It Comes Upon Us Like Belief In God - The Obama Betrayal in Spiritual Terms

It is my obligation, as one of a relatively small ration of the people who actually understood the deep-rooted passions which the evil done by President Obama has stirred among us since that President's inauguration, my obligation to explain the kinds of forces which are moving a great and growing mass of the citizens who have turned against Obama with a deep sense of having been profoundly betrayed by a hoaxster in whom they had been misguided into placing their hopeful trust as recently, it seemed, as a short time ago.

When a people has been betrayed in so monstrous a degree as President Obama has, so quickly, betrayed so many of the people of the United States now, the people yearn for the intervention of a power beyond their own means, which will rescue them from a spirit of evil which seems to them as having grabbed hold of the ruling powers of their society. They pray for succor; they cry for justice. In one fashion or another, they pray to God.

The God to whom they actually pray, is not some stranger from outside the universe, not a distant Heaven which no living person could know. They pray to a real God, whom they regard as inside the universe, reigning from within the same universe which we experience this side of death. They pray, ultimately, not to a visible God, but to His Presence which can be felt among us.

This is a God well known to the greatest intellects of science and of Classical artistic composition. It is a God known as an efficient presence; it is, in fact, the God who touched the spirit of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the author of the modern principle of physical science, Gottfried Leibniz, in referring to a principle of dynamics which envelops the universe which we inhabit.

So, read a few words from the concluding paragraph of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry."

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

It is dynamics in that sense, as the great physicist Albert Einstein wrote of the genius of the discovery of gravitation by Johannes Kepler, as knowing a universe which is (immediately) finite, but, infinitely, unbounded.

Sometimes, thus, when a people is strained to the limit, when despair envelops the sensibilities, as the vast majority of our despairing citizens are crying out now, their capacity to respond to a higher aspect of their inherent human nature, empowers them to hope, and in power of hope to recognize that they, as a people, are given the power to bestow, as if by a prayer, a rescue from evil for themselves.

- Lyndon Larouche

38 Going on Forty

It's hard to believe that it's already been a whole year since my last birthday entry - 'Pondering 37.' Wow is time flying. By Allah's grace I have been kept around for another year. I must say that 38 sounds a lot closer to the big 4-0 than 37.  So maybe I should devote this entry to the meaning of 40, or, almost 40 but not quite. Forty is an amazing age. As a Muslim, of course, 40 is the age when Nabi (SAW) first started receiving revelation from Allah SWT. Based on this, many scholars talk about 40 as being a special age -- an age where wisdom and adulthood begin to really crystallize. From the perspective of Islam, therefore, 40 is a special age and not the dreaded 'four - O' that people often refer to. In Islam, 40 means that we may actually have finally earned the title 'adult,' and, moreover, that we need to start acting like one!

But I am not yet 40. I am only 38. Two years is an eternity in a world and at a time where change happens so fast. So much can happen in two years, I better not be presumptuous and talk too much about being 40 as of yet. As for now, I will be thankful and grateful that Allah has allowed me to reach 38, and as with every new birthday, look for the meaning associated with yet another year of being on this planet.

God truly is The Merciful, The Kind, The Compassionate, The Generous and The Forgiving. Everyday I must remind myself and even pinch myself at all the blessings I have. I need to keep reminding myself of Allah's words in the Qur'an:

"Know that your wealth and children are a trial and that there is an immense reward with Allah." (Surat al-Anfal: 28)

With every passing year I realize more and more that despite the worldly blessings we receive day in-day out, many of which we easily forget, the greatest blessing by far is the opportunities we are given to do good and to help others. Especially when those opportunities are in the form of 'small' deeds, or things that we typically don't think twice about, unless we are in a state of consciousness of God, and His teachings. I guess this is another way that Islam and the teachings of Sunnah are able to stay fresh and alive with us, no matter how old we get.

My teacher (Cikgu, if you are reading) always reminds me that one of the most important but frequently overlooked elements of Islamic education is that belief must always be supported by what he and the Sufis call 'tasting.' Experiential learning and true knowing go hand and hand, leading to higher levels of yaqin and iman. When the Book speak to us directly in the context of our daily lives, then Allah's word comes to life. Then, the religion is no longer 'ancient,' nor is it relegated to a book subject, as one Iranian graduate student commented to my wife after she asked him why he wasn't fasting during Ramadan, but it grows in us and we grow wiser as a result of it, insha-Allah.

This is what we must be always conscious of, and at 38 going on forty, what we must be doing with our own children, so that they too can see and taste the benefits of Islam in their lives, alhamdulillah.