The Endlessness that Surrounds Us

When your grandpa was in hospital, he asked me one night to promise him that, when he had gone from us, I would teach you Islam - our Islam: the Islam I grew up with, the Islam he too had experienced as a child in Isfahan; the Islam of our ancestors. In that dark, impersonal room, he was thinking of you.

Since then I've read aloud to you from this book and that, but none of them was what your grandpa wanted. You've learned a great deal about the Prophet and the country he was born in; about commandments and prohibitions; about scriptures, prayers, feasts and customs; about the difference between Sunnis and Shiites; you even know now about the four schools of law, and you have an idea of the problems that the Islamic world faces today. But what Islam is really about, and not just Islam, but all religions, when you get to the bottom of it - why we say we believe in God - you've learned hardly anything about that. It's as if the books were describing a person's clothes without saying a word about the person wearing them - their face, their character; not even whether it's a man or a woman, young or old; where they come from, what their dreams are, and why they love us. If religion had any deeper meaning at all in those books, it was in bringing us up to be decent people - to be just, kind, helpful and so on. But can't a person figure that out just as well, you asked, without God?

At that I stammered something about loving your neighbour, compassion, the Ten Commandments. But later, lying in bed, I thought: of course you can figure that out without God. After all, atheists are not murderers, thieves or swindlers just because they don't believe in God. And at the same time, there are so many people who do believe in God and yet are unjust, hard-hearted and cruel. So the religions must be about something more besides how we shape our lives and how we behave towards our fellow human beings. Maybe they're also, and most of all, about life itself: about what this life that we have is, and whether it consists of something more than what we see.

Some people say life is what it is: the result of chemical, molecular and genetic processes, a kind of supercomputer that is constantly developing itself by trial and error, adaptation and selection, cause and effect. Grandpa always pointed out that someone must have built and programmed this computer that makes everything tick. And when others insisted, no, there is no one who builds and programs life; it comes about by itself and disappears again like a drop of water that evaporates and dissolves into thin air - then Grandpa always said something that is cannot simply become nothing: neither a drop of water nor a human being nor the fact that we exist. And he claimed, furthermore, that the idea that something could become nothing is almost impossible for children to conceive of. And do you know what? I think your grandpa was right about that.

It is interesting, after all, that children, if I'm not mistaken, practically never question the meaning of life - don't even dwell on it much, while adults certainly do. Oh yes, and how they question and dwell! So there must be something between being a child and being an adult that shakes our belief that everything is just as it should be. Try to remember when you were a little child: did you use to think a lot, about death for example, when you were younger? I don't think you did, really. You knew that we all die someday, but it wasn't something you thought about; to you it seemed as though life would just go on somehow. You weren't afraid at all; on the contrary - when I talked about the afterlife, about Heaven, angels and eternal life, it was the most natural thing in the world to you. You simply couldn't imagine that something that is could suddenly not be, from one breath to the next.

Only now that your own grandpa has died, and you've grown older yourself - at twelve you're almost a teenager - have you met death face to face. You wept at his grave. You noticed something was wrong; Grandpa is gone; he'll never tell you a story again; you'll never go visit him by the seaside in summer. Maybe you've thought for the first time about the fact that you too will lie in the ground one day, in one of those cold, clammy graves. That we all will turn to dust: your mother, your father, your sister. And I think this conscious confrontation with death is one of the things that happens between being a child and being an adult. It doesn't have to be a certain person who dies; what I mean is simply the clear realization that someday we won't be around any more, none of us. And two, three or at most four generations after us, there won't be anyone left around who remembers us either.

Know that earthly life is but a game

And an amusement and a frippery and a contest,

Who is the richest, who has the most children.

It is as rain that makes the plants sprout,

And makes the whole village glad.

Then they wither, and you see them turn yellow and dry.

And everything decays.

Of course, our great- or great-great- or great-great-great- grandchildren will know we existed - otherwise they wouldn't exist. But who we are, what we think, feel, dream, what makes us feel concerned, angry, glad, afraid or excited: they won't have the slightest clue about that. We'll just be gone, as if erased; not even our names will be known; even the inscription on our tombstone will weather and become illegible, no more recognizable than our faces in old photos. All the people we loved, and we ourselves too, will evaporate like a drop of water - into nothing, it seems.

Sooner or later each of us realizes with a chill that nothing of us will last. Then we begin to doubt: does life really go on somehow when a person dies, as our parents always said? And where was I before I was born? Sooner or later, every human being wonders about questions like these, and their answers differ vastly. But perhaps it is not the adults who know best with their long and their short explanations, but the children, who trust that life will go on somehow and everything is as it should be. And the Quran - and all revelations, for that matter - confirm what children think. They say, just look around you - do you really think all this can be just by chance?

Look at the water you drink -

Did you send it down from the clouds, or did We?

If We wanted, We could make it bitter.

Why then do you not give thanks?

Look at the fire you have kindled -

Did you create the wood, or did We?

We created it as a reminder

And to serve those who cross the desert.

Therefore praise the name of your Lord Who is almighty.

And yesterday, as my gaze strayed out of the window while we were reading another book about Islam, I suddenly thought there is more to learn about God out there, or at least more important things than the fact that the Quran contains 114 surahs and what the first, second, third, fourth and fifth pillars of Islam are. After all, Islam and Christianity and Judaism and all the other religions were not created in offices, in libraries or in classrooms. The religions came into being wherever people looked around at nature, or worried about their loved ones when they themselves were sick, hungry or feeling lost, when their children were born or when their parents died - at the most important events there are in a person's life. And why? Because they noticed they were surrounded by endlessness. Yes, endlessness. The sky, for example, up there, if you look out of the window right now - not the Earth's atmosphere, I mean, but the universe, space - does it have an end? No, of course not. But can you imagine that something just goes on, goes on and on forever? Think about what that means. You'll find that you can't imagine endlessness.

Or take the chestnut tree in the yard - yes, that one: can you conceive that out of trillions and quadrillions of leaves that have sprouted since the world began, not a single one is the same as another? I mean, not only each one of that tree's leaves is different from every other, even if you could lay every leaf the tree ever grew side by side - but all the leaves of all the trees of all time: not a single leaf that ever grew or ever will grow is the same as any other. And there you have another endlessness, an endless diversity this time - one that you can see but can't explain, much less produce yourself. But this amazement, the amazement at all the things, occurrences and phenomena in the world, which you can see but can't explain because they exceed our limited understanding - some of them frightening, many amazingly beautiful - precisely this amazement is the origin of Islam, and of all religions. Because all of us, your grandparents, your parents, you, your sister, and one day your children and grandchildren, all of us are born and eventually die. Just like the leaves of the chestnut tree in the courtyard, and like every creature on Earth, we flourish and wilt. Not even the stones, the lifeless, unremarkable pebbles lying around in the yard, have always existed, nor will they always exist. Something must have existed before the stones, before the...