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Eternity may be understood through many avenues and at many levels.
The primary avenue of understanding it is the permanence of life
after death and resurrection; by extension, the ephemeral, temporary
moment of life is an obvious fact.
The
temporary nature of life is oftentimes difficult to accept. The
unwise have challenged life’s fading moment through celebrating only
this life, and through suppressing its underlying meaning and
reality.
Many
in life’s history have appreciated life with its joyous occasions--
success, birth, health, material well-being, and betrothal. Those
have lived their earthly moment-- but have also struggled to remind
themselves of life’s fading moment, in addition to their yearning
for the abode of paradise and for liberation from hellfire.
According to Islam, the road to salvation has, since the dawn of
human habitation on earth, been doctrinally and ethically identical:
surrender to the One God our Creator, to his messengers, belief in
the hereafter, and performance of righteous deeds and avoidance of
corruption.
The
Unity of God-- and his exclusive entitlement to be worshipped-- has
been a belief communicated through God’s Covenant with our
collective ancestor Adam, and his descendants, and through divine
revelations to the peoples and tribes of mankind: e.g. the Torah,
the Evangel and the Holy Koran, revealed to Moses, Jesus and the
Prophet Muhammad respectively. (Peace be upon them).
It is
no secret that many, in human history, until present times, have not
been believers. There are common threads in the phenomenon of
unbelief too many to enumerate here: but one of them is a denial of
the significance of life’s temporary moment, coupled with an
irrational denial of God’s Capability to resurrect the dead on the
Day of Judgement. That the denial of the possibility of resurrection
is an irrationality is because it limits-- through an intellectual
fiction-- God’s Attribute of Omnipotence (i.e. that God is Almighty
and that he is Capable of all things). It is an irrationality,
moreover, because all of us can witness the miracle of life in the
birth of each baby, in the growth of each tree…; and yet, through
observing the seemingly ordinary birth of life many exclude the
possibility that the God who created life in the first place is
capable of creating the same life again. To deny this is to express
a limited observation of life as occurring once. But to say that
life occurs once is simply false: the proofs of Revelation and
reason support this.
The
argument may be made, furthermore, that one of the primary sources
of human folly and oppression is denial of resurrection and Divine
accounting, over and above clinging to the illusion of permanence in
this life; sometimes, this has been the folly of individuals-- at
others, it has been the folly of elites of empires, ruling
dynasties, fiefdoms-- and, also, the folly of very modern secular
states (e.g. Communist, Nazi or liberal states). Hitler believed
that Berlin would be the Third Reich’s capital for 1,000
years; Communists were convinced that Socialism is where the
direction of history is; the liberal intellectual Fukuyama claimed
that liberalism is the final ideological and political event of
human history.
Jerusalem very much embodies the notion of the heavenly kingdom and
life after death; and yet, it has been characterized by some Zionist
politicians as “Israel’s” eternal capital. It is, sometimes more
appropriate to withhold comment when claims to political eternity
are made! History’s simplest lessons would have to be ignored in the
process.
Human
vision is maintained-- and the moral content of political conduct is
enhanced-- when people have the ability to affirm life’s and power’s
temporary moment. To affirm God’s unchanging reality and to believe
in the hereafter is critically important in the human quest to avoid
what is painful or disastrous. To learn, to build, to struggle, to
toil are facts of life: to do so with faith, with a commitment to
justice, and with an awareness of God’s purpose in life is to avoid
rolling the dice of uncertainty and self inflicted injury. Truly
Allah is All-Merciful and absolutely just.
July 3, 1999
Mr.
Khaled Nusseibeh is a translator and writer. He currently manages
the Ubada Center for Writing and Translation Services in Amman. Born
in Amman in 1961, he obtained his BA and MA from Columbia and
Princeton Universities, respectively. Mr. Nusseibeh, who originates
from Jerusalem, specialized in Near Eastern Studies with a focus on
Islamic thought and studies.
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