A New Road Map: Tawhid in the 21st century
And your Allah is One Allah. There is no god but He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful (Q2:163).Archive for prophecy
Alam un Nabowwa
The concept of prophesy and prophesizing is very different in Islam vis-à-vis Judaism and Christianity. Unfortunately, most/many Muslims do not realize this. Many assume that the hadith of Alam-un-Nabowwa are talking about prophesies. The events MUST come to pass.
What this does to the psyche of Muslims is incredibly destructive- they assume that the best was in the past, and everything is only going to be downhill anyway. If anything is going from bad to worse, why should they bother doing anything? This viewpoint is very damaging and pessimistic. It paralyzes people and makes them lose hope.
I realize that Allah has promised a Day of Judgment, yet I do not know if He has promised us unconditional misery and the decay of the ummah before then. It is as though in the preparation for the Last Day, the world must be a miserable place, and there will no mention of Islam any more. That view is hard to reconcile with Islam and the attitudes that the Quran encourages in us.
What is exciting however is to look at the alam-un-nabowwa narrations as scenarios. The Prophet was a futurist, and he was projecting about what could happen. He had access to some knowledge of the Unseen that most others do not have, and this gave him an edge in determining various scenarios that can play out. What is incredible is the possibility of time-transcendence that these scenarios have. Are they valid for all time? Have some of them already played out, and have some of them been prevented?
It would be a wonderful project to write a book on these narrations from a scenario perspective to gain insight into human psychology and politics. They might be very revealing in giving us tools that can be used in a variety of endeavors, beyond religion.
