Of Boring Men And Women Who Love Them

This probably is the first time I am posting something like this, not really my area and this is hardly about Ed Miliband and how he will be the next Prime Minister.

But in an increasingly pernicious pornified public culture, where the cosmetics of a relationship supersede true responsibility when in private and where the ephemeral glamour of a wedding day is given more importance than the substance of a marriage that makes it durable, it is truly remarkable and refreshing that thoughts like those in this link still find their way to the public sphere.

Of course I post this not because I am going soft, but I have long argued that short lived relationships have everything to do with rampant consumerism that individualises people into one’s and feeds to them the perception of absolute independence.

Image from here.

Lankan Muslims and Their Image Problem

This article was first published in the print version of the Ceylon today on 24 July 2013 (view online soon) and  is in response to an interview of Dr.Ameer Ali published on the Ceylon Today on 19 July 2013 titled ‘Muslims are self-alienating’.

The state of Muslims in Sri Lanka has been closely observed over the last few years. Indeed the plight of Sri Lankan Muslims has become somewhat dire; new radical Sinhalese groups like the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) and the Sihala Ravaya (SR) have hijacked Buddhism and are both committing and advocating crimes against the Muslim community. It is in such a context, that Dr. Ameer Ali’s interview was published a few days ago.

When asked if he concurs with the widely asserted notion that a peaceful Muslim minority are under threat by elements representing a hegemonic Buddhist nationalism, Dr Ali opines that after more than a hundred years of ‘rationalism’, religion is once again in the ascendency. As such, Buddhism in Sri Lanka is seeing a revival.

There are multiple loopholes in this argument and if anything it is rather febrile in the face of the main structural issues at hand. While a global revival of religion has been noted, it is important to highlight that this has manifested in an increasing of religiosity amongst people who already profess a faith rather than a marked resurgence in the numerical ratio of people claiming to subscribe to a religion. Secularism too is on the rise, with atheism becoming more numerically prominent. Therefore, what is seen is not the reversal of a status quo where the numbers of atheists is diminishing to make way for the religious; rather it is the concentration of the strengths of already set religious and or other value systems.

Attributing the rise of the Bodu Bala Sena and the Sihala Ravaya to the revival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka is insulting to good decent Buddhist Sri Lankans if it isn’t farcical. For example, the BBS has been acting in contravention of law and order, embracing violent means and initiating vile, organised hate campaigns against ethnic minorities and those who have stood up against their methods. If the good Doctor sees this as the birth pangs of a revivalist Buddhism in Sri Lanka, there will be many who would spring out of a kicked bush to question his sense of reason.

Further, Dr. Ali states that since the 1970’s, there has been a spread of ‘orthodox Islam’ in Sri Lanka, supposedly brought to our shores by Sri Lankan workers returning from the middle East. This argument which has been liberally thrown about by many commentators, is fast gaining traction.

Unlike the Russian Orthodox Church which is the institution of an independent Christian denomination of its own, ‘orthodox Islam’ is a Western linguistic construct which has no definition except where the West would like to use it as it sees fit. From a Western lexicon, the rigid conservatism of the Afghan Mujahideen in the 70’s for instance was a non-issue when the Soviets had to be fought; Margaret Thatcher even reportedly celebrated with some of them in Downing Street.  The applicability of the phrase ‘orthodox Islam’ to the case of Sri Lankan Muslims therefore is in serious dispute.

Moreover, Dr Ali exhibits a rather futile sense of nostalgia for the state of the Muslims in the 1970’s which he uses to denigrate Lankan Muslims of today. Those who were born after the seventies were born to a different Sri Lanka and share a different identity and seek no avenue to revert to a time unheard of to them.

If the inference is that Muslims today will do well to revert to customs of the 70’s, it igoes against the epithets of any form of liberal or social democracy to want to impose the culture of a bygone era to a current generation who are a product of an entirely different time with different needs and issues. Incidentally, there is an interesting correlation where the allegation that the Muslims of the 70’s were different stem from those who left Sri Lanka domicile elsewhere in the 70’s, and therefore scrutinise Sri Lankan Muslims after a gap of a generation. The culture of Muslims today is a response to what is and what happens around them and it would be a synthetic intervention to modify that. If it is sentimentalism or nostalgia that is needed, then of course the interviewee would be forgiven if he limited himself to his harmless persuasions.

But if these nostalgic affirmations have serious political undertones, they are rather analogous in theory with the right wing loons in the US Tea Party who struggle to accept the US for the racial diversity it boasts of today, but yearn for times of yore when an all-white US bureaucratic hegemony trampled down the black communities and native Americans with impunity.

Therefore, that the Muslims seen in Sri Lanka in the 70’s were different remains only to be an innocent fact.

It is a basic anthropological ideal that societies, communities, faiths and belief systems evolve in response to the inevitable changes occurring around them. All religious and ethnic communities in Sri Lanka have responded to the changes around them, culturally or ideologically. The Tamils of Sri Lanka who were subjected to ostracism by sections of the Sinhalese majority for the last thirty years, are naturally different today than they were decades ago. The simplistic argument augmented by this commentator that the Muslims of the 70’s were somehow better, needs to be laid to rest. Things change and communities change around them, The once white America now has a Black President, it was a Conservative (not liberal) Prime Minister that pushed through legislation legalising gay marriage in Britain

Further, the majority of the Muslims of the 1970’s were either mono-lingual Tamil speakers, with a limited elite who were both Tamil and English speaking. Contrast this with today where the average Muslim is bi-lingual with the class of Muslims who are tri-lingual  increasingly on the rise, thus making the Sri Lankan Muslims the least polarised and most diverse Sri Lankan community when it comes to languages. This is notwithstanding the fact that there are recognisable sections of the Sri Lankan Muslim populace who speak Malay, Arabic or Urdu in addition to the three main languages. The Muslim community therefore is linguistically the least insular of all communities

Since communal conflict in Sri Lanka has more precedent to be based on ethnicity (perhaps language related) than religion, that Dr. Ali doesn’t see the receptive position of current day Lankan Muslims vis-a-vis integration is deplorable if it isn’t laughable. Therefore, to cite ideological changes in a community over a period of thirty years, a natural development that is hard to measure or quantify and to simultaneously ignore and overlook other quantifiable socio-political development indices of the Lankan Muslim community is both biased and inaccurate.

The interviewee then goes on to making some facetious claims of how Muslims should be part of the Dalada Perahera. That they don’t take part isn’t a crime and Muslims give due credence to the event as being of national significance and its purity doesn’t have to be adulterated by Muslims taking part, unless if requested to do so, I am reluctant to believe that this was the puritarian orthodoxy that he mentioned of earlier.

Other aspects raised by Dr.Ali, include the supposed banes of Muslim schools being closed during Ramadan, thereby exercising a liberty he has to express himself at the cost of opening academically irrelevant cans of worms. I myself was educated at a Christian Missionary school in Colombo and therefore never had holidays during Ramadan, but Muslim schools being closed during Ramadan has never been an impediment to social integration.

Moreover, he highlights the fact that there are funds coming into the Muslim community from Saudi Arabia which in turn helps institutionalise a Saudi brand of ‘Intolerant Islam’. The record of the Saudi’s is nothing to be proud of, reports increasingly suggest that that oppressive regime of the Saudis with a host of other Arab states connived with the US to depose the first democratically elected President of Egypt. Therefore, the Saudi’s have little virtue to extol.

However, Sri Lanka is a democratic country underpinned by a legal system; it is not anyone’s concern what comes from where, as long as it doesn’t impinge local laws and regulations. His concerns of Saudi money coming in is akin to some Sinhala extremists crying foul that the Norwegians are funding Christian groups in Sri Lanka and importing a foreign brand of Christianity that seeks to proselytise the majority Buddhists. Of course he callously neglects to calibrate his argument by failing to recognise the dangerous development in relationships between the radical monks in Myanmar who are responsible for many violent deaths of the Rohingya and local radical monks.

The dominant image Dr. Ali seems to conjure of the Lankan Muslim community is of a conclave of black burka wearing women & bearded men donning flowing white robes, He blatantly fails to recognise the image of a non-violent resilient community, brutally uprooted from their domicile in the north by the LTTE exacerbated by the indifference of successive governments to its plight, a community hounded by a fringe of Tamil terrorists in the past and hounded by a fringe Buddhist extremists in the present, a community that has overcome discriminatory bureaucratic patterns to become highly entrepreneurial.

Very regrettably, When atrocities of the LTTE stole the image of an educated and upwardly mobile Tamil community, and when violent escapades of Buddhist extremism is distorting the pristine image of the Sinhalese, it is both whimsical and flippant of the Doctor to think that Sri Lankan Muslims are plagued by an image problem.

Image from here.

NOTE: Dr Ameer Ali’s callous remarks somewhat fall in line with an older post of mine titled ‘For Muslim Critics of the Lankan Muslim Community’

Bodu Bala Sena and Their Muslim Funding

Evangelicism is quite a common phenomenon in many parts of the world. Evangelicals take many forms and hues, from the hysteric evangelic Christians with their TV shows in the US or Muslim televangelists in many parts of the Muslim world, mostly in South Asia than in the Middle East, like this Muslim loon here who likes to put on a show.

What is also known is that these evangelical types operate in most covert and clandestine ways, often conspiring between power factions to create turmoil to facilitate the requirement of a peace keeping force in whose guise these evangelical types can creep in furtively through INGO’s and clubs & societies, smaller tentacles of the evangelical types have even percolated as clubs & societies in Sri Lankan schools. Co-Education not being the norm in Sri Lankan schools, these clubs and societies thrive on the notion that boys or girls get the chance to interact with the opposite gender, not something readily available if you schooled in Sri Lanka.

The crux of my ranting above is to drive the fact that evangelicals work in the most ingenious means by penetrating into our collective psyche so much that they become part of the default setup, so much so that you welcome them in, not knowing that they are luring you out.

The Bodu Bala Sena have been on the rampage in Sri Lanka these past few months, you may think they are a Buddhist organisation trying to promote the values of true Buddhism, like Metta, Karuna, Muditha and Upekka, but you, like most of the others around you are far from the truth.

It has been revealed that the Bodu Bala Sena is funded by a Muslim evangelical organisation based in the Middle East. Having successfully taught Sri lankans about Halal and Haram, they are now hell bent on teaching Sri Lankans about the attire of Muslim women in Sri Lanka, before long the vast majority of Sri Lankans will know about the hijab and abhaya, terms otherwise confined mostly to cities with mixed ethnic populations.

The concept of Halal and Haram are ancient Islamic concepts, but they were confined to the inner walls of the Sri Lankan Muslim community because non Muslims do not have to live according to what is stipulated by Halal and Haram. Halal being anything that are permissible and Haram being what are impermissible. The Bodu Bala Sena has gone about vociferously advocating the abstention from Halal foods. They put out posters, large rallies were held and many TV slots were allocated for the BBS to teach the Sinhalese Majority of the Islamic concepts that are halal and haram.

Many monks belonging to the BBS have been seen researching the Qur’an very studiously to understand what it means and what it seeks to espouse. Ven. Galaboda Aththe Gnansara Thera has been seen holding the Qur’an and explaining to the Sinhalese masses what it truly means.  Sinhalese Buddhists who probably never held a Qur’an in their life, having seen a revered monk propagate from it are now driven to study the Qur’an to see what the fuss is all about, thereby getting attracted to the Islamic faith, reliable BBS sources who cannot be revealed have stated.

Of course the reverend monk who appears on TV and BBS platforms seemingly espousing true Buddhist teachings in the pristine Sinhalese that he speaks with calming rhetoric that can proselytise to Buddhism even members from the Taleban was once seen to have behaved like this video shows – ranting in colourful language, except the colour here was in reference to anatomical sections in the human body, both Muslim and Buddhist.

It has been revealed that the paymasters of the Bodu Bala Sena now want the Sinhalese masses to be educated on the Abhaya and Hijab. The rapid westernisation of Sri Lankan society means that the Muslims are getting de-islamicised and the Buddhist majority are getting secular, thereby deviating from Buddhist ethical codes of morality and charity. If the secularisation of the majority Sinhalese were to go unchecked it would be onerous for the Muslims to proselytise the Sri Lankan Sinhalese. The role of the BBS therefore is constantly keep the Buddhist majority in check by infusing Islamic principles into their daily routine, what better way than doing so by scapegoat-ing the existing Muslim population.

Indeed the Muslim evangelical intelligentsia have been so powerful and devious that the Bodu Bala Sena have got wide recognition in Sri Lanka, and the BBS are promoting Islam in Sri Lanka in ways the Sri Lankan Muslim community would have known to be possible.

Further cementing the devious nature of the Muslim Jamiyathul Ulema can be seen in the kind and calm manner in which they have been dealing with the situation compared to the hate filled hysteric rhetoric employed by BBS. This is a carefully orchestrated move of trying to portray goons as Buddhist monks and thereby smear the nobility of a revered philosophy such as Buddhism. It seems this is now bearing fruit, as Gamini Kotakadenia from Theldeniya  mentions here.

True Sinhalese and Buddhists who value their cultural identity must be careful of this rapid Islamisation being spread by the Bodu Bala Sena, their intention is to make this beautifully diverse island nation rid of the majority Sinhalese who if this Bodu Bala Sena scourge were to go on a rampage would soon be much less in proportions.

Image from here.

Sri Lanka and the Halal Controversy

I have been trying to write on this matter for sometime, for lack of time and the want to write something coherent without just ranting, I have been keeping away from it.

This gentleman from the Jemmiyathul Ulema (Sri Lankan body of Muslim Theologians) gives an excellent analysis of the social, legal and political dimensions of what ‘Halal’ is and what this controversy is all about, in very eloquent Sinhalese I must add.

It is important that non Muslims in Sri Lanka are enlightened on this matter,  please do share this video to dispel doubts and reduce the chances of unnecessary tension.

The Golden Globes, Homeland and Islamophobia

I watched both seasons of Homeland, as gripping and exciting as both seasons are, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that it is yet another film/TV Series that portrays the default image of Muslims as being terrorists. In the defence of the show, it does show the US Vice President as being a murderer who ordered drone strikes that killed 80 or so children, but the damages the show would do for the image of an everyday Muslim living a normal life is overshadow any depiction of fairness or balance of the real narrative.

It is with a lot of accuracy that Laila Al Arian describes the show as “TV’s most Islamophobic show“.

I like Damian Lewis who plays Sergeant Brody, the Muslim, Vice Presidential candidate nominee and secret terrorist. I posted a facebook link to Damian Lewis being interviewed by Jonathan Ross where he says that he did not want the film to make ‘lazy’ comparisons between  Islam and violence, and instead Islam could be a force for good that sustains him. As noble as Lewis’s thoughts may have been, I am reluctant to feel that Homeland succeeds in doing that. I did the mistake of posting the YouTube link on facebook before actually watching the show.

Homeland has been featuring in my facebook feed for sometime now and many have been watching it. My worry is that it will reinforce the wrong and lazy assertion that the average Muslims, for all their average activities are usually closet terrorists.

The Golden Globe awards that concluded a few days ago have been an endorsement of a rancid American foreign policy in the Middle East and the Film Industry has yet again proved to be the preferred apparatus of US foreign policy to set the stage for future operations.

Rachel Shabi notes in The Guardian about the Golden Globes-

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

I am inclined to side with Rachel wholeheartedly.

If Homeland did one good thing to sustain my faith it is this – Brody recites a prayer after Abu Nazeer is killed, in thankfulness that his life is now returning to normal, he recites this outside Carrie’s family holiday camping home, I had forgotten this prayer, I must say I say it a lot now. If not for anything, I am thankful to Homeland for this.

وَقَالُواْ ٱلۡحَمۡدُ لِلَّهِ ٱلَّذِى هَدَٮٰنَا لِهَـٰذَا وَمَا كُنَّا لِنَہۡتَدِىَ لَوۡلَآ أَنۡ هَدَٮٰنَا ٱللَّهُ‌ۖ

And they say: The praise to God, Who has guided us to this. We could not truly have been led aright if God had not guided us. (A’raf : 43)

Image from here. 

For Muslim Critics of The Lankan Muslim Community

I was involved in a twitter argument with someone known and someone unknown about the recent spate of Buddhist extremism in Sri Lanka, particularly instigated against Muslims.  The argument was that there were certain sections of the Muslim community in Sri Lanka who claim that Buddhists are not entirely to blame for the recent anti Muslim activities, but rather there is an outside force kindling unnecessary fires, in this case the group in question was Jewish/Israeli interference. Whether there is authenticity to such claims is for an entirely different post.

But my argument is this, it is nauseating to see some Muslims in Sri Lanka so easily driven to castigate the Sri Lankan Muslim community, if it isn’t clear – castigating their own community. This is a typical mindset fostered by Muslims in many parts of the world where Muslims are a subjugated minority with very low upward mobility, socially, politically or economically. It reflects a sense of insecurity of being part of the community that is so backward, and therefore castigating it is a way of trying to get others to look at one differently. As if to get others to say, “oh he may be from the Muslim community, but he is cooler than most of them”.

The vast majority of my adult life was spent in the West, therefore I understand how the temptation and indeed the opportunities to want to distance one self from the negativities intrinsic to your own community is extremely high. It is a sort of pariah attitude where you feel like you can belong in a better community, but at the same time not be accepted by any other community, simply for not being one of them. I was fostered and harnessed entirely by non Muslim institutions; the only Muslim institution that took care of me was my family. Therefore, the vast majority of my social transactions are with non Muslims, social transactions with Muslims are a mere trifle compared to the rest. Thus, I understand why others in my situation may feel the need to castigate their identity and thereby be apologists in the empty belief that they would be better accepted by another social circle that isn’t of their own.

But in my humble belief, that is to confess an insecurity of their own identity – in this case a Sri Lankan Muslim. The Sri Lankan Muslim community is one of the most backward communities in Sri Lanka, most of the indices point towards such backwardness. The percentage of Muslim university entrants is lesser than the population percentage of Muslims in Sri Lanka as a whole, and the percentage of Muslim convicts is greater than the population percentage of Muslims in Sri Lanka as a whole.

This must not be misunderstood as wanting to not foster integration. Indeed it is pivotal that all communities in Sri Lanka integrate and harness good inter community relations if Sri Lanka is to rise as a built nation.

I will be a fierce critic of my community if need be, but I would consider it shameful and beneath myself to exaggerate the ills of my community in order the project myself as being much better than that. I speak of community here, but the same applies to one’s identity as being part of a nation. If you live in the West, castigating Sri Lanka as a nation is not the way to amplify your otherwise sound credentials.

Therefore, Muslim critics of the Sri Lankan Muslim community, can criticise all they want – but should always keep their intentions purified and in check. Whatever they may think, their community and their country will always be bigger than them.

Image from here.

The Muslim Life of Pi

Not really the Muslim life, but spiritual life would have been more apt. Also, spoiler alert.

I finally managed to watch ‘Life of Pi’ yesterday, I say ‘finally’ like I have been wanting to watch it for sometime now, but no – it was just a spur of the moment decision to go and watch it. I didn’t necessarily have it bookmarked as a must watch.

The book has been highly commended and many people whose opinions I trust have recommended it to me and I really did want to read it. I did the mistake however of watching the film first, and I think I may now never read the book. By this I mean not to say that the book has now diminished in my mind as an essential read, but the film I thought was a bit of a drag.

What the film successfully does however is to make it clear how good the book is and why the book must have been so good in the way it elucidates the power and presence of God in our lives. Therefore, if anything the film doesn’t really reduce the impression one may have had of the book.

The film I thought was a bit too long, and there were instances where I would have pressed the forward button if I was watching it at home on a DVD.  Pi, the protagonist (a believer of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam)  gets stranded in the middle of the ocean after a shipwreck that kills all aboard including his parents and his brother, that was made clear, with that the  human mind can associate to some extent the various perils and sufferings that come with being stranded. The film spent a lot of time trying to convey this.  Personally, I felt there were instances where time durations could have been cut down, more so when no powerful spiritual or literary message was really being conveyed compared to the time that it was taking. Another good film which had good reviews and yet which I found to be a drag at times is 127 hours, yet another instance where the film tended to focus far too much on reinforcing the suffering of the protagonist upon the viewer when the message surely had been conveyed.

But as a spiritual person and someone who believes in the presence of God, there were poignant moments which struck me and certainly pushed the case for the fact that as humans we aren’t entirely in control of ourselves or our actions. Our actions too are a result of the manoeuvring of us by a far more supreme being.

When Pi was stranded in the middle of the ocean, with nothing to depend on except some emergency supplies he finds on the boat and a Bengal tiger with which he was constantly involved in a battle for life, and yet at the same time kept him alive and alert, one does get the idea that much is said here about life. This is an instance when one really feels helpless and is truly in the hands of God. Many times we come across people or situations in life which are to our lives like the tiger was to Pi in this particular sequence of his life.

The tiger was an apparatus used by a higher power that kept Pi alive by being the significant threat to his life that it was, the fact that Pi had to struggle so much to go to the boat from his little raft to collect supplies at the risk of being eaten up strengthened his resolve and kept him vigilant. When all else was lost and the tiger had nothing else to feed on except to eat Pi, hordes of flying fish suddenly collide with the boat and the boat fills up just enough fish for the tiger and Pi to feast upon, thereby reducing the vulnerability of Pi from being eaten up by the tiger.

Just at that point I was reminded of this Qur’an verse –

 وَمَن يَتَّقِ ٱللَّهَ يَجۡعَل لَّهُ ۥ مَخۡرَجً۬ا (٢) وَيَرۡزُقۡهُ مِنۡ حَيۡثُ لَا يَحۡتَسِبُ‌ۚ وَمَن يَتَوَكَّلۡ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ فَهُوَ حَسۡبُهُ

 “And for those who fear God, He (ever) prepares a way out. And He provides for him from (sources) he never could imagine. And if anyone puts his trust in God, sufficient is (God) for him.”  (Chapter  65 Verses 2-3)

There were numerous instances during the film when I thought that the ideal scene had been set where Pi would perhaps dramatically yell out something similar to the prayer of Prophet Jonah (Yunus for Muslims), but he did not. However, Pi did look towards the skies and cry out in despair that he had lost his parents and everything else, and asked what more God wanted from him.

After leaving the carnivores island, Pi says something to the effect that even though he was in instances of difficulty in numerous occasions and all hope was lost, he sensed that God made His presence felt in one way or the other and despite all the pains and sufferings, he felt that God never abandoned him.

This is when one (I in this instance) realises how every single living and non living construct play a part in our lives and this whilst accomplishing their own purposes of existence, they also come and influence our lives to a certain extent to remind us of the purpose of our existence, and how we should get about our lives, as peoples of faith or otherwise.

Upon reaching the shores of Mexico, Richard Parker (the name of the Tiger) just walks away from Pi, stops for a moment as if to look back at him, and then just continues to walk into the dense forest and Pi never sees him again. This naturally upsets Pi a lot, despite all that the tiger and the boy have been through, through the most perilous moments of their lives, the tiger just walks off without saying good bye. This reminded me of another Quranic story, the story of Moses and Khildr.

Moses had erred by proclaiming that he was extremely knowledgeable and that he knew the mysteries behind all or most things without attributing his strength as coming from God. God sends down Khildr to meet Moses and after three incidents where Moses’ wrong claim to absolute knowledge is established, Khildr goes away, never to be seen on the face of the earth.

The tiger in this instance had a worldly purpose to fullfill, and amongst its scope of work would have been to teach Pi vital lessons of trust, belief, hope and absolute reliance on God.

Sometimes people come into our lives; in their living they fulfil their purpose of existence. But the very purpose of their existence may perhaps be purely as guidance to us who have erred as a mercy from Allah. The soldiers of Allah can take any form, and rarely do we recognise them as soldiers of Allah sent to help believers – but they are there.

Tabarani reports that , “A man came to Abu Darda and said to him, ‘O Abu Darda, your house has burned.’ He said: ‘No, it cannot be burned. Allah will never allow this to happen because of the words that I heard from the Prophet, peace be upon him. Whoever says these words in the beginning of a day, the Prophet, peace be upon him, told us, will not be afflicted by a misfortune until the end of the day, and whoever says these words in the evening will not be afflicted until morning. These words are, 

“O Allah, You are my Lord, there is no god but You, I put my trust in You, You are the Lord of the Mighty Throne. Whatever Allah wills will happen and what He does not will, cannot happen. There is no power or strength except with Allah, the Exalted, the Mighty. I know that Allah has power over all things, and Allah comprehends all things in knowledge. O Allah, I seek refuge with You from the evil of myself and from the evil of all creatures under Your control. Surely the straight way is my Sustainers’ way“.

In some versions of this hadith we further find that he said, “Come, let us go. So he went with them to his house. They found all the area surrounding the house burned but his house was not damaged.”

Life of Pi is of book or film that illustrates the life of a man, who believes in all main faiths, yet the lessons derived from it and the resonance it has to Islamic values is truly poignant. Points to those of us who ponder.

For those of you who do not believe in a God, this post will come across as loony. Watch the film or read the book all the same.

Image from here.