Status Updates From Islam and the Destiny of Man

the great virtues - and it is the Prophet's virtues that the believer stirves to imitate - can, it seems, be expressed through human nature in countless different ways, whereas worldly fashion induces uniformity.

The Quran tells us "O believers, do not ask concerning matters which, if they were made known to you, would trouble you... (5.101) and the Prophet said, "Do not ask me about matters which I leave unspoken, for truly there were people before you who went to their doom because they put too many questions to their messengers and thereupon disagreed."

Islam is the religion of mercy, but it is also, and above all, the religion of truth, and truth is pitiless in that it cannot be other than what it is. There is no way in which black can become white so as to appease the grief of a human soul. Not even God, for all His omnipotence, can choose to make error ino truth.

Ultimate Truth - the truth of the Shahadah - cannot be neatly fitted ino the terrestrial dimensions and therefore finds expression in painful contradictions and the interplay of opposites. If Truth is the principal business of religion - but for which all Faiths would be be mere sentimentality and wishful thinking - then religion is inevitably stretched out upon the rack of contradiction.