To be saved from heedlessness and misguidance

The month of Ramazan is the month in which the Qur'an was sent down, a time when the Creator, who created the worlds and created the human being from a nutfah, explains to the human being the reason for his creation and explains His message. Without regard for how he was created, the human being presumes to become an adversary to his Creator. Let alone falling into heedlessness, forgetfulness and obliviousness, with the three-and-a-half brains he runs, he regards his own existence as something happening within himself and goes into squabbling with the idea of a Creator.

With his reason, which he so admires and regards as sufficient for everything, he ponders and deliberates and finds resurrection after death impossible. By ignoring how he came to be what he is out of nothing, he is not even aware that he has already displayed his first great ignorance.

He skips over the miracle, the irrationality, the extraordinariness within having been created out of nothing, and begins to regard being created again, even after having turned to dust and earth, as harder. This is the reason that drags the human being from misguidance to misguidance, hence from disaster to disaster, and blinds him even to the simplest truth.

When he opens his eyes and looks around, everything he sees is in fact impossible. Everything is a miracle. In his own body, a heart that is not under his own control, a blood circulation of extraordinary regularity, a kidney, a liver, a nervous system, a brain, an eye, an ear...

He has a magnificent system in his body, he thinks it belongs to him, it is not even under his own control, he does not even have proper knowledge of how it works, how it operates. There is a system, indeed systems, given to him ready-made, running like clockwork, every detail working with extraordinary perfection.

Even within that body, when a person sets out to explore, he learns new things every day that he did not know. In fact, he becomes aware of any point in that body only when a disruption arises there. And his becoming aware does not mean that he knows everything and has mastered all knowledge of it. All the knowledge that all humanity has accumulated about its own body, biology, anatomy, the medical sciences, first tries to discover, know and understand this magnificent system in order to remedy these disruptions, and at every stage keeps discovering how little it actually knows about this system. Years ago the famous astonishment of Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel continues to be repeated during these discoveries: "Man, This Unknown."

That a human being who is unknown even to himself should presume to compete in reason with his own Creator only shows his wretchedness.

What does the human being know about himself anyway? Even if he were to decipher the whole operating system of his bodily existence, which he is far from doing, how much can he know, staying within the limits of the reason that has likewise been "given" to him, about why and how this system was established?

When he steps out of his own body and glances at other beings, for a human being not to see that he is in every case surrounded by miracles that call forth his amazement, he must have fallen either into ghaflah or into dalalah. Ghaflah is a human condition that comes about through the person's unconcern, his sinking into the cares of the world and forgetting his creation, or his handing over his reason to others and not daring to use his reason, being captivated by the spell of others' very attractive, very showy words and surrendering to them. Instead of using his own reason, to surrender to the reason of others like himself, to bind his will to them, is one of the ways of servitude to servants. The path of those who have incurred wrath.

Every day we pray in Surah al-Fatiha that God not lead us astray onto that path. And we also pray that He not lead us astray onto the path of those who have gone into dalalah.

Dalalah is a state of istighna', precisely beginning with the human being forgetting his own creation and regarding himself as self-sufficient, although he has control over none of the millions of processes operating within his own body.

That is why, if the first words of the Qur'an, which addresses the human creation, begin to humanity with "Read," one of the first subjects it commands us to read about is the istighna' in the human being's regarding himself as self-sufficient even though he was created from an "alaq." The istighna' that drags one into dalalah, into deviation.

That big men, great philosophers, brainiacs who have read Islam and all religions quite well, who have devoured Greek, Indian and Islamic philosophy, should, on top of all they know and have learned, reach this state of istighna', is of course not the only road that reason leads to, and moreover this outcome is of course not an unavoidable tragedy of the human being. Falling into ghaflah and falling into dalalah is not a fate that works by itself, it is only a choice. It is not, in any case, a necessary outcome to which reason leads.

The Qur'an al-Karim begins with Surah al-Fatiha, and the 7-verse Surah al-Fatiha ends with this prayer: "Guide us to the straight path (ihdina, grant us hidayah), not the path of those who have incurred wrath and have gone astray."

The whole of the Qur'an al-Karim, as a "book of hidayah," is an answer given to this prayer that we make many times every day in our prayers or outside the prayers: "Alif, Lam, Mim. This is the Book about which there is no doubt, a guidance for the muttaqin."

A guidance, yes, but not for everyone, for the muttaqin. Who are the muttaqin? This question is a guiding question for all the exegesis, interpretation and hermeneutics debates to be opened in order to understand the Qur'an correctly or as it deserves.