Everybody must agree when I say that the weather nowadays has all gone hay-wired. It is always either extremely hot or fierce rain complete with deafening thunder and blinding lightning. Yes, it is the global warming in action.
Two days ago, I couldn’t get through the route I normally used to get home. The junction was flooded and a new Mazda car got stuck in the water which made me and other drivers decided to reroute. Luckily there are three other routes for me to choose in order to get home. It looks to me that the global warming may have caused the crazy weather but it’s the over-development of the area that caused the flood. Somehow both are out of our control.
Global warming is a serious threat though here, in Malaysia, people still take it very lightly. We may have heard about how the largest single block of ice in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, which had been around for 3,000 years, cracked in 2000. Within two years it had split all the way through and is now breaking into pieces. But hearing about it and witnessing it are two different things. We heard, we gulped in fear and we forget and continue our lives as usual - filling our trash cans with plastics, let the water run while brushing our teeth and let the air-conditioner on 24 hours a day. All these, got me thinking: Were the Mayans right about 2012? Was Nostradamus right about it too? I’m a practical person and I don’t like to ponder upon ideas on fortune-telling, psychics, crystal balls, card-reading even ghosts and djins and all the unseen creatures.
I know these creatures exist but as we have been told, some things are meant to be the secret of Allah. Allah wants us to study the universe, the atoms and particles, the ocean, the sky, the earth right down to the core, the human body, the planets and everything else that can help us understand and improve our lives. Allah doesn’t want us to study ghosts or djins – not more than acknowledging their existence and avoid them. For me, should the Mayans and Nostradamus were right about the world coming to an end in 2012, then it must be co-incidence. Nobody knows when the world will end but we know for a fact that the global warming is irreversible – not until each and every one of us could stop using our cars, air-conditioners and the like – which is impossible.
Time is running out for humans though time has no meaning for Allah. Allah is beyond time and space – infinity in every way a human could think of. I’ve read a book by a religious scholar that wrote; every single thing, even us the humans, exists only in the minds, including the brain because the brain is practically just another organ. Everything we see and touch is only perception created by the mind. We practically don’t exist, only Allah is real. This makes perfect sense since Al-Quran has time and again emphasize on the miracle of the brain which refers to the minds. The mind is the key to everything. It is said that the power of the mind is unlimited – no, I’m not referring to our imagination though it is the first step towards anything and everything. Unfortunately, most human only use approximately 10% of our brain’s capability. Scientists and inventors must have used 30%-40%, I guess. And I’d like to believe that Prof. Stephen Hawking must have used all of his brain capability to power his mind that nothing is left for his physical mobility.
The minds can not only imagine but make the imagination becomes reality. Space shuttle, computers, handphones, ipad, hologram and now there’s a holopad or something that I watched on discovery channel last night – everything starts with mere imagination which then pushed to the limit by curiosity and willpower to discover and explore – all of what was the hardwork of the mind. Looking at what the west had discovered makes me wonder whether we as a race, have even used 10% of our brains? I mean, here we are getting all excited about another stupid ghost movie….I can’t help wondering where we, as a race (Malays) stand in this world at the end? We haven’t been anywhere in history, and if we have, it was forgotten. We desperately need to start creating history.
How do we justify ourselves as the Khalifah of the world when everything we know about the world are taught by the west or the ancient Arabs during the glory days of Islam? We don’t even know what life is all about as most of us are busy studying the afterlife, the unseen creatures and the sins of others. Some are busy imitating the west in all the wrong ways. None are trying to imitate the west in terms of their imagination, curiosity and willpower to discover and explore.
It is so sad to be living in this modern world without having the right to take any credit on it till the very end. Without any significant contribution, we are basically just passengers in this world and for that, we should be ashamed to dare call ourselves ‘Khalifah di dunia’ just because we can memorize the whole Al-Quran.I accept that we may not have much time but may this little time that we have is not wasted for something meaningless. We should start teaching our children that Ibadah is not all about praying and reciting Al-Quran alone, Ibadah is much more than that. The highest ibadah is to learn and contribute as much as we can to the benefit of as many people as possible.
Therefore, we should start telling our children that they can be beyond engineers, beyond managers and executives, beyond doctors and scientists and then let them imagine what beyond really means. And no, they don’t have to stop praying or reciting Al-Quran in the process and become a liberalist or a pluralist for that sake. Keep them on the ground by guiding them through their imaginations. For that, let’s pray for the world to not end so soon as the Malays need more time to make a statement of our existence in this world and sadly, in our own motherland.
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