Archive for God
Heroes with super-values
There’s been a buzz around “The 99″ for some time, but the latest news is that these Islam-inspired superheroes will soon be making their debut on British TV.
They have proved a hit from Morocco to Indonesia and were recently named as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the world by Forbes magazine. Now they are being brought to British television by Endemol, the production company behind Big Brother, with a mission to instill Islamic values in children across all faiths. [...]
They were created by Dr Naif al-Mutawa, a clinical psychologist from Kuwait, who felt Muslim children needed a new set of heroes to look up to, to counter jihadist role models. [...]
Dr al-Mutawa hopes the cartoons will have a universal appeal. He said: “It is based on attributes such as generosity and mercy. These are not things that Islam has a monopoly over.”
One rather strange point in the Independent’s report was the claim that “there will never be a full cast of 99 superheroes since it is forbidden to depict all Allah’s attributes.” I can’t see what this statement is based on, and there are two further problems with it: (1) God’s attributes cannot truly be portrayed in the first place, but these are characters just reflecting some aspect of the “99 Names”; (2) Although it’s not commonly known, God has more than 99 names, as evidenced in a supplication taught by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), in which we say:
“O Allah, I am your servant, son of Your servant, son of Your maidservant. My forelock is in Your hand; Your command over me is forever executed; Your decree over me is just. I ask You by every name belonging to You which You named Yourself with, or revealed in Your Book, or You taught to any of Your creation, or You have preserved in the knowledge of the unseen with You, that You make the Qur’an the springtime of my heart and the light of my breast, and a departure for my sorrow and release from my anxiety.”
Born believers – new study
Children are born believers in God, academic claims
Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose.
He says that young children have faith even when they have not been taught about it by family or at school, and argues that even those raised alone on a desert island would come to believe in God.
Very interesting, though rather a familiar idea to a Muslim! The Prophet Muhammad (on whom be peace) taught: “Every newborn is born upon the Natural Way (fitrah) and it is his parents who make him Jewish, Christian or Magian.” And we might add: or atheist.
While the term ‘fitrah’ is understood to mean Islam, the wording is important because it indicates that what we mean by children being “born Muslims” is the most essential meaning, namely the natural inclination of the soul to recognise its Creator and worship Him. That, after all, is the meaning of Islam: wilful submission to God’s will, so we can see clearly why the “natural way” is considered synonymous with Islam.
Because of this concept, many people who accept Islam later in life prefer the term “revert” over “convert”, to reflect the idea that they are coming back to something they always recognised in their heart of hearts. As the Qur’an says:
{ And [mention] when your Lord took from the children of Adam – from their loins – their descendants and made them testify of themselves, [saying to them], “Am I not your Lord?” They said, “Yes, we have testified.” [This] – lest you should say on the day of Resurrection, “Indeed, we were of this unaware.” } [Al-A'raf 7:172]
Bismillah (in the name of God)
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful…
Welcome to a new blog which has existed in my mind for quite some time. My intention here is to explore and expound the principles of meaningful, effective dialogue on the subject of religion. Please see the About page for more details of the spirit of this diablog.
Since I have started in the name of God, it seems fitting to share a thought-provoking article by Dr Umar Farooq Abd-Allah:
“One God, Many Names” (PDF download)
It is a fairly brief exposition of the use of the name “Allah” to refer to the One God, and corrects a number of misconceptions that exist surrounding this.One of them is the hesitance some Muslims have to use other names in reference to Allah, such as the standard English term God (with a capital ‘g’).
More significantly, I have found many Christians (usually more among those with a keenness for evangelism) who believe that the names “God” and “Allah” have two different referents, so one of them is the true “God of the Bible” (Who of course is referred to by other terms in the Bible’s original language) and the other is a “false god” – or even, according to one particularly wild theory, the “moon god”. We often find the media manipulating this perception in the minds of the public by translating a whole speech by some fanatic or other but not translating the term used for God, Allah. We always read of extremist Muslims who “kill in the name of Allah” – this phraseology obviously being chosen to imply a particular fanaticism among those who use this term to refer to the same God, in Whose name(s) other people do kill.
It is a very crucial point that Jews, Christians and Muslims (and of course we can extend this list) worship the same God, even if their doctrines differ sharply in numerous ways. My Christian friend believes that God is a trinity, made up of Father, Son and Spirit. I point out that the only one of these Who is God is the One he is describing as “Father”, while the others are not equal persons. But more importantly, I emphasise that we may have different beliefs and descriptions of God, but that does not mean we are referring to two different entities. Both of us are saying that we worship the One Who created all things, and neither of us would admit that there is any more than One Who can be truly described as such. So our monotheism (however different its expression) leads us to the conclusion that there is One God upon Whose description we need to work to agree, in the pursuit of true belief and worship.
