NEW YEAR VISION
With this issue, the Light enters upon the 40th year of its publication. Our first thought on stepping into the new year is one of thankfulness to God Almighty for having enabled us to do our little bit towards keeping the flame of Faith burning in this age of wide-spread scepticism, even defiance of spiritual value’s, as well as of prayer that He, out of his unbounded grace, may give us light and strength to continue making our little contribution towards promoting better understanding of the truths of religion.
Looking back, the span of life so far covered by the Light presents quite a vast and variegated panorama – the gradual winding up of one epoch and the birth of an altogether new epoch. When the Light made its appearance in the early twenties, the throb of religion in a Muslim’s breast had touched the lowest ebb. The intelligentsia was by and large even ashamed of owning religion. Indeed, everywhere in the Muslim world, the stagnation and backwardness that had stamped Muslim thinking and life was ascribed to the dead weight which Islam was considered to be.
To-day we find the whole face of things changed. Talk of Islam and Islamic values is on everybody’s lips. The world as a whole has been shaken – and shaken rudely by two World Wars – out of its illusion that it had found the millennium in the material advancement it had achieved. Instead of a millennium, what it actually found was what the Quran describes as the phenomenon of the mirage in a sandy desert which the thirsty wayfarer mistakes for water, and feverishly pursues in the fond hope that the end of his travail is within his reach only to find disillusionment and frustration awaiting him.
The old age of Godless materialism now lies dead and buried, and the new age that has arisen on its ashes is unmistakably the Age of Faith, the Age of Religion. Mankind has through the hard schooling of disastrous conflicts and clashes, awakened to the truth that a life without God is a rootless life which like a rolling stone gathers no moss. True peace and tranquillity of mind can come only as the blossoming and fruition of a life with roots struck deep and firm in faith in God.
While the Light has every reason to look back with satisfaction on what it has been able to do in the past towards the making of the new age, it is not unmindful of the big challenge that the new age has brought with it. The task that lies ahead is far more tremendous. The force that the new age has released is a whole wave of urge to know God. Between the urge to know, however, and the actual knowing of God there is a wide gap. It should be the endeavour of all seekers after spiritual values to fill that gap. And that is what the Light hopes and prays it may be vouchsafed light and strength to do, in however a small measure.
What usually passes for Islam, it is so often forgotten, is not Islam. When a Muslim talks of reorienting his life in the light of the Quran and the Sunna, he thinks he has done something meritorious in the eye of God. He forgets that talk of Islam is no substitute for Islam itself, which means life. Likewise, when he recalls the noble lives of the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions, he forgets that this in itself is no virtue. The Quran leaves us in no illusion about it. Those were a people that are gone, it reminds us. They got what they earned; you will get what you earn.
Paradoxically much that passes for religion is an escapism from the underlying purpose of religion. To scan the Quran without a personal realisation of God, to say prayer and go through other prescribed observances without the personal realisation of God are only so many ways to bypass God, direct personal contact with Whom is the only true core of Islam – indeed of all religions.
This is what the Seers and Savants of old described as the bringing of the Kingdom of God. Without bringing God into our day-to-day life it would be a sheer illusion to think we can be good Muslims. Theology, sermons, devotional observances are all vein unless they help forge a personal link with God in the actual game of life. This is the new inspiration, the new vision, which the Light prays it may be enabled to keep before it while adding one more year of service to its humble endeavours.
M.Y.Khan
The LIGHT – Sunday, January 8,1961.
