It’s very easy to see the beginning, but extremely hard to see the how we got here. In the old days, when men were men and women were women and growing up meant a black-eye in the playground, there were axioms. Axioms that were recognised and acknowledged and from there you moved forward and outward. They established decisively that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, that what begins must be begun by something else, and that the contingent cannot give existence to itself.

This was the nature of the world and how we saw things: things as they really are. If something seemed improbable, a sea that parts, a staff turning into a serpent, you asked a simple question: is this impossible? Is it akin to a triangle with four sides or a square circle? Or is it unhabitual? Meaning improbable, but not intrinsically impossible

Miracles are unhabitual. They’re not contradictions nor impossibles. They’re breaks in habit. And habit, in the older metaphysics, had a maker. This Maker, the Necessary Existent, the One that must be, was not bound by the custom He had established. A break in the custom, then, was not a break in reason nor in intelligibility. The intellect could assent to it, even if the eye had seen nothing like it. And that assent counted as knowledge because of its underlying intelligibility.

But we no longer inhabit that world.

The New Age philosophy says it lives outside, in the field with its instruments. It says it will not assent until it has seen and empirically observed. Its epistemology is observation. Only what is sensed is known. Only what is measured is real.

This is far from the truth and this philosophy has its own contradictions. Watch what it does when it talks about matter. It speaks of fields no one has touched, of particles that appear only as traces on a screen, of dark matter that explains everything precisely because it cannot be seen. It posits. It imagines. It calls the imagining a model and then forgets it imagined anything at all. It remains, all the while, quite sure of its own hard-headedness.

This creates a particular kind of skeptic. He is not, as he thinks, a rationalist. He is a man who has dismissed reason early and kept only his senses, and then, without noticing, has begun to serve his imagination. He comes to the question of the miraculous with one demand: ‘show me something like it.’

Tell him that omnipotence, if omnipotence exists, can actualize any contingent reality, and he will look past you. Possibility is not enough for him. He needs a precedent. He needs a case that resembles it, a photograph of a similar sea, a documented instance of a staff that behaved strangely in a laboratory in 1973. Without that, a low-level anxiety remains. He calls it doubt. It’s not doubt. It’s his imaginative faculty, the faculty that stores images and insists the world must look like the images it already owns and all the while it refusing to be quiet.

We’re in a strange moment: an abundance of information and a scarcity of abstraction and first principles. We have data on everything and principles for almost nothing. We believe in gravity because someone drew a curve, not because we understand causation. We disbelieve in the splitting of the sea because we have never seen water stand up.

It is not that we will not believe without seeing. It is that we will believe only what we have already seen.

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My dear Husain,

Congratulations on your A level results.

You’ll be leaving home soon and you’ll find yourself managing your affairs by yourself. As you prepare for this next stage of life, I’d like to remind you of your duties towards your Lord. Your mother may not be watching you, but God always is.

Be mindful of your prayers and take care of its form and substance. Though they make take a lifetime to acquire, they should be at the forefront of your mind. These are: love in the heart, sincerity of intention, the hope of acceptance in the Divine Presence, and such absorption before God that, for a little while at least, the claims of everything else grow faint.

The true prayer is the prayer of those who have attained to its inward reality. To reach that station is difficult. It takes time, patience, and no small amount of labour. But difficulty is no reason for abandoning the attempt. One must have courage and continue trying. Perhaps God will make easy what at first appeared impossible:

“As for those who strive in Our cause, We shall surely guide them to Our ways.”

Let me explain, then, how you might begin.

Think of the prayer as though it were a living body: its heart is a pure intention. Its spirit is the presence of the heart before God. Its body consists of standing, bowing, prostrating, and the other outward acts. Its principal limbs are its integrals; and its faculties are the deliberate recitation of its words and the proper rendering of the Qur’an.

A living body cannot dispense with its heart, its spirit, or its limbs. Neither, in the estimation of the people of God, can the true prayer be complete when these inward realities are absent.

Prayer also requires purification. We know the purification of the body: the ablution by which a person prepares himself to stand before God. But there is a purification belonging to the heart as well. It is to cleanse the heart of whatever competes with God for its deepest allegiance.

For it is the heart upon which the Divine regard falls. As the Prophetic teaching tells us, God does not look to our outward forms, but to our hearts. If the heart remains unclean, what shall outward cleanliness avail? The body follows the heart; the servant therefore ought to begin by setting the heart in order.

When you stand for prayer, try not merely to pronounce its words. Make the words true of you.

When you say Allāhu Akbar - God is the Greatest - let the heart acknowledge that nothing besides Him deserves ultimate greatness or reverence. And when you raise your hands for the opening takbīr, imagine that with that movement you have put the world behind you. You have come to stand before God.

When you say:

“I have turned my face…”

turn the face of the heart as well. The body has already faced the qiblah; now let the heart find its qiblah.

When you recite:

“All praise belongs to God,”

remember that nothing in the world possesses any excellence independently of Him. Whatever is truly praiseworthy returns, in the end, to God, from whom every perfection comes.

When you say:

“Lord of all the worlds,”

let the heart acknowledge that there is no true Sustainer besides Him. Every creature is being carried, nourished, preserved, and brought from one condition to another by His care.

Then:

“The Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.”

Here let hope arise. Think of His tenderness, His favour, and His mercy, and establish that hope firmly in the heart.

But hope should not make the servant heedless. Therefore you immediately say:

“Master of the Day of Judgement.”

Now let awe accompany hope. Remember the Resurrection and the Day on which all borrowed authority will disappear and the truth will become plain:

“The command that Day belongs to God alone.”

Then you come to the centre of the matter:

“You alone we worship.”

Try, when saying it, to realise that nothing possesses independent existence before Him: lā mawjūda illā Allāh.

And when you say:

“You alone we ask for help,”

realise that no agent acts independently of Him: lā fāʿila illā Allāh. Means exist, causes operate, human beings act and choose; but none possesses a power standing outside the power and permission of God.

Then you ask:

“Guide us to the straight path.”

Do not let this become merely a familiar sentence. Ask for an actual road: a road by which you may reach God.

And when you continue:

“The path of those upon whom You have bestowed Your favour,”

ask for the road travelled by the Prophets, the truthful, the saints, and the righteous servants of God.

Then:

“Not those who have incurred anger, nor those who have gone astray.”

Seek refuge both from the displeasure of God and from your own capacity to lose the way.

The movements of the prayer should likewise have an inward meaning.

As you stand, ask God for steadfastness upon the Sharīʿah and the path to Him.

As you bow, remember His greatness and your own smallness.

As you prostrate, contemplate your own passing nature and His permanence. You descend until the forehead itself rests upon the earth, and in that abasement recognise that all lasting greatness belongs to Him.

And when you sit in the tashahhud, let there be something of self-effacement in the heart: less of yourself, and therefore more room for the remembrance of God.

This is why you should make a serious effort to ensure that the prayer you recite is true of the person reciting it.

We say Allāhu Akbar; let us ask whether anything has become greater in our hearts than God. We say iyyāka naʿbudu (You alone we worship) let us ask what else we secretly serve. We ask to be guided upon the straight path; let us ask whether we are willing to walk upon it when it is shown to us.

Otherwise there is a danger that the tongue will testify to something from which the heart remains absent.

So work especially upon presence of heart and sincerity. Watch over yourself during the prayer. When the heart wanders, bring it back. When you discover a deficiency, correct it. If necessary, begin again. Do this repeatedly, and do not be discouraged by the frequency with which the mind escapes you. A wandering heart is trained by returning it, and returning it again.

There is an old saying:

Whoever truly seeks a thing finds it.

Take this as encouragement, not as an excuse for impatience. The treasure is not ordinarily obtained in a day. What matters is that you do not cease seeking merely because you have experienced, once or twice, a sweetness in prayer. Do not mistake an occasional state for the destination.

Continue.

The object is not simply to have a better prayer. It is to arrive, by God’s grace, at the reality of prayer; and through prayer, to find God.

There is a Persian verse which expresses the resolve required:

I shall not withdraw my hand from seeking until my purpose is attained:
either I shall reach the Beloved, or life itself shall leave this body.

Make something of that constancy your own, my dear Husain. Do not demand perfection from yourself at the beginning, but do not make peace with heedlessness either. Stand before God, fail, return; become distracted, return; find the heart absent, and return once more.

For perhaps much of the secret of prayer lies in that returning.

May God, by His grace, grant you sincerity in intention, presence in worship, and finally that prayer which is not merely performed by the body but lived by the heart.

Your loving father

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

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I’ve been to prison twice in my life. Not for any misdemeanours or juvenile delinquency, but as a visitor. The first time was to visit a friend, who did, as it happens, suffer the consequences of a misspent youth. I won’t go into the details. But I did experience the security protocol that a visitor has to go through just to say hello to his friend. I was searched with a metal detector, sniffed by a dog and had to stand next to one of the most foul-smelling people I have ever met. I’m not complaining. The prisons do us a great service by keeping our streets safe from thieves, drug-dealers, murderers, rapists and others of their ilk. The drugs however, still get in. Black Mamba, as my friend tells me, was the trending drug in Winson Green and Oakwood prisons.

The second time was as a guest of the chaplaincy. Still the metal detector, but no sniffer-dog licking my hand and certainly no hideously smelling people standing in front or behind me. There was no queue. Nor was I confined to visiting hours. It was just me. The Right Honourable Shazad Khan imagining a red carpet before him as he glided past the guards into Her1 Majesty’s Prison. I was given a tour of all the cells, gym, canteen, kitchen, library and had lunch with the Muslim chaplain. The chef, another inmate, came into the chapel and asked me how the chicken and rice was. You could have easily confused the prison walls with the walls of Buckingham Palace.

I was reminded of these two prison visits of mine when I read an article in my current bedfellow magazine2 on the reading habits of prisoners. There are sentences and there are sentences, and a prison sentence can go well hand-in-hand with a declarative sentence on the page. It was in 1910 that the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, appointed a Prison Libraries Committee. The committee talked to chaplains, who were in charge of selecting books, they also talked to prisoners about the books they were reading. In 2026, the National Year of Reading, a similar exercise was carried out and comparing the two reports, almost a hundred years apart, tells fascinating story of changing reading habits.

In 1911, the year the report was published, Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne was the most popular book in demand, whilst in 2026 it was Birmingham’s prodigal son, Lee Child, who’s the winner with his Reacher books (he’s just been nominated the Prison Reading Laureate by the Ministry of Justice). Grand Central above New Street Station in Birmingham had a complete wall dedicated to Lee Child. I often visit Foyles bookshop in Grand Central and then potter about the wall exhibition before trying a herbal tea in Whittard’s of Chelsea. All in a day’s work.

I digress.

So what are prisoner’s reading in the confines of their cells today? Freida McFadden’s, The Housemaid, is high on the list in both men’s and women’s prisons. Mcfadden has eight titles in the Sunday Time’s top fifty best sellers; and according to the 2026 Prison Committee report it seems as if HMP libraries have been one of its best buyers. Apart from this, true crime is obviously a best seller in prisons. Manga and graphic novels are popular with the younger offenders.

But is isn’t just fiction that tops the list. Popular psychology and self-help books also appear on the list including: Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad; Flander’s Cell Workout; even Machiavelli makes it as the most borrowed book in one prison. As do classical dystopias such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Animal Farm, 1984 and Brave New World.

Most readers find their next book by accident: from word of mouth, titles by the same author, Netflix adaptations, a prize list, a present, or even snooping over someone’s shoulder on the train. And you never know where your next book title is going to come from. Prison Reading Groups as such are in vogue and each group member suggests books to the group and this eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction is most likely where this list comes from. Discussions are lively and humorously engaging. One prisoner even described it as, “Word on the yard used to be, ‘what you in for?’, now it’s ‘how far you got in the book?’”

Like many avid readers, I too run a monthly book club where myself and a group of students get together and discuss. Sometimes the book is long and at others that length is manageable, but more often than anything else, it’s the outside world that interferes with my reading. The email alerts, the ping from the Teams chat, the imposing deadlines, the PhD that overshadows my existence, the weekly shopping that has become twice-weekly because the children are at home and need constant feeding. I’m almost tempted to commit a crime so that I can curl up in my prison cell with a copy of P. G. Wodehouse’s Carry On Jeeves.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

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My dear son,

You’ve asked how one might draw nearer to God. The old masters gave many instructions, but they all return to three simple practices: remembrance, the recitation of the Qur’an, and ritual prayer.

Remembrance begins with the declaration of faith. It is more than a sentence to repeat; it is a movement of the heart. When a person says, There is no god, he first lets go of everything that competes for his devotion. Only then does he turn toward the One who alone deserves it by saying but God. The words are brief, yet they describe an entire journey: away from illusion and toward Reality.

The Qur’an accompanies this journey. It is not merely a book to be read but a conversation to be entered. Read it slowly, with reverence and attention. Imagine that these words are addressed to you personally. If you cannot yet feel that you stand before God, remember at least that you always stand within His sight. When the verses promise mercy, receive them with gratitude. When they warn of error, let them awaken humility. Read with a voice that stirs your own heart, for a living voice often succeeds where silent habit does not.

Ritual prayer gathers these practices into one act. Within it are remembrance, recitation, praise, supplication, and surrender. It is the meeting place between the mind and the body; and between the servant and his Lord. Those who neglect it deprive themselves of one of the surest means of drawing near to God.

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If you wish to deepen your recitation, prepare yourself before you begin. Seek cleanliness of body and sincerity of intention. Withdraw, if possible, to a place free from distraction. Offer two voluntary units of prayer, then sit quietly until your thoughts settle. Place the Qur’an before you and reflect upon the greatness of the One who speaks and the smallness of the one who listens.

As you read, let your tongue, your heart, and your attention move together. Should your mind wander, do not be discouraged. Return gently. Begin again. Over time, you may come to feel that every part of your being joins in the recitation, as though the whole body has become an instrument of remembrance.

The masters describe even deeper stations of contemplation. They speak of moments in which the servant becomes so absorbed in the divine word that the distinction between reader and recitation seems to fade. Such experiences are gifts rather than achievements. They cannot be forced, only received with humility if God so wills.

Do not seek extraordinary experiences for their own sake. Attend faithfully to the ordinary disciplines of remembrance, recitation, and ritual prayer. Walk them patiently, and leave the destination to God. If insight comes, receive it with gratitude. If it delays, continue the journey just the same.

Yours sincerely,
Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

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My dear son,

You write to me that your prayer is without presence, and that your body stands before God while your mind wanders like a poor servant sent on too many errands. Do not be too astonished by this. The mind is a restless creature, and the heart does not become royal merely because the tongue has begun to recite. Presence in prayer is learned, as walking is learned: by returning after imbalance.

When you stand for prayer, do not think only that your face is turned toward the Kaʿba. That is necessary, but it is not enough. Let the face of the heart turn toward the Reality to which the Kaʿba points. The body has its direction; the heart must have one too. Without this, a man may be correctly aligned and inwardly absent ; it may be a neat arrangement of limbs, but a poor arrangement of the soul.

When you raise your hands for the opening takbīr, imagine that you are casting both worlds behind you. Not because the world is evil, but because it is not God. Its business may wait. Its noise may wait. Its claims, even the important ones, may stand outside the door for a while. Say Allāhu akbar as a man who means it: God is greater than my fear, my plans, my appetite, my reputation, my unfinished letters, and the small parliament of anxieties that holds session in my breast.

Then consider that by the takbīr you have slaughtered the lower self. Every prayer begins with a sacrifice. The thing offered is not an animal, but the self that wishes always to be noticed, obeyed, excused, admired. It is a stubborn little monarch, this self, and not easily deposed. Still, the takbīr is a beginning.

When you recite al-Fātiḥa, do not rush as though you were reading a notice pinned to a wall. Recite as one addressed and answered. When you say, Al-ḥamdu lillāhi rabbil-ʿālamīn, remember that your Lord says, “My servant has praised Me.” When you say, Ar-Raḥmānir-Raḥīm, He says, “My servant has glorified Me.” When you say, Iyyāka naʿbudu wa iyyāka nastaʿīn, remember that this is between you and Him. And when you ask for guidance, know that the asking itself has been received.

This is the secret: prayer is an audience.

In bowing, lower the head and remember His greatness. Let the eye fall where it should, and let the soul fall lower still. In prostration, when the forehead meets the earth, remember His exaltedness and your poverty. There is no humiliation in this poverty. It is the only honest wealth we possess. The proud man brings a full purse into prayer and leaves with nothing. The poor man brings nothing and finds the door open.

When you sit, reflect on the meanings of the shahadah. Imagine yourself admitted, by mercy, into the company of the prophets and the righteous. Do not imagine this in order to feel important. Imagine it so that you may feel ashamed of small thoughts.

And if distractions come, do not wrestle them like a man fighting furniture in the dark. Return quietly. Say to yourself: there is no prayer without the presence of the heart. Then come back. If you return a hundred times, you have prayed a hundred returns. God sees the turning.

As for the voice, let it be measured. Recite loudly enough to hear yourself. Let the words enter your own ear, for the ear is sometimes a better preacher than the mind. But do not shout unless the prayer calls for audible recitation. Even devotion may become theatrical if it forgets its manners.

My son, presence in prayer is not seized in one attempt. It is learnt. The body teaches the heart: standing, bowing, prostrating, sitting. Each posture is a school. Each word is a door. The prayer is already complete in its form; what remains is for the heart to arrive inside it.

Do not despair because you wander. Despair is only another form of self-importance. Return, and return again. The servant who keeps coming back is already being taught presence.

Your well-wisher in prayer and affection,

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

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Islamic thought now stands on such firm ground that the West has stopped arguing from inside it. The criticism has moved outside.

That may sound odd. The common impression is that the West is attacking Islam more sharply than ever. But I’m are not talking about volume. We are talking about kind. The question is not how much criticism there is, but on what grounds it is made.

This shift matters because the most serious threat to any civilisation is criticism that enters through its own front door. That kind of criticism does not merely object to a result or a policy. It goes after the foundations: the sources, the method of reasoning, the very idea of truth.

When a civilisation is judged instead by standards that do not belong to it, the criticism becomes external by necessity. Then the first question is not about that civilisation at all. It is about the standard itself. Is it universal? Is it sound? Does it have authority?

External criticism must first prove its yardstick. Internal criticism can skip that step because both sides already accept the yardstick. Take an example. Suppose someone says, “Islam is wrong because men and women are not equal in every matter.” That objection does not rise out of Islam’s own principles. It comes from a modern Western idea of equality. So the real question is no longer what basis Islam gives for the rights of men and women. The real question comes earlier: is this modern idea of equality itself a settled and final measure by which every civilization must be judged?

If a Muslim does not accept that measure, then the debate is not about Islam first. It is about the measure. Is this the right definition of equality? Is this the right idea of freedom? Is this the only valid standard of human rights? The centre of the argument shifts from Islam to the Western standard. In external criticism, the fight is first over the criterion, and only then over the civilization judged by it.

In internal criticism, the criterion is already agreed on. A scholar of hadith might say, “This hadith is not sound in its chain of transmission.” He is working inside the Islamic method. Both sides accept isnad, narration, transmitters, and the principles of hadith criticism. The argument goes straight to the proof of the hadith, not to the validity of the science itself.

Because of this, the two kinds of criticism have very different effects. Internal criticism strikes directly at a civilization’s own intellectual house. It runs deeper. External criticism must first justify its own tools. So it cannot go straight to the foundation. It starts with a contest between two systems over which one has the right measure.

To understand the intellectual relationship between the Muslim world and the West, we have to separate the different phases of Western criticism. In the 19th century the main project was Orientalism. Orientalists did not treat Islam as a distant culture. They went straight to its sources, its scholarly tradition, and its religious sciences. Their focus was the Qur’an, Hadith, fiqh, the life of the Prophet, peace be upon him, Islamic history, and the basic texts of Islamic learning.

What set Orientalism apart was that it put the historical, scholarly, and rational status of Islam’s own sources on trial. The questions were direct: Is the Qur’an really divine revelation, or is it a historical text? Is Hadith a reliable religious source, or a later invention? The same lens was turned on biography, law, and the other sciences.

That is why we call it internal criticism. The Orientalists were not Muslims, but their aim was aimed inward, at the internal method of Islam. They argued on the very ground where Islamic scholarship stood. The great battles of that era were over belief, over sources of knowledge, and over the scholarly tradition. The integrity of the Qur’an, the authority of hadith, the development of fiqh, ijtihad, the life of the Prophet, and Islamic law were the main topics. Much of Muslim scholarship in that period was spent answering those objections, using tafsir, usul al-fiqh, ilm al-rijal, history, and the other Islamic sciences. In short, the question was raised inside the tradition, and the answer was given from inside it.

After two hundred years of this assault, Orientalism did not shake the Islamic method in the least. It raised questions, it started debates, it created doubts. But it could not knock down the structure. The reason is simple. Islamic scholarship is not just beliefs and feelings. It is an intellectual tradition with working parts: principles of exegesis, principles of hadith, principles of jurisprudence, biographical criticism, theology, and more. These were built over centuries of methodical work. So the objections were met by a system, not by scattered sentiment.

By the late 20th century, however, something changed. The West stopped attacking the internal system directly. It turned instead to standards drawn not from Islam’s own method, but from modern Western values and ideas. That is the turn we have to understand, because it is the key to the present intellectual contest.

Today’s Western criticism is external because it does not start from Islam’s principles, sources, or method. It starts from standards made outside Islam. It does not try to understand Islam from within its own intellectual system. It measures Islam against an outside yardstick that Islam does not concede.

This is what separates present criticism from the Orientalist criticism of the past. That is no small change. Internal criticism is a far deeper danger than external criticism. When one civilisation cannot unsettle another’s basic method, it ends up judging its outward expressions by its own standards.

But this raises a basic question. If Western criticism is essentially external, how did those external objections become internal debates within the Muslim world? I believe the answer lies in Islamic Modernism. The fault of Islamic Modernism is that it took Western external criticism and turned it into Islamic internal criticism. In other words, criticism that began outside Islam was brought in, through Islamic Modernism, and made part of Islam’s own scholarly arguments.

So what we once knew as Orientalism now appears in a new form: Islamic Modernism. That is why our real problem today is not Western external criticism. Our real problem is Islamic Modernism, which converted that external criticism into internal criticism.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

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There is a common way of talking about modernity. We are told it is simply the next step in human progress. Just as one civilization rose and fell after another, so too has the modern West arrived, on schedule, as part of the natural unfolding of history.

The easiest way to test that claim is to ask a plain question: Did modernity only produce the same kinds of changes that earlier empires produced? Or did it create new kinds of crises: crises so wide and so deep that the world had never seen their like before?

That question matters. It decides whether we treat modernity as just another culture, or as a project that set out to change the very foundations of man, society, and civilisation.

Look back at history. Empires conquered other empires. Borders moved. Wars came and went. But through it all, a few basic things held steady in almost every society.

The family remained the first unit of human life.

A mother tongue remained the centre of identity.

Religion and custom remained the ground of shared meaning.

And loyalty to one’s own culture was still considered a virtue.

After the modern, colonial age, something shifted. For the first time, those very pillars became the problem. And it was not the problem of one country. It became a worldwide condition.

1. The Family Became a Problem

Every society in history had a different kind of family. But no society had ever treated the family itself as a problem. Parents, children, marriage, kinship; these were the givens of life.

In the modern world, the survival of the family has become a public issue. Marriage rates keep falling. Divorce keeps rising. People live alone. Old parents grow lonely. Family ties grow thin. This is no longer the complaint of a few nations. It is the common conversation of the modern world.

If modernity were only the next natural stage, why, then, did the family become a global crisis for the first time?

2. Estrangement from One’s Own Language

People have always learned other people’s languages. But until now, not knowing your own language was never a badge of honour.

The modern colonial system created, for the first time, whole classes of people who came to see distance from their mother tongue as a sign of education and refinement. A new generation in many societies lost direct access to its own books, its own literature, its own way of thinking.

This is more than a change of words. Language carries a civilisation inside it. When you lose the language, you lose the house it lives in.

3. The Crisis of Identity

In traditional societies, a person did not invent his identity. It was given to him. Religion, family, tribe, culture, and local custom told him who he was. Inside that belonging, he also knew his duties and his purpose.

Modernity set the individual free from all those ties and called him “autonomous.” He must now choose his identity, his values, his way of life. When identity is no longer anchored in something larger than the self: in revelation, in tradition, in community, it stops being a fact and becomes a project. You must build it, and rebuild it.

That is why “identity crisis” is now a central subject in psychology and sociology. People keep asking: Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my life for?

Individuals may have asked such questions before. But for an entire civilization to be asking them all at once; that is new.

4. Shame in One’s Own Civilization

A special feature of modern colonialism was this: it set out to convince the conquered that their own culture, language, and learning were obstacles to progress. The standard of superiority, it said, was to resemble the West.

Older conquests took land and tribute. They rarely set out to break a people’s cultural confidence. Modern colonialism did. Through the “civilising mission,” the “white man’s burden,” and colonial schools, it taught that the local past was backward, and that imitation was the path to advancement.

The result was widespread. People began to feel small about their history, their dress, their language, their books. Western ways became the measure of being advanced.

This is what we now call the colonisation of the mind. It was not enough to take territory. Modernity tried to reshape a person’s consciousness : his language, taste, preferences, and very idea of life.

So we come back to the same question.

If modernity were only a natural stage in human development, why did the family collapse everywhere at once?

Why did alienation from one’s mother tongue become a sign of progress?

Why did identity crisis become the mark of modern man?

Why did shame in one’s own culture become the mark of an educated class?

If this were just evolution, why did none of it appear with this scale and this intensity in the previous several thousand years of history?

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

One evening, as the lamps flickered and the room settled into stillness, he placed a simple question before his students:

“Do you think,” he asked, “that a command exists without a reason?”

The students exchanged glances. One replied, “Master, perhaps some reasons are hidden from us.”

The scholar smiled. “Hidden, yes. But absent? Never.”

He then drew three lines in the dust before him.

“Every ruling,” he said, “is like this. First, there is the thing itself—the subject. Second, there is the judgment attached to it. And third, there is a thread between them. If you cannot see that thread, you know the ruling but not its truth.”

One student leaned forward. “And can that thread always be known?”

“Not always,” the scholar replied. “But it always exists.”

He paused, then continued:

“There are three paths. The highest is to see the thread itself, to perceive the cause from which all rulings flow. Whoever sees that can foresee its consequences. This was the rank of the Prophets.”

The room grew still.

“Below them,” he said, “are those who see the cloth and try to trace its weave. They begin with rulings and work backward toward causes. These are the jurists.”

“And below them?” another asked softly.

“Those who sense patterns but cannot fully name them. And below all, those who imitate without understanding.”

What breaks wudu?

From front or back if something departs,

be it wind or wet, it breaks the parts,

if blood or pus should leave its place,

and flow beyond, you’ve lost your grace,

a mouthful vomit, cast it out,

less than that? Then dismiss the doubt,

sleep so deep you lose your guard,

lying or leaning, that makes it hard,

but nodding while seated, firm and tight,

your wudu stays sound, you’re still alright,

if mind departs by faint or drink,

or sanity’s lost, then purity’s sink,

and loudest laugh inside the prayer,

heard by your neighbor - wudu’s not there,

a smile or chuckle, quiet and slight,

won’t harm your state, you’re still upright,

touch of the hand, or skin to skin,

in Hanafi law, no break therein,

nor blood that beads but does not flow,

nor tears that from the eyes may go,

so guard the exits, guard the mind,

and keep your wudu well-defined,

for with it broken, prayer won’t stand,

till water returns to wash the hand.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

The passing of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas marks the end of an era in contemporary Islamic intellectual history. Widely regarded as one of the most influential Muslim philosophers and scholars of the modern period, al-Attas dedicated his life to the study of Islamic philosophy, education, and the critique of secular modernity. He leaves behind a profound imprint on the intellectual landscape of the Muslim world.

Born on 5 September 1931 in Bogor, Indonesia, into a distinguished family with roots traced to the Hadhrami (Yemen) Arab scholarly tradition. His upbringing exposed him early to Islamic scholarship and the civilizational heritage of Islam, shaping his intellectual formation from a young age.

He received his early education in Johor and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, before pursuing higher education abroad. Al-Attas studied at the University of Malaya, and later continued his academic training in the UK at the University of London, where he focused on Islamic studies and Malay history. He eventually obtained his doctorate from McGill University in Canada, in Islamic philosophy and thought.

After completing his studies, al-Attas devoted himself to scholarship and teaching for several decades. He served as a professor at the University of Malaya and became a leading voice in debates surrounding Islamic education and intellectual renewal.

Throughout his career, al-Attas authored more than twenty-five books, along with numerous scholarly articles and lectures. His works have been translated into several languages and continue to serve as foundational references in Islamic philosophy, education, and intellectual history.

Among his most influential works are:

• Islam and Secularism

• Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam

• The Concept of Education in Islam

• Islamic Philosophy: An Introduction

• The Oldest Known Malay Manuscript

• Aims and Objectives of Islamic Education

While his prolific writing established him as a leading scholar, the true significance of al-Attas’s work lies in the broader intellectual project that underpinned it. His writings were part of a coherent effort to diagnose the intellectual condition of modern civilisation and articulate an Islamic alternative.

Modern educational systems, he argued, often fail to achieve this goal because they separate knowledge from moral and spiritual development, producing technically skilled individuals who lack intellectual clarity and ethical insight.

His answer began with a diagnosis. According to al-Attas, the modern world suffers not from political instability or economic inequality (though these exist) but from a deeper intellectual disorder: confusion about the nature and hierarchy of knowledge itself. He described this condition through a concept he called the loss of adab: where adab refers not merely to etiquette but to the recognition that things have a proper place in the structure of reality, and that knowledge requires acknowledging this order.

Once this recognition disappears, knowledge itself changes character. It stops being a search for truth and wisdom and becomes instead a mechanism for power, utility, and technological control—an arrangement that can produce astonishing material progress while simultaneously leaving people unsure what any of it ultimately means.

To address this crisis, al-Attas proposed what he called the de-Westernisation of knowledge. A process of identifying philosophical assumptions embedded in modern academic disciplines that arose from specific Western historical experiences. The point was not to reject Western scholarship but to examine it critically. Only then, he argued, could knowledge be reorganised within what he called the Islamic worldview, a framework that integrates metaphysical, ethical, and intellectual dimensions of reality rather than separating them.

Education therefore occupied a central place in his thought. For al-Attas, the real aim of education was the formation of a human being capable of intellectual clarity and moral balance. A person who understands both the structure of knowledge and the responsibilities that come with possessing it.

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas leaves behind not only books and institutions but an intellectual challenge. At a time when knowledge is often treated as neutral, purely technical, or detached from deeper questions of meaning, his work insisted that knowledge is always embedded within a worldview; and that civilizations rise or fall partly according to whether they remember this.

May God accept his lifelong efforts and grant him the highest place in Paradise.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

When we think of kingship, we imagine crowns, palaces, thrones, and armies. Surah al-Mulk goes deeper, revealing what truly underlies these symbols and establishing kingship as a comprehensive system of governance grounded in moral authority: True Kingship.

The Surah takes its name, al-Mulk, because it assigns to the Owner of all sovereignty qualities that truly befit a king.

1. A true king is generous. Generosity presupposes abundance. The word Tabārak (Blessed is He) alone carries within it the connotation of abundance, of goodness, and a greatness of grace and beneficence. An abundance which befits a king.

“Blessed is He in whose hands is dominion;”(67:1)1

2. A king also needs to be powerful. The Surah also establishes the nature of real power: of Omnipotence. True sovereignty extends beyond human reach, dominating over life, death, creation, and even destruction. A human ruler may order executions or command armies, yet mortality itself belongs solely to the Divine. Authority requires absolute knowledge and power to be genuine; anything less is merely pretence.

“And He, over all things, hath power. He who created death and life that he may try which of you is best in deed....”(67:2)

3. Power alone, however, cannot legitimate a ruler. True kingship rests on accountability built into the system itself. Accountability presupposes knowledge of the subjects. A genuine sovereign witnesses everything: the actions of officials, the behaviour of governors, even the hidden intentions of hearts. Deeds are recorded. Intentions matter. Governance without visibility is hollow.

“That he may try which of you is best in deed.” (67:2)

“And whether ye hide Your word or publish it, He certainly has full knowledge of the secrets of all hearts.” (67:13)

4. Strength must be tempered with mercy. Real kingship carries honour, dominance, and unassailable standing; yet it remains open to forgiveness. The capacity to pardon and erase guilt ranks among sovereignty’s highest expressions, making clemency a mark of power rather than its absence.

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“And He is the Exalted in Might, Oft-Forgiving.” (67:2)

5. This kingdom also requires infrastructure. The heavens themselves function as royal architecture: layered, vast, and meticulously ordered, displaying no cracks, no imbalance, no design flaws. Such uniformity signals a ruler whose governance tolerates neither negligence nor chaos. Even beauty serves a purpose: the lights adorning the nearest heaven illuminate and defend simultaneously, their brilliance both aesthetic and strategic.

“He who created the seven heavens, one above another. No want of proportion wilt thou see in the creation of God most Gracious. So turn thy vision again; seest thou any flaw? Again turn thy vision A second time : (thy) vision Will come back to thee Dull and discomfited, In a state worn out.” (67:3-4)

“And we have from of old. Adorned the lowest heaven with lamps. And we have made such lamps as missiles to drive away the evil ones. And have prepared for them the penalty of the blazing fire.” (67:5)

6. A serious sovereign anticipates threats. Justice has teeth. Prisons and punishment serve as deterrence, ensuring that defiance carries consequence. Yet fear is never the kingdom’s final currency. Loyalty earns mercy and honour, even when offered in obscurity and without recognition. The system is quietly generous to the sincere.

“For those who reject their Lord and cherisher, is the penalty of Hell. An evil destination. When they are cast therein, they will hear the terrible drawing in of its breath. Even as it blazes, blazes forth. Almost bursting with fury. Every time a group is cast therein, its keepers will ask Did no warner come to you? They will say yes indeed, a warner did come to us. But we rejected him and said: ‘God never sent down any message: You are in nothing but an egregious delusion...’” (67: 6-9)

“As for those who fear their Lord, unseen. For them is forgiveness and a great reward.” (67:12)

7. Provision, security, and livelihood flow as outcomes of governance. The kingdom itself is an inexhaustible storehouse where nothing is forgotten and nothing runs dry. Where the flight of birds entertain the onlookers.

“Do they not observe the birds above them, spreading their wings and folding them in? None can uphold them except God, Most gracious: truly, it is he that watches over all things.” (67:19)

8. The Surah draws a firm boundary in this Kingship: no rival power will be permitted to support those who have been rejected by this court. Shadow patronage and alternative allegiances are illusions. To place one’s trust anywhere other than the true Sovereign is to discover, in the end, that one has been left entirely alone.

“Or who is there that can provide you with sustenance, if he were to withhold his provision? Nay, they obstinately persist in insolent impiety and flight from the truth.” (67:21)

“Nay, who is there that can help you even as an army besides God Most Merciful? In nothing but delusion are the unbelievers. (67: 20)

9. Seek the bounties of the King. Enjoy His provisions.

“It is He Who has Made the earth manageable For you, so traverse Ye through its tracts And enjoy of the Sustenance Which He furnishes” (67:15).

What emerges is a coherent theory of rule. Kingship integrates power with knowledge, strength with mercy, beauty with purpose, and authority with justice. The Surah asks us to locate ourselves within this kingdom and, with full seriousness, submit to the One True King.

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‘Lordship in right and in fact belongs

to God Most Gracious, whose goodness

and glory and power are writ large

on all His creation. The beauty and order

of the heavens above us proclaim Him.

Then who can reject His call but those

in pitiful delusion? And who can fail

to accept that except he who truly knows himself

and the mighty reality behind him?

The earth and the good things thereof are prepared

for man by his gracious Lord, who guards

him from hourly dangers, who sustains

the wonderful flight of the birds in mid-air?

Above and below and in mid-air can we see

His boundless signs. We know that His promise

of the hereafter is true. The spring and source

of the goodness of things is in Him and will

appear triumphant when the hour is established.2

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

Dear Tariq, 1

Thanks for putting up with me while I try to herd my thoughts into some kind of order, which, as you can see, is not exactly a natural gift of mine. Every time I try to answer something straight it ends up requiring all these little preambles and qualifiers and contextual footnotes that feel absolutely necessary if you’re going to understand what I’m actually saying, which I don’t always have the energy (or the patience) to drag through. And yet, as you’ve already noticed, those background details are necessary.

Anyway, back to the actual matter at hand.

Because disasters and afflictions are in fact properties of our own non-being, the dark hollows that belong to our condition before existence comes along, these don’t actually “show” until divine intervention, until existence itself shows up on the scene; and if, therefore, you want to attribute them back to God, you can only do so in one of two ways:

(a) in terms of creation and bringing-into-being,

(b) in terms of exposing, or rendering manifest, the inner stuff (the built-in qualities) of creatures.

And yet, nobody who’s actually using his intellect in good faith would ever dare to call either of those things “cruelty” or “injustice” or “mercilessness” (because creating means giving existence, right?) and bringing some nonexistent thing into existence is not only the highest possible perfection but also an act of ultimate generosity, literally existence as beneficence.

Now, if after being given existence this creature starts to exhibit the flaws or defects that were always already hidden in its original non-being: flaws that belonged to its essence and its conditions and its attributes, i.e., things it was never free of; then when those defects necessarily come to the surface, it’s part of what it is to be created.

The creature’s suffering belongs to its own constitution, its own built-in incapacity to draw in all the perfections of existence, and the fault (if we even want to use that word) is only ever on that side.

The Creator, for His part, by giving existence, has revealed both the creature’s admirable qualities and its miserable ones. And if He hadn’t given existence at all, then not even a hint of those qualities - good or bad - would ever have appeared in the first place.

So, what He’s done is simply to bestow existence. And if existence itself, by its nature, makes a being appear to be thoroughly afflicted, head to toe wrapped in calamity, then what blame can possibly attach to existence itself, or to the act of creating, or to the Creator who confers it? To confer existence can never be classified as disaster or affliction. Bestowal of existence is, in every possible register, an act of sheer and immense beneficence.

Since God (i.e., the Source from which existence comes in the first place, because He’s already characterized by existence in Himself, prior to any bestowal) is the fountainhead of existence, and since all other beings only get their portion of “having existence” from Him because existence pure and simple belongs exclusively to Him; and everyone understands that to grant without obligation, and especially to give something that cannot possibly be acquired from anywhere else, is not just beneficence but beneficence in its maximal superlative register. Which means that in this whole business of the appearance of evils and calamities, the first relation back to God is the act of creating and conferring existence itself, which is sheer perfection and not in any way oppression.

The second relation is the “bringing out” of inner properties, the “making manifest” of what was hidden. Because after divine creation, when beings accept existence, what gets disclosed is perfection: really the perfection of existence itself and of the One Who bestows it. And to the extent that any being fails to accept existence fully, that being’s defects and deficiencies become visible; which are its own issues, the built-in limits of its vessel.

Then, as time moves forward, and because created existence is in constant friction and contradiction (i.e., things wear down, unravel, decay), the creature’s essence, attributes, states, actions; these all keep leaking existence, dripping it away. And in proportion to this withdrawal, afflictions and calamities show up. But again: this is nothing more than the by-product of the creature’s own shortfall in capacity and its inadequacy in actually “actualizing” existence.

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So if, by the laws of nature, we ascribe these things back to God, the only ascription possible is that of disclosure: He’s the One who allowed the creature’s inner properties to be seen.

And just as granting existence is the highest generosity, so too allowing a creature’s essential qualities to surface (letting its inherent traits unfold in real time) is pure justice, pure grace, and not oppression.

In fact it’s justice at its loftiest register, a mode of fairness so refined that only the Divine could do. And honestly, if giving something existence in accordance with its own nature is to be rebranded “injustice,” then what, pray tell, would “mercy” or “compassion” even mean?

The very idea of “injustice” here would only really be possible if something were brought into existence and then somehow prevented from ever showing its own intrinsic qualities, its built-in essences, its natural tendencies; if it were created but gagged, its inherent capacities smothered, its properties locked up in some kind of metaphysical quarantine. That would be cruelty, sure. But to actually give something existence and then allow it, in full proportion to what it really is, to unfurl its real properties and natural dispositions, and to grant those properties freedom to act, freedom to influence, freedom to disclose themselves in the world; how in the world could that ever be cruelty?

For the Just One, to commit such a crime (holding existence hostage, denying things the chance to be what they are) is literally unthinkable.

So the upshot is: Divine Wisdom, overflowing and generous, gave existence to everything in the cosmos and, along with that gift, permitted every single thing to display its own properties and peculiarities, to show its marvels. And that’s why the world is this kaleidoscope of effects and powers, these strange and wondrous qualities that keep surfacing everywhere.

If existence had not been bestowed, or if after bestowal the thing’s essential attributes had been suppressed (so that it could never disclose itself through its effects) then really its being and its non-being would be indistinguishable. Creation, in that scenario, would have no point at all.

What would it mean to have fire if it didn’t burn?

Or water if it didn’t moisten or cool?

Or air that didn’t refresh?

What would animals be without signs of activity, vitality, expression - just inert lumps, dying in their burrows without ever having lived?

Or plants without sweetness, sap, fruit, leaf, blossom?

Or humans without the dramas of movement and repose, building and inventing and contending, but instead born in forests and buried there with nothing in between?

Tell me, what sense would there be in a universe so empty, so pointless, so terminally dull?

The perfection of this world actually depends (hinges entirely) on the fact that every single thing testifies to its life by showing its positive and negative effects, by disclosing both the powers of existence it has absorbed and the residues of non-being it still drags along. If some thing “existed” but showed no effects of existence, or carried traces of non-being without manifesting them, then that would be barrenness, futility, deprivation; and, from the standpoint of its Creator, a violation of justice and wisdom. And God, exalted be His majesty, is far above such absurdity.

So not only is it clear that the defects and disasters we see in things are really just the harvest of their own constitutions (the fruit of their admixture with non-being, so to speak) but it’s also clear that, in this whole chain of appearances, not even the slightest injustice comes from God.

On the contrary: what comes from Him is showers of beneficence, the gift of existence itself, and the unveiling of each thing’s nature. And these, far from being cruelty, are generosity at its highest register, justice at its most refined, mercy at its most luminous.

I must leave it here for this letter.

Until next time please think hard over this.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

Dear Tariq1,

Assalamu ‘Alaykum,

Hope you’re well.

September has arrived and the weather is now gradually growing dimmer and wetter. It’s actually one of my favourite months of the year because prayer times are easily manageable and not so disproportionately apart.

Anyway.

Back to business.

Although the whole chain of human afflictions and evils originates in our own inner foundations, they don’t actually surface out of “pure non-being” all by themselves. They can’t. Not unless existence gets attached. And existence, in turn, cannot attach itself without the will and intention of the Necessary Being Himself (may He be exalted).

Why?

Because non-being, even though it is the matrix or the breeding-ground of all deficiencies and evils, doesn’t have the independent ability to display them. It literally is nothing, meaning no-thing.

To manifest a property, or to project a form, is the job of something that is. Only “something” (i.e. being) can bring out qualities, because it not only is itself but, by its contact, can lend being to what was previously nothing.

So the recognition follows: the curtain hiding the deficiencies and evils embedded in non-being can only be torn away by existence itself when it “touches” that non-being. Our essences and attributes, being at root nonexistent, contained within themselves limitless hidden deficiencies and evils, but hidden, locked up, unspoken. The instant existence brushed against our non-being, the nonexistent shapes were stamped into existent ones. Non-being of life became the stage for life; non-being of knowledge became the opening for knowledge; non-being of hearing and seeing became the background against which hearing and seeing flared up; non-being of power became the very arena where power could be shown.

In other words, non-being pulled on existence’s cloak, and the opposites within non-being suddenly became luminous. Non-being was the mold into which existence was poured, shaping new and varied, kaleidoscopic forms.

But (and this is the important part) since non-being is also the reservoir of deficiencies and evils, existence’s entry didn’t just generate perfections suited to each mold; it also simultaneously unveiled their corresponding opposites. So wherever perfections appeared, afflictions followed in their shadow. For every quality revealed, its negation was also pressed into visibility. Thus: as many perfections as exist in the world, just so many corresponding defects exist; as many principles of being as there are, just so many contrary negations of them are inevitably paired alongside.

Every single part of existence, in order to introduce itself, had to knock up against its corresponding part of non-existence. Which meant that whenever some existential perfection came into view, right alongside it the corresponding deficiency, its negation, flared up as well. And so the whole cosmos, ended up with this mixed character, a blend of existence and non-existence, of perfections and deficiencies, as its very essence.

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Once these possibles achieved existence, they didn’t thereby dissolve or erase their inherent non-existential temperament.

It made them conditioned, limited beings, bounded on all sides (beginning and end, inside and outside) by traces of non-existence. At the very least, the possibility of non-being never goes away. So they remain “contingent existents,” fenced in by boundaries and restrictions; and beyond those fences there is nothing but non-being.

Which means: every existential perfection in them is necessarily flanked by its non-existential opposite: the flaws, the defects, the limitations. None of these things ever became an “absolute existent,” a being that’s pure perfection.

Take a human being: just because he acquires knowledge, he doesn’t become omniscient; just because he hears and sees, he doesn’t become all-hearing and all-seeing; just because he has power, he doesn’t become all-powerful. His knowledge, his sight, his power, all of them are revealed only within certain non-existential limits and conditions.

So the upshot is: within those limits, yes, he knows; but outside them, he is ignorant. Within those bounds, yes, he sees and hears; but beyond them, he is blind and deaf. Inside the circle of limits he’s perfected, but beyond the circle he is deprived and stripped of perfection. Just as his very existence and life are hemmed in on all sides by non-existence and death (which force his being into limitation), so too every one of his attributes stands in the shadow of non-being.

And that’s why wherever our knowledge, or our power, or our creative capacity makes an appearance, at that very same horizon our ignorance and incapacity, our ineffectiveness and inertia, also announce themselves. The defect pressed right up against the perfection.

It isn’t actually our non-being, our nothingness, that drags these built-in defects and negative traces out into the open. It’s existence. Existence, and the light of its perfections, is what throws them into the limelight. If life hadn’t arrived, we wouldn’t even have the concept of death. If knowledge and power hadn’t come, we couldn’t have recognised ignorance or weakness either. In other words, our non-being and its traces (the defects, the evils, the afflictions) they don’t have any capacity to present themselves as “non-being” on their own. They need existence to expose them.

Which means that the very accident of being, the fact that life shows up at all, even as a temporary thing, opens the doors for us to perceive our fundamental non-being, our defects, our sorrows, our calamities. And because existence itself only ever arrives by God’s permission, those afflictions, those so-called negative unveilings, are also by God’s permission. They manifest because existence lets them, and existence itself is always on loan from the Divine.

So from all this we end up with, basically, a taxonomy of calamities of two kinds:

(1) the “essential” defects, the privative afflictions;

(2) the subtractive calamities.

The detail runs something like this:

In this world of flux and corruption, the very fact that we peel away from pure non-being and land in this halfway-state, part-being, part-non-being, is itself the origin of evils and deficiencies. Because our essential non-being, our original defect, doesn’t and can’t fully receive existence (it cannot in any sense become necessary existence), so naturally what results from that failure-to-receive-being is not perfections but flaws.

Which is to say: every so-called perfection of ours is limited, circumscribed. Beyond its border, what you have is defect. A little bit of knowledge, but more ignorance. Some measure of power, but more weakness. A limited capacity for making, but an unlimited incapacity for making. A bit of hearing, but much more deafness. And all of these we call “defects” but not “calamities.”

So: defects are sourced in pure non-being. They’re baked in, even when we’re “existent.” These are the essential defects.

The substractive calamaties on the other hand are the ones that come and go. Our semi-being, such as it is, insofar as it does receive existence, can’t hold it firmly because of the innate opposition between non-being and being. So existence arrives, but is never stable: it comes and goes, and gets canceled. And whenever the existence of a particular perfection is canceled, the non-being rushes back in.

Lose health, you get sickness. Lose knowledge, ignorance surges. Strength departs, weakness surfaces. Calm fails, and restlessness emerges. These emergences, these negative eruptions that occur precisely when existence withdraws are what we mean by “calamities” or “afflictions.” They are the offspring of loss-of-being, i.e. subtraction.

So the distinction, summarized: defects arise from the original non-being that never accepted existence in the first place, whereas calamities arise from existence once acquired being snatched away, interrupted.

But both defects and calamities only ever show up in the light of existence.

Without existence in the first place, neither the privative defects nor the subtractive afflictions would be thinkable or real.

Existence has to come in before its absence or its instability can be perceived. And since existence can only arrive from the reservoir of existence itself, which is to say, God, the unavoidable conclusion is that both defects and afflictions, their revelation, their being-known, happen by God’s permission, God’s act. Creatures cannot make them appear on their own, because their appearance presupposes the arrival of existence, and existence is never in the hands of creatures.

In summary: blessing is nothing more or less than the arrival of existence, and calamity is nothing more or less than the withdrawal of existence. And existence can only be withdrawn by the same One who bestows it.

It is impossible that some other hand should give being and some other hand should take it away.

Think of it like sunlight: the ray is flung down by the sun itself, and the same sun alone may cause it to vanish. It makes no sense that someone other than the sun could cancel the sunbeam, given that the beam is nothing except the sun’s radiance extended outward.

So existence, being rooted in the Blessed Essence, rests entirely on that source; and the shine that falls upon creatures, letting them be called “existent,” is simply the borrowed glimmer of that source. When that beam gathers back into itself, back into the treasury of existence from which it came, the creature’s existence contracts and is erased. That erasure, that pulling-back, is what we name “subtractive afflictions” and “calamities.” And the only eraser, the only hand that can retrieve what it gave, is God Himself.

Thus, every such calamity is God’s act, even though the underlying susceptibility belongs to our own fragile nature. Hence the claim of the materialists - that blessings and calamities are merely the inherent operations of matter, with no divine agency whatsoever - collapses as baseless and self-refuting. For blessing and calamity are simply the coming and going of existence, and existence can only come and go by the One in whose grip it always remains. Matter, which is perpetually changing, is only a stage on which existence appears and disappears. But it cannot be the donor or the thief of being; if it were, it would have to remain “always as it was,” never changing. And since matter’s being is not its own (since its existence can and does slip away from it) matter cannot by itself be the giver or taker of existence. Only the One who lends being can reclaim it.

In any case, the giving and the taking of existence belongs solely to the Necessary Being, not to the contingent one.

Existence arriving is blessing; existence being withdrawn is calamity. Which means both blessing and calamity can only ever be traced back to God’s act, not to any self-contained maneuver of the afflicted or the fortunate themselves.

The difference is this: blessing, since it proceeds directly from God and strikes the creature (the human, the contingent), thereby making it “existent,” is ascribed without mediation to God Himself. Calamity, however, being nothing but the loss of existence, which loss occurs because matter’s capacity for sustaining existence runs out, because it fails to hold on, takes on the appearance of being “due to” the corruption or misconduct of the creature. Hence, calamity is linguistically or rhetorically attached to the creature, even though in reality both the act of bestowal and the act of removal belong to God alone.

That is why, regarding blessing, the Qur’an states “So it is from God” (fa-min Allāh), while regarding calamity it states “It is by what your own hands have earned” (fa-bimā kasabat aydīkum): thus laying bare the distinction between appearance and metaphysical source. For calamity, even though we describe it as the “changeability of matter,” still arises through God’s act, not through matter’s own independent power, which it does not and cannot possess.

Until next time, think hard over this.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK.

Dear Tariq1,

Assalamu ‘Alaykum,

Hope you’re well and in the best of health and spirits.

Apologies for the delay in writing to you. I’ve been busy with family the last few weeks. It’s the summer holidays you see, and well, father duties take precedence.

Anyway.

Getting back to our discussion.

The whole upshot of this discussion is that nothing in the world ever actually “gets hit” by misfortune, and the Almighty doesn’t really go around placing misfortunes on things either, because for something to have a misfortune “come upon it” in any meaningful sense it would have to first (a) be an existent thing in the ontological sense and (b) have the capacity for arrival and departure, comings and goings; which, when you really look at it, is a property of existence per se, not of nonexistence. And “misfortune,” being a kind of anti-thing, has a nature that is basically the subtraction of existence rather than existence itself, so the claim that the world contains actual incoming misfortunes turns out to be, quite frankly, metaphysically unsound.

What’s really going on is: misfortune doesn’t arrive; rather, a blessing departs. The departure of the blessing is what we perceive and label as “the arrival of misfortune.” Death doesn’t come to anyone; life just quietly (or sometimes not-so-quietly) slips away, and we label that “death arriving.”

Ignorance doesn’t move in like an unwelcome tenant; knowledge just takes its leave, and we call that ignorance “coming.”

Sickness doesn’t march up to us from somewhere outside; health drains away, and that absence gets named “the arrival of illness.”

And if you want a visual aid, think of the sun and sunlight: when the sun is present, sunlight just is. When the sun withdraws (or gets blocked or just tucked behind a big slow cloud), the light goes with it, and suddenly there’s shadow. But the shadow hasn’t “arrived” from somewhere : darkness was always there, in a latent, pressed-down way, as the condition that exists whenever light is absent. The light departs, and what was suppressed inside the thing (darkness) rises up.

So in every created thing, blessings arrive from the outside, but misfortune is an inside job: it was there in the clay all along, part of the basic dough of the thing’s nature, waiting to swell and show itself the moment the weight of the blessing lifts.

So now, having trudged through all those preliminaries, we’ve finally clambered up to the actual vantage point, the intended destination, from which you can look down and see that all those so-called “events” we’d earlier dressed up as changes or as removals-of-being are, in the rhetoric of the more materialist-leaning crowd, exactly what they’re calling “calamities” and “afflictions.” Which means, logically and almost embarrassingly simply, that removal-of-being/change and misfortune are just two faces of the same ontological coin. Misfortune, in other words, is nothing other than change and the subtraction of existence.

Because here’s the obvious bit nobody likes to say out loud: actual, positive, existent perfections: health, strength, ease, composure, peace, safety, integrity, are never labeled as “misfortune” by anyone in their right mind. No, what gets called “misfortune” are their negations: illness, weakness, pain, constraint, disorder, and so on. And (again, this is crucial) these negations only attach to you when the corresponding positive quality has been stripped away, when its existence has been subtracted from you. So misfortune is, strictly speaking, the loss of a perfection, the vanishing of some good (which is exactly what we’d earlier identified as removal-of-being/change).

And it really doesn’t matter whether that loss-of-perfection comes from the elements or from compounds, from living souls or from the greater world outside; whether it originates inside a human being or outside in the environment. In any of these cases, it is “misfortune” or “affliction.” This means that from every atom, inescapably, these transformative afflictions will one day emerge.

Examples: in humans, illnesses: whether bodily/material (fever, cholera, plague) or mental/non-sensory (anxieties, sorrows, intrusive thoughts piling up until the mind just wants out), all count.

In animals, the spread of species-specific diseases. In plants and herbs, the onset of blight. In stones and mountains, fissures and cracks that break down their hardness and cohesion.

In elements: water becoming stagnant and foul (a decay of its very nature), fire catching on certain fuels and turning heavy, smoky, grimy, losing the clean brightness that made it “fire” in the first place.

You get the picture.

All these are privative afflictions, negative transformations, springing up from the thing’s own primal non-being, the moment it can’t keep its hold on existence. And when that happens, in the language of essence-and-properties, we call it sickness, misfortune, calamity.

So it’s clear: change itself is the whole reality of coming-to-be and passing-away in this world, soldered into every particle of it, inseparable from it. And since this same change/subtraction-of-being is also the reality of misfortune, the conclusion is unavoidable: misfortune is either the whole reality of this world or at least one of its central, indispensable parts, and it never, ever departs, because it’s something that wells up from within, not something that comes knocking from outside.

And the Quran, in that way it has of condensing something enormous into a single, almost casual sentence, says it cleanly:

أَوَلَمَّآ أَصَـٰبَتْكُم مُّصِيبَةٌۭ قَدْ أَصَبْتُم مِّثْلَيْهَا قُلْتُمْ أَنَّىٰ هَـٰذَا ۖ قُلْ هُوَ مِنْ عِندِ أَنفُسِكُمْ ۗ

What! When a single disaster smites you, although ye smote (your enemies) with one twice as great, do ye say?- "Whence is this?" Say (to them): "It is from yourselves. (Quran. 3:165)

And so, given that in this world the subtraction of being, i.e. change, outweighs by far any stable persistence of being; given that non-being is in fact the default, the baseline, the original state here, and is forever pressing in from the inside, battering at existence and its perfections and naturally driving them away; the conclusion emerges, plainly enough, that everything in this world is by nature afflicted.

Doesn’t matter whether it’s a tool, a plant, an animal, a human; whether it’s the highest class of thing or the lowliest - the same basic deal applies.

Which also means: it’s not just that affliction exists here, it’s that it must always exist here, that it’s inseparable from the very nature of the place. Misfortune is not some alien add-on to reality; it’s the other side of the coin of what reality is. And this also makes clear why misfortune outweighs ease: because misfortune is of the order of non-being, and non-being is what’s native and predominant here, stretching over and through everything.

We could put it another way: if the negations, the privative afflictions, are constantly piling up (every moment) while the perfections of existence come and go like unstable, uninvited guests, arriving without warning and leaving just as abruptly, then the inborn nature of this world is a sort of permanent affliction, a chronic shortage of perfection, baked in and inescapable.

There isn’t a single atom exempt from it, because everything here is “non-being at root,” and so by its very constitution it’s a locus for the comings and goings of being (i.e., for changes) which means the traffic of afflictions is perpetual.

And once you keep that in mind, you can see how absurd it is to imagine that these change-driven afflictions would come only to adults and not to infants, or only to humans and not to animals, or somehow spare plants and stones.

Because, after all, in babies and in animals and even in unconscious rocks there’s the same admixture of being and non-being you find in adult humans.

That admixture is exactly what makes change possible and thus misfortune inevitable.

So how could they possibly be immune to those privative effects?

Which is why the sentimental or skeptical protest :“If God intends these pains for the betterment of man, then why inflict them on animals? And if they don’t target anyone, then why do the weak and the young get hit first and hardest? What could these innocents have possibly done to deserve this?” ; is not only misplaced but rooted in a kind of deep metaphysical illiteracy. Because these so-called “natural evils” aren’t really targeted punishments at all; they’re simply the natural, unavoidable fallout of the friction between being and non-being. It’s what happens when you have a reality whose basic recipe is half-existence, half-absence, stirred together and left to simmer.

You’re probably going to ask now, so why does God remove these blessings? As I said, I’m going to deal with them in upcoming letters. I’ve drawn a brief summary of all the letters I’m intending to write to you, and by my current count it numbers around thirty. So please bear with me as I gather my thoughts and put pen to paper.

Until next time (hopefully next week), think hard over this.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

You can read the first letter here.

The second letter here.

The third letter here.

The fourth letter here.

Shazad

P.S. Please do like, share and subscribe as I’d like to think this is benefitting some of you out there.

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Dear Tariq,

Assalamu ‘Alaykum,

I hope you’re well and are in the best of health and spirits.

As for me, my health is getting better - slowly though. I went on a long walk this morning and the fresh air did me good. It gave me a renewed spirit and it’s probably why the length of this letter is longer than usual. But as I said earlier, please consider these letters as a drip-feed. There are aspects I have deliberately left out because I will cover them in subsequent posts, so please refrain from comebacks as it'll only interrupt my train of thought.

Anyway, I hope you can see from my previous letters that the building blocks are starting to fall into place. Please re-read my letters again if this is far from obvious.

Let me start today where it makes the most sense to start: change is the essential property of anything created. Which is to say: the defining attribute of anything not-God is its ability, or more correctly, its necessity, to change.

How did I arrive at this conclusion?

Well, what we’ve established thus far from my previous letters is the metaphysical fault line between being and non-being. What follows is that the one who really exists (i.e., the capital-M Maker, the real-deal Ontological Primary) doesn’t need anything. He is pure unadulterated existence.

Meanwhile, everything else, is basically footnotes to that existence. Our being is, to put it gently, borrowed. Like we’re renting existence at an Airbnb and at any moment the Host could just say, "Time’s up, thanks for staying."

So: existence flows downward (metaphorically), from the Really Real to the Conditionally Real. From the Uncreated to the contingent, like light from a source - but not vice versa. Because non-being (i.e., metaphysical vacuum, i.e., nothingness) doesn’t get to affect Being.

Why?

Because it’s not even a “thing.”

It’s no-thing.1

So no matter how messed up the created world is, none of that rot reaches the core of the Real. Because deficiency doesn’t rise. It can only receive, not project. The asymmetry is baked into the very nature of its being.

Thus, the Absolute Being (God) can choose to extend existence outward: to lend, bestow, temporarily support. It can even retract it, take it back like someone yanking the tablecloth and leaving everything standing (or not). But the created, the borrowed, the contingent beings don’t get to do anything back. They can only react, receive, be affected. They are passive verbs in a sentence the Real Being is writing.

And the moral of the story is this: the dependent (us) may come into being, be gifted a pulse of realness, but the Independent never slips into non-being. It just is. Always. Endlessly.2

And from that, from all this metaphysical topography we just covered re: the asymmetry between Real Existence (God) and derivative being (us), it’s almost inevitable, to deduce this other (weirdly comforting?) principle: That change is strictly a creaturely thing.

Because change implies contingency. For something to change, it has to have received its being from somewhere else. And if something came from outside, it can go back outside. Import/export. Entry/exit. Come and go. Think of it like metaphysical customs control.

So whereas the created universe is basically always fluctuating: entropy, death, decay, shedding old skin, etc; the Creator remains absolutely immune to all that. Ontologically immune to it because change, by definition, can’t touch Him. It doesn’t apply.

Hence, the big theological poetry of the thing:
The Creator’s state? "He ever was just as He is."
The creation’s fate? "Everything shall perish."

Moreover, there are, two ways that both being and non-being interplay in the creation:

1. It comes into being- that is, goes from not being to being.

2. It ceases to be- that is, slides from being back into not-being.

Now, it seems intuitive to lump both under the umbrella of “change,” but if you look more closely, you’ll notice something:

Only the second case. i.e., the departure from existence, the removal, the evaporation of being, is actually change in the strict metaphysical sense.

Why?

Because change requires a subject; a something to be changed. You can’t change nothing. You can’t alter what's not there. For something to undergo any kind of transition, it first has to be something to begin with.

And when something goes from non-being to being, i.e., from absolute nothingness to "Hello world," it didn’t undergo a change in the normal sense: it wasn’t there to be changed!¹

Change, therefore, can only apply after the thing has already been given existence. You need a platform before you can paint over it. You need a body before you can age. You need a self before you can screw it up.

That's it. Those are the rules.

So, to put it as plainly (and probably as uncomfortably) as possible: all change, in the final analysis, is just the loss of existence. Period. Just subtraction. Just less.

And yes, this means what it sounds like it means: the fundamental, irreducible nature of change (in anything, anywhere, ever) is nothing more than a retreat from being, a sliding back down the metaphysical hill from is to was.

And here’s where it gets sneakily more complicated (because it always does): this retreat can manifest in two different ways:

1. The thing itself disappears—like, its actual selfhood gets voided, its being revoked, unplugged, exited.

2. Or its qualities, its defining whatness, its function, vitality, motion, dignity get erased while the bare form lingers like a hollowed icon.

Think of it like this: the moment something is given existence (i.e., moves from "not" to "is"), it receives, along with that existence, all sorts of things: qualities, traits, capacities, the ability to act, to respond, to reflect, to hope, etc.; and all these are existential perks, little kinks that arise because it exists.

But when change strikes, it comes as a kind of decreation. Not in one brutal blow, but in slices: either the essence, or the qualities, or the actions or the states collapse.

And slowly (or suddenly), the thing becomes less of itself. Existence drains. Presence thins. Identity wavers. Until what remains isn’t presence, only the shape of what used to be present, ever-decaying and withering away.

So yes, the world changes; changes by leaking; leaking with absence Everything in it slowly loses what it borrowed.

What it had, is taken back.

What it shined with, dulls.

What it did, stops.

What it meant, fades.

The only steady direction is toward less.

And since it’s already established that existence = perfection3 (i.e., being is good, and non-being is lack, absence, evil in the ontological sense), then the net result of all this cosmic change is: a steady loss of perfection, a steady accrual of lack, a long, sad walk away from meaning and into silence.

The world, then, is akin to a sort of stopover.

And this is how we know, maybe more surely than anything else, that the world- this world - is not God.

Because in a being that truly possessed existence by nature, existence couldn’t be lost. Ever.
And yet, here we are. Always losing.

So now imagine that all the stuff you complain about, or medicate against, or pray away, or intellectualise into oblivion, is actually not an aberration, not an interruption of the natural order, but the natural order itself. That the world, in its default state, is a machine for subtraction.

Because if yyou look, you’ll start to notice a pattern so painfully consistent it could be called a law: that everything with being has that being slowly or suddenly pulled away, and that all its nice, solid, comforting traits are in a state of active and perpetual erosion.

Let’s be honest:

• Where there’s health, illness shows up like it’s got a key to the house.

• Where there’s comfort, pain knocks louder.

• Sleep is hounded by anxiety, clarity by confusion, peace by noise, order by collapse, fullness by famine, wealth by ruin, honour by humiliation, joy by dread, and finally, of course, life by death.

Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but eventually, slowly but surely, the leaky inner non-being will pour out.

So saying “I want the world without all this decay and disaster” is like saying “I want fire that doesn’t burn” or “wetness without water.” It’s metaphysical nonsense. It’s wanting the world and not-the-world at the same time, which is, as philosophers like to say, not even wrong, just straight-up impossible.

Because this world is defined by the inevitability of these corrosions. Change is its nature, and change here means un-being.

Which brings us full circle:
The world, bless its weirdly beautiful, heartbreakingly fragile face, was never meant to be kept.

But something else is also very telling of this asymmetrical nature of being and non-being: goodness/being requires effort, badness/non-being just happens.

Seriously. Try noticing it.

Every good thing: health, beauty, stability, clarity, justice, peace, cleanliness, literacy, generosity, Wi-Fi that actually works, requires work. Requires maintenance. Requires intention.

Whereas evil, ugliness, breakdown, rot? They just show up. No invitation necessary.

Example:
A garden. A literal green, lush, beautiful, bee-buzzing, shade-giving garden. To make it good, to keep it from turning into a patch of regret; you need irrigation, caretakers, fertilizers, pruning, protection from heat, cold, pests, theft, goats, etc. It needs money, sweat, time, vigilance.

But to destroy it?
To turn it dry, cracked, overrun with weeds and ghosts of things that once bloomed?
Do nothing.
Just stop tending.

No meteor needs to strike. No fire needs to be lit. Just remove the hand that nurtures, and entropy will do the rest. Because decay is already in the recipe. Always was.
The garden’s ruin wasn’t some external catastrophe; it was pre-installed. Held back only by the daily, sweaty application of good.

Same goes for a house.
Want it to be clean, bright, liveable, a place of safety and peace? You’ll need a small army of builders, plumbers, electricians, mums, dads, roommates who don’t suck. You’ll need soap, nails, effort, willpower, dustpans and mirrors on the wall.

Want it to become a rotting shell?
Just stop. Stop cleaning, stop fixing. Stop caring.
In time, gravity + time + silence will do what no wrecking crew could do better.
And again: the ruin was already there. Dormant. Lurking.
You didn't cause the collapse. You just stopped holding it back.

Which leads to the ugly, almost unbearable truth:
Evil doesn't need to be built. It's already inside.
It's default.
The absence of good is enough to let it surface.

Because, ontologically speaking, good is being, and evil is un-being.
You make good. You lose into evil.
You just stop loving it long enough, and it falls apart on its own.

And now, if you’re still with me, you and I are part of this broken system too.

That’s right. You and I, Tariq, the human, homo sapiens, we’re not the exception. We are a subset of this whole creaky, decaying, entropy-fueled creation.

And like every other “thing” in this system, your basic setting is not existence but non-existence. You're borrowed being. You’re an absence that’s been briefly interrupted by a loan of presence.

The Quran puts it like this:

هَلْ أَتَىٰ عَلَى ٱلْإِنسَـٰنِ حِينٌۭ مِّنَ ٱلدَّهْرِ لَمْ يَكُن شَيْـًۭٔا مَّذْكُورًا

Has there not been over Man a long period of Time, when he was nothing - (not even) mentioned? (Quran, 76:1)

Meaning you were, for an uncountable age, nothing. That’s your baseline.

Which means: all the stuff you think makes you “you”: your personality, your dignity, your skills, your happiness, your ability to hold it together in the checkout line, all of it, every last ounce, is not your own. It was given. It was loaned.

Your actual default state? Is lack. Emptiness. Un-being. What’s actually yours, really yours, isn’t joy or health or success. It’s fear, fragility, pain, confusion, disease, desperation, and yes, the quiet existential chill of knowing that even your joys are rented.

And this is why every good thing in you: health, clarity, joy, patience, contentment, requires effort, striving, grace. Because these are existentially uphill. They’re not automatic. They have to be granted from a Source. Otherwise, all that’s left is what was already lurking under the surface.

Like, for example, if a person suddenly loses the energy to try to fight, to tend, to seek help, to pursue something larger than the closed loop of their own impulses; they fall. Things fall apart.

And it’s because something left.

The gift was what kept the horror in check.

And this is the key point, the whole paradox: Good is presence; evil is absence. Good is structured; evil is collapse. Good is being held up by grace; evil is what’s already waiting underneath if that grace is withdrawn.

And the Qur’an, if you read it closely, spells this out with an unnerving clarity:

وَمَآ أَصَـٰبَكُم مِّن مُّصِيبَةٍۢ فَبِمَا كَسَبَتْ أَيْدِيكُمْ

Whatever misfortune happens to you, is because of the things your hands have wrought. (Quran, 42:30)

Another verse reads:

مَّآ أَصَابَكَ مِنْ حَسَنَةٍۢ فَمِنَ ٱللَّهِ ۖ وَمَآ أَصَابَكَ مِن سَيِّئَةٍۢ فَمِن نَّفْسِكَ ۚ

Whatever good, (O man!) happens to thee, is from God; but whatever evil happens to thee, is from thy (own) soul. (Quran, 4:79)

That is:

blessing = from the Source.

Misery = from your own gravitational pull back toward nothingness.

You do not have to summon ruin; it’s already in the walls. You just have to stop pursuing the good, and the ruin will leak through.

And when the Qur’an addresses the “blame game” people like to play, it pre-empts this and sets it aright by stating:

وَإِن تُصِبْهُمْ حَسَنَةٌۭ يَقُولُوا۟ هَـٰذِهِۦ مِنْ عِندِ ٱللَّهِ ۖ وَإِن تُصِبْهُمْ سَيِّئَةٌۭ يَقُولُوا۟ هَـٰذِهِۦ مِنْ عِندِكَ ۚ قُلْ كُلٌّۭ مِّنْ عِندِ ٱللَّهِ ۖ

If some good befalls them, they say, "This is from God"; but if evil, they say, "This is from thee" (O Prophet). Say: "All things are from God." (Quran, 4:78).

Here, another subtle point is unveiled: when we say that goodness is from God and evil is from the self of the creature, one might mistakenly assume that God is the creator of good, while man is the creator of evil. The Qur’an gives a decisive response, making it absolutely clear that both good and evil are from God. The distinction lies only in this: that beauty and perfection emanate from God, because He is Pure Being, and corruption and deficiency manifest through the self of man, because he is rooted in non-being. Yet both good and evil are earned by the human being through choice and action. Despite this, the source of issuance for both remains God’s decree and will, while the origin of good is from God, because existence = good; and the origin of evil is from you, because you = nothingness, and that nothingness eventually reclaims whatever light was lent to you unless you cling hard to its Source.

In describing the source of goodness, uses the phrase “min Allah” (from God), but when referring to the appearance of events, whether good or bad, it uses “min ‘ind” (from His side), so that the distinction between the Divine origin of all things and the human reflection of their nature remains intact.

So yes, you might technically be the “doer” of both good and evil; but you are the storehouse only of one: the lack. The void. The darkness. Good has to be added to you. Evil (understood as non-being) is already in you, folded neatly into the software.4

Until next time,

Think hard over this.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

You can read the first letter here.

The second letter here.

The third letter here.

Shazad

P.S. Please do like, share and subscribe as I’d like to think this is benefitting some of you out there.

Dear Tariq,

Assalamu ‘Alaykum,

Sorry for the delay in getting this letter to you. It’s been a busy two weeks. And my health hasn’t been too good either.

Anyway.

You’ll have noticed from my previous letters that there are a few preambles that we need to get out the way before I get directly to your questions. These detours are akin to making sure that the frame is sound before we hang anything heavy on it. Think of it as me trying to build a little porch on the front of the house before inviting you inside.

Hope that makes sense.

Building on from what we’ve established from my previous letters, existence as we encounter it in all things around us, is contingent. Or, to use the classical term: accidental. Which is just a dressed-up way of saying it didn’t have to be here. And if something didn’t have to be here, then it must have come from somewhere, or more precisely, from something else that does have to be here. Because if you trace the whole domino chain of existence backward; this caused that caused that caused that ad infinitum; you eventually hit a wall. And you must hit a wall. Otherwise, you fall into what logicians call an “infinite regress,” which is a fancy way of saying your explanation never actually explains anything and instead just spirals into this intellectual black hole where cause and effect just cannibalise each other.

So what does this mean?

It means that the source of its existence must exist. As in: a Being whose very essence is to be, and who could no more not-be than a number could be wet. A Being who doesn’t need to receive being from elsewhere, because He is Being, capital-B, full stop.

This, of course, is the Islamic conception of God. He’s the “Necessary Existent”. Because this Necessary Existent, unlike the world, is transcendentally above absence, decay or even the possibility of non-being. No crevice in His being where not-being could slip in. Not in the beginning (because He has no beginning), not in the end (because ditto), not in His inner reality, not in His outward manifestation: because those distinctions collapse when you're dealing with a being who isn’t composed of parts or limited by time or space or anything else we associate with createdness.

هُوَ ٱلْأَوَّلُ وَٱلْـَٔاخِرُ وَٱلظَّـٰهِرُ وَٱلْبَاطِنُ ۖ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَىْءٍ عَلِيمٌ

He is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward: and He has full knowledge of all things. (Quran, 57:3)

And so: existence, as we experience it here in this temporary, ever-decaying world, is like moonlight: visible, real, even beautiful; but always reflecting. The light we see in the world is, metaphysically speaking, borrowed. Which means the Source (the metaphysical sun, so to speak) is the only one truly deserving of the name “existent.”

Hence the Qur’an’s declaration:

ذَٰلِكَ بِأَنَّ ٱللَّهَ هُوَ ٱلْحَقُّ وَأَنَّهُۥ يُحْىِ ٱلْمَوْتَىٰ وَأَنَّهُۥ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَىْءٍۢ قَدِيرٌۭ

This is so, because God is the Reality: it is He Who gives life to the dead, and it is He Who has power over all things. (Quran, 22:6)

Another verse reads:

ذَٰلِكَ بِأَنَّ ٱللَّهَ هُوَ ٱلْحَقُّ وَأَنَّ مَا يَدْعُونَ مِن دُونِهِۦ هُوَ ٱلْبَـٰطِلُ وَأَنَّ ٱللَّهَ هُوَ ٱلْعَلِىُّ ٱلْكَبِيرُ

That is because God - He is the Reality; and those besides Him whom they invoke,- they are but vain Falsehood: verily God is He, Most High, Most Great. (Quran, 22:62)

God is the Real: the one whose being is not dependent, whose reality is not borrowed, whose essence is to exist, and whose existence grounds everything else’s.

Everything else is just echo. Contingent. Temporal. Finite.

God, in His mercy, casts the radiance of existence upon the void and we come into being. But we come not as pure light. We are composite. In every moment, we are lit only to the extent that we face Him. And all that is dark in us, all that is broken, partial, wounded, unjust, is the residual darkness of our original non-being. It is what we are without Him.

In simpler terms: every ounce of good we carry, every act of wisdom, mercy, beauty, courage it is His. And every ounce of corruption, cruelty, pettiness, and spiritual confusion, that’s not from Him. That’s what happens when the creature forgets it is not the Source.

This leads us to something profoundly important. It is why, in sacred language, we say “Subḥān Allāh” - as a recognition: that God is utterly free of every flaw, untouched by the shadows that cling to created things. There is no failure in Him. No crack in the foundation. No error in the Light.

And it is why we say “Al-ḥamdu li-llāh” because every perfection, every beauty we witness in the world or within ourselves, has its root and its rightful credit in Him alone.

The former is negation, and the latter is affirmation: corresponding to the negation and affirmation in the lā ilāha illā Allah.

And finally: It is why the soul must be humble. Radically, humble.

فَلَا تُزَكُّوٓا۟ أَنفُسَكُمْ ۖ

Ascribe not purity unto yourselves. (Quran, 53:32).

Don’t pretend the light is yours. And don’t inflate your worth based on borrowed brightness. The only One who owns grandeur, truly owns it:

وَلَهُ ٱلْكِبْرِيَآءُ فِى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ ۖ

And unto Him (alone) belongeth Majesty in the heavens and the earth. (Quran, 45:37)

He is the One whose Light knows no shadow, whose Being knows no absence, whose Majesty has no equal.

And so we reach another monumental truth: that the one who is originally non-existent can be given existence. But the One who is originally existent can never become non-existent. Because He is existence. And this means that the creation is dependent on the Creator, but the Creator is in no way dependent on the creation. There is only need and dependency going upward, and mercy flowing downward.

Therefore, the created thing may be shaped, sustained, animated, and even withdrawn from existence by the will of the Creator. But it can never act backwards. It cannot influence, modify, or affect the One from whom its existence comes. The creature can receive, yes: it can feel, be transformed, be blessed or deprived. But it cannot, not even in the smallest measure, act upon God.

Which brings us back - as these meditations always do - to awe. To humility. To that deep, shivering awareness that we are upheld, moment by moment, by a Source that asks for nothing in return, and is not moved by our praise or changed by our faults. And that the only proper stance is a kneeling of the soul.

The fact that we exist at all is the signature of His generosity. And the fact that nothing in us (not even our darkness) can ever stain Him, is perhaps the single most hopeful truth the mind can hold.

It shouldn't be hard to see then, that change, that most familiar and yet deeply unsettling feature of all created things: flickering, the endless flow of coming-to-be and passing-away belongs only to the realm of the created. It is, by definition, a creaturely phenomenon. And that the Creator, whose essence is not contingent or borrowed or received, remains beyond and untouched by every species and nuance of change.

Because change presupposes a being whose existence isn’t from itself. Something that receives existence is, by that very fact, something that can lose it. If your being comes from outside you, then by the same pathway, it can leave. That’s the bargain. That’s the metaphysical risk of being made.

The Creator on the other hand, remains in a state of pure actuality: untouched, unmoved, undiminished. His essence, His attributes, and His will, are immutable. The human mind, conditioned by flux, can barely hold the idea. But prophets speak of it with awe: that God's essence is as it always was, as it always will be, as it always must be. He is not in time, because time is a created thing. He is not subject to change, because change is for things that can fail, fall, fade.

So if you’re wondering why all things seem to shift, and why even joy itself feels fleeting, and why everything you touch eventually slips through your fingers: it is because you, and I, and the world, are creatures. We are defined by what we are not yet, and what we are no longer. That’s change. That’s mortality. That’s us.

Until next time, think hard over this.

Yours sincerely,

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

You can read the first letter here.

The second letter here.

Shazad

P.S. Please do like, share and subscribe as I’d like to think this is benefitting some of you out there.

Dear Tariq,

Assalamu ‘Alaykum,

I trust you had a pleasant week.

I found myself with some spare time this weekend and thought I'd better carry on with our series of letters. I find the tranquil atmosphere after fajr on a Saturday or Sunday to be my most productive time because I have no commitments for the day and the little gremlins are still fast asleep.

Anyway.

We’ve established thus far, from my previous letter, that the dual modalities underlying this cosmos are both existence and non-existence. The rise and fall of empires, life and death, health and sickness are all manifestations of this cocktail of both being and non-being. It’s as if they both dissolve into a kaleidoscope of hybridities.

But what further becomes apparent is that both existence (wujūd) and non-existence (ʿadam) - excuse me for using the Arabic terms here but this is where my educational influence comes from - are not symmetrical forces. They do not, in other words, bear equal metaphysical weight. Rather, their relationship is marked by a deep ontological asymmetry that discloses itself upon even a casual metaphysical inspection: while the universe’s existence is contingent, accidental, and bounded, its non-existence is essential, primary and intrinsic.

To frame this in less abstract terms, the universe was, for an indeterminate and immeasurable span of pre-ontological “time,” simply not. That is, it did not exist. This absence was fundamental. And at some definable point, existence was conferred. This emergence from non-being was limited, conditional, and temporally located. It began. And at some point it will “end”. In the metaphysical sense, it will revert to its ontological origin, namely nothingness.

In other words, the universe is ex nihilo in its origin and it is ad nihilum in its eventual destiny.

If it were otherwise, if the universe were somehow guaranteed permanent being, if it were assured of eternal persistence, then the designation of the cosmos as contingent or created or ḥādith (to use the classical Arabic term) would become philosophically incoherent. For permanence is a property of necessary being, not of the created or contingent. Temporality by definition implies finitude, and finitude implies a terminus. The very essence of the “temporary” is that it is framed on both sides, before and after, by non-being.

The Prophet’s ḥadīth confirms this:

كان الله ولم يكن شيء غيره

“There was God, and none besides Him…”

The Qur’ān corroborates its eventual non-being:

كُلُّ شَيْءٍ هَالِكٌ إِلَّا وَجْهَهُ

“All things perish, except His Face.” (Quran 28:88)

Another verse reads:

كُلُّ مَنْ عَلَيْهَا فَانٍ

وَيَبْقَىٰ وَجْهُ رَبِّكَ ذُو الْجَلَالِ وَالْإِكْرَامِ

“Everything upon it [i.e., the Earth] will pass away. And the Majestic Munificent Face of they Lord will remain.” (Quran, 55:26-27).

The universe’s initial non-being, its primordial absence, is delimited; leaving only the Necessary, the Absolute, the Unconditioned as ever-abiding.

For the universe, for you and I, and everything we see and hear, existence is the exception; non-existence is the rule. And while we may live suspended in this bright interval of being, we must acknowledge that we are suspended between abysses.

If we explore this further and dig deeper, the kind of “being” this universe possesses isn’t just limited in time, existing temporarily, but spatially and structurally limited, too. Its "being," its very ontology, is hemmed in by borders- physical, conceptual, existential-which, rather than merely surrounding it, actually define it, and, paradoxically, expose its internal fragility.

And these limits do more than just frame what the thing is, they also constitute an implicit announcement of what the thing is not. A boundary, after all, is always a confession of absence on the other side.

So: if a thing is limited in space or function or duration, it essentially implies its own non-being outside those limits. If you say “this thing exists here,” you are just as much saying “this thing does not exist there.” Existence, in this mode, becomes a kind of glowing dot surrounded by a sea of negation.

Now take that and scale it across everything, atoms, animals, minds, galaxies. Everything that exists within these boundaries (which is to say: everything that exists at all) carries within itself the possibility and the reality of not-being simultaneously. Not just before or after or elsewhere, but even internally, in its very structure. Existence, then, in our world, isn't this pure, pristine "is-ness" but a kind of cracked, adulterated condition where being and non-being live uncomfortably side by side. They come together like strangers awkwardly trying to kiss.

This leads to a wild, almost comic metaphysical irony: that what we call “things” are really just zones of conditional presence, full of gaps, vulnerable at every edge, leaky with absence. Even while they exist, they are, at least partially, not. They’re temporal maybes, and ontological almosts. And this applies to their interactions, their properties and their behaviours. Water is not fire, and it must not be, or else we collapse the distinction between identities. But that means part of water’s essence is its rejection of fire. Its existence requires a simultaneous denial of another.

So these so-called "existing things" become fragile, fleeting, fractured. Their presence is temporary, borrowed, and always teetering toward absence. And the more we analyse their essence, the clearer it becomes that the non-being in them outnumbers the being. Their very nature is lack.

Which, in the end, forces the unsettling conclusion that the dominant force in the universe, as we experience and observe it, may not be presence or reality or fullness, but absence, negation, finitude. We live in a world made more of “not” than of “is.” And so what we call “existence” is, perhaps, just the visible crest of an ocean flickering, stuttering, never whole, never still. It’s the asymmetrical nature of the cosmos’ ontology.

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Yes, I know this sounds like something from an overwritten philosophical treatise or one of those footnote-heavy essays from a journal nobody reads, but what this establishes is that ‘existence’ in and of itself is good, intrinsically good, or at the very least, preferable; and that ‘non-existence’, i.e., the absence of being, is inherently a defect, a lack, a kind of ontological glitch in the ideal code of reality.

To be more precise: the very fact that something exists gives it a kind of dignity or completeness that its nonexistence would categorically lack. A human being, for example; this complicated, frequently ridiculous but occasionally noble organism of flesh, blood and bones, is celebrated for coming into the world ( balloons, midwives, announcements, birthdays), and mourned when they pass out of it (wails, funerals, lamentations), because being is understood universally, instinctively and primally, as better than not-being. The same principle applies - scalably - to all human attributes. Knowledge (as in, the presence of understanding) is good; ignorance (the absence thereof) is bad. Sight, hearing, speech are forms of human completeness. Blindness, deafness, dumbness: all examples of things we define, as deficiencies. And this duality extends to ethical ones too.

Generosity, courage, forbearance, humility, modesty, and so on are all "existents": they are there, they take up ethical space. Their opposites: stinginess, cowardice, arrogance; are not just moral failings but absences of those more refined qualities. They are voids, holes, missing pieces.

The same holds for mental and physical states: health, joy, clarity, contentment; these are all positives, presences. Disease, grief, disarray; these are absences of something better, something more whole. And human actions? Same story. Truth-telling, altruism, devotion, purity, restraint etc. are actions with substance. Their lack (lying, selfishness, debauchery, etc.) is less a presence of evil than a vacancy where good could’ve been.

So (and here we land, finally, after our scenic route): wherever there is being, there is value. And wherever there is non-being, there is loss, or a falling short of the possible potential .

In other words: to exist is, ipso facto, to matter.

I must leave you now. Dad duties call. The gremlins are awake and are demanding pancakes for breakfast.

Until next time, think hard over this.

Speak soon.

Yours faithfully,

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

Shazad Khan

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Dear Tariq,

Assalamu ‘Alaykum,

Thanks for your letter. It’s always a bit startling, in a good way, to be reminded that other people are actually thinking about this stuff.

You should know that you’re not alone in these thoughts. In fact, and I mean this with no condescension whatsoever, they’re ancient. Think Job, think Dostoevsky, think Kafka. You’re not the first, and you certainly aren’t the last to have these thoughts.

Now: do I have the answers? No, not all of them.

But I’ve spent enough time wrangling with the questions to hazard a few thoughts.

The only thing I’ll ask, respectfully, and maybe a little self-protectively, is that you let me finish laying it all out before jumping back in with follow-ups. It’s just that my brain, such as it is, tends to work in spirals rather than clean linear bursts, and interruptions (however well-meaning) tend to knock me out of the thread. Plus, on the logistical side of things, I’m trying to juggle family life, teaching, and a writing project or three, which means I’ll probably need to respond in installments. Think of it as a slow drip feeding thing, rather than a one-and-done FAQ.

So bear with me.

Let's get down to business.

Your questions have made me think about the strange, flickering nature of the universe we live in. It seems to me that nothing around us ever really stays the same: the seasons, our bodies, even the thoughts we hold from one day to the next are constantly changing. The world is rising, falling, growing, decaying - like something caught between two poles it can never fully escape.

The philosophers have long said this universe wasn’t always here. Most traditions agree that it had a beginning. And if something begins, then it's also capable of ending.

If the universe emerged from nothing, and if one day it will disappear back into that same nothingness, then what we call “existence” is really just a passing moment in a much vaster, deeper silence. A brief flare of light between two eternities of darkness.

Like a sandcastle: in the beginning there was only sand: nothing shaped, nothing built. And then, a form appeared: a dome, a tower, a fragile arch. And just as easily, just as inevitably, the tide will come and reclaim it.

The universe is less like a house with a strong foundation and more like a tent, pitched briefly, taken down quickly, and never meant to last.

The result is a kind of ontological restlessness. Nothing stays. Nothing holds. Everything is in flux because it was never meant to last in the first place. It's as if impermanence is woven into the fabric of reality itself. Buildings collapse, stars die, bodies age, memories fade; because that’s how this place works. Its defining feature is that it changes. The instability is built into its metaphysical nature.

Ontologically speaking, it’s always kind of halfway there. When it wasn’t, it had the capacity to be. And now that it is, it has the inbuilt capacity to not be. It’s like existence with a “Best Before” date, only no one knows the actual date.

And so every single thing in the world, every mode, condition, object, interaction, epiphany, heartbreak, spreadsheet error, is simultaneously showing the signs of existence and also whispering its own non-existential nature. If it were pure existence, it wouldn’t decay. If it were pure nothingness, it never would have made it here in the first place.

And what this actually means is that nothing in this world, can ever be in a fixed state. Ever. Period. Because true fixity - unchangingness (is that even a word?) - is only possible if something is either (a) pure existence, eternal and invulnerable, or (b) pure non-existence, which, by definition, would mean it doesn’t exist and thus isn’t our problem. But we live in Door (c), the “both/neither” option: a world perpetually in flux because it's composed of stuff that exists but only kind of.

So the inevitable, unavoidable consequence is instability. Not just change over time, but change as time.

And this is true at every single level: from the loftiest abstractions of the celestial spheres, down to the tiniest particulate bleeps of material reality. Elements, atoms, organisms, thoughts, relationships. Every single thing is caught in this universal flicker of opposing states. Existence and non-existence taking turns driving the bus.

And so, we are left with a paradox that might be uncomfortable but is nonetheless philosophically robust: a world that is always already in transition, always slipping from one state into another, to live in such a world is to be immersed in a metaphysical field of opposing vectors, each asserting a claim on reality without ever fully securing it. It is, in effect, to inhabit a universe of contradictions, a cosmos of contraries, structured by the impossibility of stillness.

More soon.

In the intervening time, please think hard over this.

Yours,

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK

Dear Shaykh,

If God is merciful and kind and more tender-hearted toward human beings than even their parents (who are, in the best-case scenario, biologically wired to love them), then why is the world soaked in misery?1

Why the relentless torrent of affliction, disease, humiliation, anguish, anxiety, grief, and raw torment that falls from the sky like acid rain?

Why are human beings consistently and intimately pulverised by this grim precipitation?

Granted: some of this suffering might plausibly be caused by human negligence or moral failure. (E.g., you get cholera because your city’s sanitation is abysmal, or you have war because someone wants more land or oil) But what about phenomena that fall squarely under the category of acts of God, events that are entirely outside human agency?

Consider, for instance, the creation of germs. Or parasites. Or mosquitoes. Or bedbugs. Or scorpions. Or earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, droughts, famine, lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions. These are not human failings. These are the direct result of divine programming.

So how exactly, are we supposed to square such pitiless natural horror with the notion of a God who is, in essence, pure Mercy and boundless Compassion?

Because if this is compassion, or what divine “mercy” looks like, then what exactly distinguishes mercy from cruelty? What word do we reserve for actual malice if this gets to wear the badge of love?

If one attempts, charitably, to say: “Well, these afflictions are meant as a warning. A wake-up call. A moral corrective sent by a loving but stern Father to his errant children”

Then one is forced to confront the fact that these plagues, trials, tribulations, etc., do not, in practice, discriminate. Guilty and innocent are steamrolled with equal fervour. Yes, maybe adults have sinned. But what about infants?2 What do newborns do to deserve cancer? Or paralysis? Or starvation in refugee camps?

And even if, (absurdly, inhumanely) you want to argue that children might sin in the future and thus are fair game (a kind of pre-emptive strike), what do we do with animals? Cats, dogs, deer, elephants. Creatures with no concept of God, no conscience to violate, and no tongue to confess. They too get buried under rubble, burned in wildfires, or drown in tsunamis. What moral lesson is being delivered to them?

And when one suggests - almost desperately- that perhaps all this horror is designed for humanity’s “spiritual refinement,” as a way to shape the soul and cultivate virtue, then a deeper and even more troubling question arises: if God is all-powerful and all-wise, as all traditions insist, could He not have devised a method of moral development that didn’t involve such agonising misery?

A decent doctor, when forced to operate in a painful way, at least administers anesthesia. He wraps bitterness in sugar. He tries to dull the patient’s pain even while curing them.

Where is that divine anesthesia?

Where is that compassion-in-practice?

Why do infants suffer?

Why do goats drown in floods?

Why do entire ecosystems collapse when the guilty few fly private jets?

Why is the so-called “moral curriculum” written in the language of pain?

Couldn't He design a gentler pedagogy? A course in compassion that doesn’t involve fire, death, and pathogens?

And so we’re left with a terrifying dilemma. Either God is not merciful, or He is merciful in a way that is so radically foreign to human understanding that the term loses all meaning.

Or, perhaps more disturbingly: He is merciful, and omnipotent, but chooses not to use His omnipotence to spare us. Which implies that He wants us to suffer. Which, depending on your interpretive generosity, is either a mark of terrifying divine indifference or of a cruelty too vast to name that even the most dysfunctional families try to avoid inflicting on their own family members?

These are not metaphors or philosophical dilemmas. These are daily, bodily, intimate forms of suffering. And humans seem to take the brunt of it.

Or is God simply unable to interfere? Is God bound by some unseen constraint, rendering Him powerless to alter the course of events?

Then what is the purpose of worshipping a deity that appears impotent in the face of adversity?

Why do humans - religious people to be precise - trouble deaf heaven with their bootless cries?

Does the act of worship stem from a genuine expectation of divine intervention, or is it merely a form of existential comfort, a desperate attempt to impose meaning upon an seemingly indifferent universe?

Let’s say that the reason we (i.e., human beings) are subject to this whole carnival of suffering and misfortune and chronic, inexplicable emotional and physical pain is because God: defined traditionally as omniscient (i.e., knows everything), omnipotent (i.e., can do anything), and omnibenevolent (i.e., supposed to be good, capital-G Good, metaphysically, ontologically, and incontestably Good), is testing us.

Testing what, exactly? Well, our character. Our steadfastness. Our spiritual fiber. Our epistemic stability under moral duress. In short: to see whether we’ll still “believe” when the odds are against us, and things are only likely to get worse.

Which immediately collapses under its own theological weight, because if God knows everything (and I do mean everything: the innermost intentions of your heart, the crumpled tissues of your secret regrets, the joke you didn’t laugh at but wanted to, the existential trajectory of every blood cell you will ever circulate), then what is the function of the test? As in, what’s being measured that wasn’t already perfectly, eternally, absolutely, and irrevocably known?

Because, think about it: if the “test” is for God, then we’re saying He needs empirical data to make a moral assessment (which, for a deity whose Curriculum Vitae includes “Author of Time,” is kind of like saying Stephen Hawking needed flashcards to pass Algebra). And if it’s not for Him - but for us - then that means we’re part of some pedagogical structure whose outcome is completely opaque until we die, which, given the stakes (eternal salvation or damnation), seems, at best, psychologically destabilizing and, at worst, a Kafkaesque nightmare disguised as sacred telos.

Also, if you accept the omniscience bit (which, again, is the quintessential doctrine of monotheistic theology), then the whole experiment takes on a weirdly performative, even sadistic, quality. Because what’s the point of testing someone when you already know the result?

Imagine a teacher who hands you an exam question paper, watches you sweat through the entire exam, and then reveals that your grade was already assigned based on a personality test you took in primary school. Except that teacher also designed your brain, your weaknesses, your attention span, and possibly even the air quality in the classroom.

And it gets worse. Because the test, this divine evaluation, isn’t short. It doesn’t come with a clock or a defined end of term or end of contract or even midterm feedback. It just keeps going: For. Your. Entire. Life.

And the syllabus? Good luck with that. It’s written in an invisible language, and apparently there are no retakes. Also, some people are born into what appears to be the essay question from hell while others get True/False questions with a 50% shot at eternity.

And don’t even get me started on the toddlers. If this cosmic test begins at birth then how, pray tell, are babies supposed to demonstrate moral resilience? They can’t hold their own heads up, let alone muster a spiritual defense against bone cancer or famine. So now we’re testing people who don’t even know they’re being tested?

Which leads to the most uneasy conclusion of all: if the point isn’t the result, and the result is already known, and the test is lifelong and apparently devoid of feedback, then the test isn’t a test. It’s just suffering. Institutionalized, sanctified, theologized suffering, dressed up as “trial” but functionally indistinct from existential punishment.

And if that’s the case, then perhaps the whole construct needs to be re-examined. Because it might be too committed to an idea of God that’s simultaneously all-knowing and all-testing, all-merciful and all-pain-dealing, benevolent yet bureaucratically indifferent to outcomes. In other words: if this is the system, then the system is broken. Or at the very least, it’s not taking your questions right now.

A reasonably reflective person, especially one who has suffered, eventually finds themselves in when trying to square the theological circle of God being both all-good and the apparent CEO of human misery, or at the very least its silent shareholder. And the liturgy goes something like this:

The pain you're experiencing, the loss, the inexplicable disaster, the cancer or car crash or crushing lifelong mediocrity, isn't random. It’s a test, a divine refinement, a moral gymnasium of sorts. And that, crucially, you're supposed to respond with gratitude. That's right, you're supposed to thank the very force responsible for the thing you're barely surviving.

Let that marinate.

Now imagine the kind of psychological contortion this requires: You’re expected not only to believe in this all-powerful being who knows exactly what’s happening to you, and could change it, and doesn’t- but also to believe that this not changing it is an act of mercy. That the avalanche flattening your life is somehow a gift. And if you’re really spiritually “mature,” you're also supposed to pray. fervently, repeatedly, to the very being who, by all available evidence, signed off on the avalanche in the first place.

And all of this, mind you, with a straight face.

Which (if we’re being honest) leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance so profound that your internal monologue might sound something like this:

Wait—he wants me to say “thank you” for the pain? And not just thank you but like, thank-you-thank-you, soul-level gratitude, eyes-closed, palms-up submission? And I'm supposed to believe he already knows everything about me- my faults, my fragilities, my breaking points-because he made me that way? And I'm still being “tested”? For what? What part of the test isn’t already in the answer key?

Because here's the thing: if God is omniscient and omnipotent, then either (a) he causes the suffering directly, which makes him less benevolent than advertised, or (b) he allows it despite having the power to prevent it, which makes his benevolence a kind of moral abstraction so far removed from actual human experience that it may as well be a unicorn.

And then there’s the whole business of merit. Because this religious weltanschauung, doesn’t seem particularly interested in fairness. Good people suffer. Terrible people thrive. And if all of that is “God’s plan,” then the concept of divine justice becomes as nebulous as a bureaucratic form letter: We appreciate your patience. Your suffering is being processed. Do not reply to this message.

If that’s the case, if the test never ends and the results never arrive and the suffering just keeps coming, and gratitude is still the expected emotional baseline, then yes, maybe it's psychologically inevitable that some people will stop believing entirely. Not out of rebellion or arrogance or some Nietzschean death-of-God trend, but out of plain old exhaustion.

Because at some point, your average thinking human might start to see the world as a causal web of consequences.3 Actions and reactions, choices and errors, biology and bad timing. And maybe then, the locus of control shifts. Maybe then, you stop looking for the divine hand behind every tragedy and start seeing the human ones: bad policies, bad doctors, bad plumbing. And you realize, belatedly, that maybe God isn’t punishing you; you just didn’t get the vaccine.

And the weird twist here is that the more you do take responsibility, the more science and human reason and sheer logistical effort start fixing the things you were once told only God could cure. Smallpox? Cured. Polio? Largely gone. Floods? Now predictable by satellite. Which begs the embarrassing but essential question: If we can mitigate suffering ourselves, why did we ever think it was a divine reward or punishment in the first place?

In other words, maybe the test isn’t real. Or maybe we’ve been answering the wrong questions. Maybe gratitude, real gratitude, is naught but a commitment to build seatbelts that work, roads that don’t kill, and a world where prayer isn’t the only hope you have left.

And maybe, just maybe, we had it all wrong from the start - and there is no God after all. We just had it all wrong

Please forgive my rant and the length of this letter.

These questions have been pestering me for a while and I thought the best way to get them out of my system is to write to you directly.

Eagerly awaiting your reply,

Tariq Ali4

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I always enjoy the lull after Eid, the calm after the storm. A fleeting reprieve from the cacophony of the world, brings with it a peculiar sort of creative ferment. This time round, I was drawn to a pile of books that promised to disrupt my reverie.

This particular piece is inspired by an Urdu book entitled, Falsa-e-Nimat wa Muṣibat by Qari Muhammad Tayyib. It’s a 244 page theological response to the problem of evil. A Gordian knot of paradoxes and conundrums that refuses to yield its secrets easily.

Enjoy!

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When prophets, scriptural heavyweights and secular rationalists all arrive at the same uncomfortable conclusion, it’s very telling.

What conclusion?

Things that are made of other things i.e., that anything composite is, at root, dependent on its components.

It’s a screaming signpost pointing to its inevitable disintegration. Because if something requires its ingredients in just the right ratio to be what it is, then what happens when that ratio fails, or the ingredients decay, or the connections weaken, or the universe decides to reshuffle the deck?

What you get, at best, is a thing that isn’t really that thing anymore. You get a kind of ghost version, the incomplete article, the unfinished product; and at worst, you get nothing. Total obliteration. Ontological flatline. Kaput. Finito.

And the scarier part is that this isn’t limited to stars and skyscrapers and soufflés but applies, unfortunately, and unavoidably, to us.

Because humans, too, are composites: little bundles of proteins and pulses and past traumas barely held together by belief or breath or sheer momentum. And when these components fray, when the soul’s scaffolding begins to warp under the pressure of entropy, we don’t necessarily vanish outright, but something vital starts to flicker. A quality, not a quantity. You could call it suffering, or disintegration, or spiritual drift. It's not always terminal, but it always hurts.

Now, here’s where Islam pulls a rather elegant pivot.

It doesn’t say: go fix this with more matter. It doesn't prescribe pills or tech upgrades or TED Talks.

Instead, it says: the site of suffering isn’t your bank account or your bones or your physiology - it's your heart. The metaphorical heart, the ruh, the thing within that is “you” when all else is stripped away.

And the health of that heart isn’t preserved through material means or life insurance plans but through alignment. Specifically, relational alignment with the Originator of all being. In other words, God.

There are two core principles here, both of which are spiritually dense enough to require deep, slow chewing:

1. Don’t tether your heart to the suffering itself (which is changeable and often pointless in isolation), but to the Author of the suffering (who is, theologically speaking, not changeable and never pointless).

2. Don’t totally rely in the causes of things. Seek it in the Cause of causes, the musabbib al-asbāb, the First Cause, the Unmoved Mover.

And when we view suffering through this lens (and here’s where it gets wild) you start to see that those rare humans we call saints or sages or awliya, who somehow remain untouched at their core even when everything external falls apart.

Yes, their bodies break, their finances collapse, their reputations suffer, but inside, deep in the inner chambers of their souls, there’s this eerie stillness. They’ve built their fortress in a place the world can’t reach.

Case in point: Umar ibn al-Khattab (a.k.a. one of the most stoic, steel-spined men in early Islamic history) is said to have remarked—paraphrasing liberally here—that if you lose something worldly, don’t freak out, because: (A) it was never really yours, and (B) even if it was, it was always going to dissolve anyway. But if you lose something of the eternal sort—faith, integrity, connection to the Divine—then it’s time to sound the alarm, because that’s not replaceable, and that is you. So where does this leave us postmodern materialists steeped in late-stage capitalism, self-help memes, and wearable heart monitors?

Well, mostly in a mess.

Because we’ve done something tragic and weirdly ironic: we've tried to patch the wounds inflicted by materialism with… more materialism.

We're like someone trying to put out a fire with gasoline—except the gasoline is personalized health plans and mindfulness apps and targeted ads for “serenity.”

And what you get - what we are getting - is a civilization that trades one crisis for another, forever surprised that the solutions keep mutating into problems. Each remedy spawns its own set of side effects, which spawn their own remedies, ad infinitum, until suffering becomes not an event, but a lifestyle. A branding category. A subscription model.

Which brings us to a sobering, intellectually chewy point made—perhaps best of all—by Qari Muhammad Tayyib in his book Falsafa-e-Nimat wa Musibat (The Philosophy of Blessings and Suffering). His whole deal, boiled down: suffering and blessings aren’t opposites; they’re both trials. Both are messages. And if you don’t know how to read them—if your “heart” hasn’t been trained to listen—you’ll have missed the whole point entirely.

Shazad Khan

Birmingham, UK