fiction.
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