Letters to a daughter. One: To believe or not to believe.

Faith is a different matter. It resides in the heart not the mind. Some twenty years ago my daughter, who was then a teenager and who had lived with us in Saudi Arabia for all her life, went away to boarding school in the UK. This was her first exposure to a world in which faith, for much of the past century, has played a steadily diminishing role in the life of ordinary people.

So it was natural that the new environment would lead her mind to question much of what she had been exposed to during her earlier life. These questions were put to us - her parents. I thought, at the time, the best way to respond would be to put my thoughts in writing. This I did in a series of letters written over a period of about two months.

I stumbled upon these letters recently and thought that it would be useful to share them with a wider audience. There are a total of six letters. And starting today, inshallah, I will post them here in sequence over the coming weeks.

The first letter is titled "To believe or not to believe".

One: To believe or not to believe

Mama has told me about your recently expressed angst about Islam, and belief in general. I would much rather talk about these things face to face. But since this is not going to be possible at least for some months, let me see what I can put across in writing.?

Yes, I think we all ask ourselves the question: What if there is no Heaven? What we really mean is: What if there is no Creator? And what if the Universe and all that exists in it is accidental – the result of adventitious random processes, acting without direction, on a primordial cloud of stellar matter??

Like everyone else I also asked myself this question, and to be honest, I sometimes still do.?

I was trained as an engineer. And engineers are a curious lot. We want to know how things work. So, I wanted to know how everything worked: The stars, the planets, the pattern of day and night, our bodies, the brain and so on. I read profusely about all these things trying to comprehend what science has learned about them. I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that science did not have all the answers. If anything, it seemed to highlight the limits of our knowledge, rather than the extent of it.

When I was at MIT, a friend who was taking a course in biology mentioned to me that there were no atheists in the biology department. At the time I didn't think much of the remark. It was years later that I understood its significance. This was when I started to read extensively about the structure of DNA, of the cell, and the processes involved in cell division. These are the processes that convert a newly fertilized egg in the womb to a baby. Look at this baby with its perfectly developed limbs, its soft pearly skin, and its wide-open eyes and tell me that this is the result of random, undirected processes! The biologists at MIT knew better. It's just that they wouldn't want you to quote them on this – it would throw their scientific qualifications in doubt.

And this is just one example. You can stand under the sky anywhere on the planet and look around you, and His signs stare you in the face: The clear blue sky itself, the Sun, the stars and the Moon, the air, the clouds, the rain and the trees – the list is endless.??All you have to do is use the gift of intelligence, and as a Muslim this is not an option, it is a binding obligation.

It is said that when something is obvious, we fail to see it. Modern humans seem to do something of the sort. Civilization has created an illusion of independence. This is true especially in the world today. Comfortable in our homes, with our gadgets and cars and 'reality' shows, never alone in our world of malls, offices, coffee shops and restaurants, we forget that only a single heartbeat separates us from Reality.???

The Bedouin, whose heart was to be the receptacle for the last Eternal message to be delivered to humanity, had no such illusions. Alone, in a timeless desert, under a night sky ablaze with stars, he had a keen, almost painful awareness of his insignificance compared to the glory and grandeur of all that surrounded him. And maybe this is why, when the Message did descend, it descended into the heart of someone who was predisposed to receive it.

Do not be deceived by the knowing, sardonic smile of the atheist. Whether he acknowledges it or not he is a creature of God. And the Quran tells us that buried deep in his heart is an innate awareness of Him which he tries desperately to cover up – the verb in Arabic is kafara: 'to cover up' from which the noun kafir is derived.?

When in doubt, all you need to do is look around and think: I look at my hands as I type these words and marvel, absolutely marvel at their complexity: A system of arteries and veins delivers and retrieves blood, which supplies energy for the muscles to move. Neural networks transmit precise instructions from the brain. Millions of 'sensors' convey a sense of touch, texture, warmth, and pain. Am I to believe that these hands have no designer and maker? Did they just 'evolve' accidentally? If you saw an aeroplane in the sky, and knew nothing else about it, would you argue that its ancestors crawled out on their bellies from an ancient earthly sea??

From my point of view getting past the stage of “to believe or not to believe” is the easy part. What is hard is deciding what to believe and then what to do about it.

?...continued at this link

Nadeem M Qureshi's translation of Why Muslims Lagged Behind and Others Progressed is published by Austin Macauley Publishers.