الأحد، 4 مايو 2014

Translated: Prophet Mohamad, Jerusalem and Life of Pi




Prophet Mohamad, Jerusalem and Life of Pi






"Life of Pi" might be the deepest movie out there. Thos movie presents evidence before mankind and makes him or her choose a judge: The mind, or the heart. The movie starts with a strange request from a guy to Pi, who's a rational grown up man now. The guy said: "My friend told me that you could make me believe in the existence of a god." Pi then narrates to him his story on how he got lost in the sea after his ship sank in the ocean and his family's death, about the life he had to bear alone with a Bengali tiger on a lifeboat, about the prayers he sent to three gods, about the island that swallowed people and about the illuminating whale. People saw no more to his story than a hallucination of a young sacred boy, so he told them another one, a realistic, highly violent, very believable story. It was chosen by an insurance company as "the real" story, because it was more believable. The guy asked him after that: "And which one of the stories is the real one?" "Which one do you prefer?" Pi answered. Now, after the movie stood people wondering, which of the two stories is the real one? What is faith in this story? Faith, simple is your ability to believe the story. Let me simplify it further for you. We as Muslims, believe that in heavens there are palaces made of gold and silver, Alweldan Al-Mokhaladoon*, Hoor Al-Aeen* and rivers of purified milk. Any attempt of explaining this will fail, it is simply not possible! But if you were in a position like Pi's and you had to come up with a story that people would believe and can be made into a movie, you would say something like: "Weldan Mokhaladoon that looks like actor X, or Hoor Al-Aeen like the beauty queen of 2012, and the closest it would get to the palace is Dolma Bahja and Versailles combined." Got it? You know for certain that this is unlike anything any nobody ever saw, and like nothing an ear has ever heard. You know your description does not do it justice. A disbeliever's brain functions in a way that he \ she thinks that they are too smart to believe in myths. A man of science, but the truth is that their minds are just too narrow to embrace and understand faith and the existence of such thing. Back to Pi's story; let's go back in time, thousands of years back. Imagine a man sitting next to you saying: "I lived inside of a whale and for a while I lost track of time, I did not know when morning was and when night was, not even how long I stayed there for. Then he threw me out on a deserted land. Hunger almost got me, if it wasn't for a pumpkin tree that grew right next to me!" Atypical reaction would be: "How insane, he's delusional!" Or another guy that would say: "While I was asleep, a creature, a ride came to me and took me to Jerusalem! There I found my long gone fellow friends, I could not recognize them, I was with another man, but he was not human, he told me which was who. Then we prayed together, I was the Imam. Then this man took me up the sky, and I saw such and such..." You would answer: "You were in your bed? And you came back to your bed?" He would reply: "Yes!" You would turn to your friends and say: "Oh man, He's been dreaming!" The first story is that of Younis peace be upon him, and the second is Mohammed peace be upon him in Al-Isra'a wa Al-Me'raj*. These stories are unbelievable, but we believe that they actually happened. Why? Because we believe that we pray and worship Allah wanting for the other unbelievable thing: heavens, the palaces and rivers we've been promised, because we believe in Al-Akherah* we subconsciously believe in the first, because the truth lies within the entire story. The beginning, the middle and the end of it, it is all true, even if it was unbelievable. And what does Pi have to do with all that? Pi says that he was with a tiger, and tells his story. We say that Jerusalem is ours, and Prophet Mohammad was the Imam of when he prayed with all the other prophets, but that's not the rest of the world's take on the matter, they say: "Jerusalem does not belong to Muslims, because unlike Moses and Jesus, there isn’t any evidence that he actually went there in the first place!" You would say: "No, he visited Jerusalem and prayed there too!" They would ask where and how? There is where you would be in Pi's position. You would say the truth that they would disbelieve in because they do not understand, because faith, on the contrary to popular belief, needs a very open mind, a very wise one. My simple definition of faith is that it is the only thing that you truly and fully understand, but just cannot explain. Now my question to you is: which story do you favor?



-Haja
Translated by: Mariam Al-Kuwari (@xelicious)


Hour Al-Ain and Al-Wildan Al-Mukhaldoon: Here

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