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
