I just wanted to share with you some gems from a British writer Gai Eaton
who died in 2010. He was a convert to islam and he had been a muslim for over 50 years when he
sadly passed away he was also an historian wrote many books and a popular speaker and he worked
also at regents park mosque in london for many years as well
and i want to quote some of these absolute gems uh from some of his books uh one of my favorite
books actually is a book he wrote called Islam and the Destiny of Man and in there he wrote
the modern westerner persuaded that he has a right to think for himself and imagining that he
exercises this right is unwilling to acknowledge that his every thought has been shaped by cultural
and historical influences and that his opinions fit like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into a pattern
which has nothing random about it that's an amazing quote i mean he's saying that we all like
in the west like to think uh for ourselves and uh and that we do that and we exercise this right
and in fact but in fact we end up thinking pretty much the same on most issues i mean of
the day whether it be politically correct issues or other issues so in fact it's a bit of a myth
that we all do think for ourselves we all think within the box rather than outside of it usually
in another quote from the same book he wrote about the agnostic very profound insight the agnostic
has a very curious notion of religion he is convinced that a man who says i believe in god
should at once become perfect if this does not happen then the believer must be a fraud and a
hypocrite he thinks that adherence to a religion is the end of the road whereas it is in fact only
the beginning of a very long and sometimes very rough road he looks for consistency in religious
people however aware he may be of inconsistencies in himself very true very true and this next quote
from the same book is such a beautiful couple of sentences that really it's just stunning i want
to share this with you people are not always what they say they are or even what they think they are
but there is one who sees us objectively and have and we have reason to be thankful
that he is called the merciful the compassionate the forgiving that's a beautiful quote
and the next one i must say made me feel rather awkward and uneasy when i read it he wrote in
the same book a man might spend a lifetime reading spiritual books and studying the writings of the
great mystics he might feel that he has penetrated the secrets of the heavens and the earth
but unless this knowledge was incorporated into his very nature and transformed him it was sterile
i began to suspect that a simple man of faith praying to god with little understanding but
with a full heart might be worth more than the most learned student of the spiritual sciences
wow painful very true very true and here's a quote from another of his books king of the castle
choice and responsibility in the modern world where he wrote men who scorn the idea
of submission to the divine will are outraged by the notion of a god who requires submission
are among the first to demand total submission to the process
in which we are involved and seem to attach a kind of moral imperative to willing participation in it
any other attitude so they say is reactionary or escapist or anti-social perhaps after all they
have found a divinity to worship and if they have the only charitable comment must be god help them
and here's another quote from the same book which speaks of our human condition uh people who
lose people we love of grief and so on and he writes in king of the castle
we are all of us exposed to grief the people we love die as we shall ourselves
in due course expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance
finally there are some who insist upon feeling guilty over the ill they have done
or simply on account of the ugliness which they perceive in their own souls a solution of a kind
has been found to this problem in the form of sedatives and antidepressant drugs
so that many human experiences which used to be accepted as an integral part of human life
are now defined and dealt with as medical problems the widow who grieves for a beloved
husband becomes a case as does the man sadden by the recollection of the napalm or high explosives
he has dropped on civilian populations one had thought that guilt was away however indirect
in which we might perceive the nature of reality and the laws which govern our human experience
but it is now an illness that can be cured death however remains incurable
though we might be embarrassed by victorian death bed scenes or the practices of mourning people
a morning among people less sophisticated than ourselves the fact of death tells us so much
about the realities of our condition that to ignore it or try to forget it is to be unaware
of the most important thing we need to know about our situation as living creatures
equally to witness and participate in the dying of our fellow men and women
is to learn what we are and if we have any wisdom at all to draw conclusions
which must in their way affect our every thought and our every act
it speaks for itself
and in a much much shorter passage back in the islam and destiny a man book
he says religion cannot survive whole and effective when it is confined to one
single compartment of life and education death is either all or it is nothing either it dwarfs all
profane studies or it is dwarfed by them i really like that statement the theology used to be called
of course the queen of the sciences uh and now of course it's uh threatened to be abolished in
many university uh departments in the uk anyway but he says religion cannot survive whole and
effective when it's confined to one part of life like you know your leisure time what you do on the
weekend or something is either everything or it's nothing the muslims get this christians used to
get this not anymore i tend to find but muslims if there's one thing that muslims can teach the
west and teach christians too is that religion is either everything and not just a private thing but
includes politics it includes uh divine law and our spirituality and everything all it is nothing
anyway on to another quote and this is this is a nice one one of the fundamental themes of
the quran is man's flight from reality given the basic premise that god is and that his being both
transcends and encompasses all existence then unbelief is precisely such a flight
men and women throughout the centuries have tried at every opportunity to evade total reality and to
take refuge in little corners of private darkness even at the simplest everyday level there is
constant avoidance of the thought of death there is evasion of our inward solitaryness
which no amount of conviviality can entirely overcome and there is a refusal to acknowledge our
limitations and our sins not only is it the innate tendency of fallen man to forget god but there
comes about a luxuriant growth of forgetfulness in every sphere wow powerful words powerful words
i like this one this is uh particularly good just one sentence from islam and the destiny of man
there are strengths and virtues in a polygamous marriage as there are in a
monogamous one and it was muhammad's destiny to demonstrate both in their perfection
in that amazing their strengths and virtues in polygamous marriage as there are in monogamous
ones but it was muhammad's destiny to demonstrate both in their perfection because he was married
to his first wife for i think it was 25 years monogamously in a beautiful marriage and then
after her sad demise he had polygamous marriages of course for various reasons often political
and here we have um a lovely uh paragraph from islam and the destiny of man about the quran
the quran set on a shelf with other books has a function entirely different to theirs and exists
in a different dimension wow what an opening sentence it moves an illiterate shepherd to tears
when recited to him and it has shaped the lives of millions of simple people over the course of
almost 14 centuries it has nourished some of the most powerful intellects known to the human record
it has stopped sophisticates in their tracks and made saints of them and it has been the source of
the most subtle philosophy and of an art which expresses its deepest meaning in visual terms
it has brought the wandering tribes of mankind together in communities and civilizations upon
which its imprint is apparent even to the most casual observer wow
and this next quote is about how do people imitate muhammad and he writes this in islam and the
destiny of man to love muhammad is one thing but to imitate him to try to be like him is another
he was the last messenger and the last prophet so how can we expect to imitate what by definition
is unique and unrepeatable in the first place his virtues are to be imitated and they were
providentially exemplified in the extraordinary variety of human experience through which he
passed in his 62 years of life he was an orphan yet he knew the warmth of parental love through
his grandfather's devoted care for him he was the faithful husband of one wife for many years
and after her death the tender and considerate husband of many wives he was the father of
children who gave him the greatest joy this world has to offer and he saw all but one of them die
he had been a shepherd and a merchant when young and he became a ruler a statesman a military
commander and a law giver he loved his native city and was driven from it into exile finally
to return home in triumph and set an example of clemency which has no equal in human history
not only do we know almost everything he did we know the exact manner in which he did it
and that's some islam and the destiny of man i like that sentence where he writes guy eaton
he loved his native city and was driven from it into exile he went to medina of course finally
to return home in triumph and he set an example of clemency of mercy so when he had total power
he could have crushed his enemies destroyed them killed them but he showed them mercy and
guidance says this has no equal in human history absolutely extraordinary absolutely extraordinary
and just a couple more because i could go on over hours uh two more short ones and this
again is typical of guy eaton's just amazing ability to write brilliant prose condensed
spiritually powerful and and a way to change our perceptions of reality and this is this is
one such example from islam in the destiny of man just a few brief sentences he writes
the muslim does not feel dwarfed by the immensities of nature because he knows
himself to be the vice regent of god standing upright in the midst of such immensities
we those small in stature see the stars they do not see us we hold them within our consciousness
and measure them in accordance with our knowledge they know us not we master them in their courses
immensity cannot know itself only in human consciousness can such a concept exist wow
and maybe just one last one and this uh is quite hard hitting this one game from islam and the
destiny of man about science and scientists if the term science has any precise meaning relating it
to knowledge of the real then it is the science of tauheed it could be said and with good reason that
the cafe should never be permitted to approach the physical sciences or to involve himself in them
whoa what's going getting out here he does not possess the key to them and he is therefore
bound to go astray and to lead others astray he divides when he should unite and his fragmented
mind deals only with fragments it is little wonder that he splits the atom with devastating results
those who know nothing of the principle are incompetent to study its manifestations
then he quotes in the quran pursue not that of which thou hast no knowledge surely hearing and
sight and heart all these shall be called to account that's surah 17 verse 36 powerful words
we will never hear them anywhere in the media or in our orthodox knowledge uh extraordinary
and then the penultimate one a beautiful paragraph this the sunnah of the prophet provides not only
a framework but also as it were a network of channels into which the believers will
enters and through which it flows smoothly both guided and guarded it is not his way the muslims
way to cut new channels for his volative life through the recalcitrant materials of this world
against the grain of things at first sight one might expect this to produce a tedious
uniformity all the evidence indicates that it does nothing of the kind and anyone who has
had close contact with good and pious muslims will know that although they live within
a shared pattern of belief and behavior they are often more sharply differentiated
one from another than our profane people their characters strong and their individualities more
clearly delineated they have modeled themselves upon a transcendent norm of inexhaustible richness
whereas profane people have taken as their model the fashions of the time to put it another way
the great virtues and it is the prophet's virtues that the believer strives to imitate can it seems
be expressed through human nature in countless different ways whereas worldly fashion induces
uniformity in media advertisements one fashion model looks very much like another how true
and the last sentence here from his book islam and the destiny of man
god gave to adam and to his descendants the gift of intelligence asking in return not for blind
praise but for a lucid and joyful understanding of the nature of all things and their source
that's enough for now i could have quoted literally endless paragraphs uh his books are
full of gems like that just wants to share a few of them here today until next time