In this current climate, with the US and Israel attacking Iran and at home, energy prices are increasing, it is more than likely that the UK government will approve of the Rosebank oil field development. For those who don’t know, the Rosebank oil field is the UK’s largest untapped oil field. While it might not be much in the scale of the global oil usage, it means the UK is going back on its climate commitment. This is a setback for the progress towards a nature positive world.
As someone who is passionate about nature, I have come to the conclusion that I can’t just be a bystander. In the framework of nature connection that I have come up with, this is time for action. I have quietly observed and reflected for this past quarter of a century, writing down my thoughts shaped by the Qur’an and global events and personal experience. So now I have decided that I would collate them into a book that will give us a framework based on justice and mercy from which to act.
In this post and several others along the way, I hope to share snippets from the book. Its working title is Qur’anic Wisdom for the 21st Century.
Snippet from Chapter 3
The focus of this chapter is to analyse Surah Ar-Rahman in terms of balance, much of which is absent in today’s world. The first few ayat in the surah talks about God setting up the balance so that we shouldn’t transgress the balance. Not only that, we are urged to establish the balance in justice. If not, then God will balance it for us because balance is a feature in all of God’s creations and that balance should be maintained. In the physical world, one of embodiment of balance is in Newton’s laws of motion – one of them being: for every action is an equal and opposite reaction, thus maintaining the balance demanded by God. I look at the world around me today and wonder if we have actually upset the balance and if reactions to our actions are actually God’s way to redress the balance before the Final Hour. In nature, animals are adapting to our interference and encroachment of their territories. By upsetting the ecological system, we upset the balance and yet the ecological system is adapting to compensate for it. Similarly, you can see today with all the various extremism, it just breed more extremism in its counterparts.
Muslims are called by God to be the people of middle path (2:143):
And thus We made you a community of the middle way, so that you should be witnesses over the people, and the Messenger a witness to you.
And what is beautiful is in the preceding verse to it, God talks about the straight path (2:142):
Say, “To Allah belongs the east and the west. He guides whom He wills to a straight path.”
The straight path is therefore linked to the middle path – a path of balance. It reminds me of a tightrope walker, swaying slightly to one side then another as he walks across the rope. But if he sways too much, he will fall off the rope. Like a good tightrope walker, we need to maintain balance, perhaps leaning slight one way or another but never too far that we fall from that middle/straight path. Today, there are many issues confronting the community – we cannot afford to forget this importance of a balanced response that is grounded in justice and mercy. In the book “Reasoning with God,” Khaled Abou El Fadl (2014) wrote on the importance of balance:
“Shari’ah is an ongoing discourse on how to be a good Muslim within a communal system and a metanarrative on being a good human being within a human society. As the history of Islamic law guilds demonstrates, it is not important that Muslims agree on the same legal determinations or laws. What is important is that they recognize shared common standards of virtue and godliness. Ultimately, the constituent elements of these common standards are a subject for another book, but at a minimum, the ultimate objective is peace, repose, and tranquillity (i.e. salam). But this salam cannot exist without justice (qist), balance and proportionality (mizan and tawazun), and compassion, love and care for one another (tarahum, tahabub, and takaful)…A Shari’ah-oriented society reasons with God – it consistently visits and revisits the rational and textual indicators to stay on the sirat al-mustaqim (straight path) knowing full well that anyone who claims to have an exclusive claim over the sirat has by definition deviated from it. As the Qur’an points out, the blessing of the sirat comes as an act of grace that can never be taken for granted. Therefore, reasoning with God means endlessly searching and engaging the divine with the hope and belief in God’s continued guidance and grave.
The balance must come from our continued interaction with God through ‘rational and textual indicators’ – which I take to mean interacting with and pondering over the Qur’an, the Sunnah and also the world around us, bearing in mind that the objective is ‘salam’ for and with all beings, including our own selves. So the balance within and without can only come through active participation and interaction with God, primarily through His Book, but also through every reminder He extends our way. Passivity will only lead to the loss of balance, just as the tightrope walker lost her balance when she didn’t correct herself after leaning too far.”
This chapter seeks to analyse Surah Ar-Rahman in terms of such balance to better understand what we can learn about God and our relationship with Him in order to maintain that balance within ourselves and in the world around us.
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