Majesty and Beauty

And yet the world is going to end. How does one hold both of those together? The way to look at it is that humanity had a beginning, just as a person had a beginning as a child. A person grows into adulthood; he will grow old, given a full life; he may even become decrepit at the end of his life. This is part of the natural process. Humanity had its maturity; it will have its decay, and it will have its old age, and it will have its decrepit period, and then it comes to an end — for something new to happen.

The way the Muslims view everything is: majesty, beauty. And God, according to the Qurʾān, is the possessor of majesty and beauty. They are both from God. So we are in a very majestic time. We are in a time where there is a lot of tribulation. In this country alone, we do not realise the extent of our troubles. If we just look at the natural disasters in this country: in the 1980s insurance companies were paying out five billion dollars a year in terms of natural disasters; we are now paying five billion a week. We have had a lot of devastation in this country just in the last ten years, just in terms of natural disasters. Our topsoil is disappearing. We are grossly overusing our resources. Our children are really getting lost in a lot of very confusing messes. Our media is extraordinarily pervasive, in the violence that it is putting out there and a lot of very negative messages.

In the midst of that, there are some very positive things happening. And one would rather be identified with, and be part of, what is positive. As Heidegger said as well: we are way beyond pessimism and optimism. Depression is a luxury — "the world's coming to an end, I'm depressed". No: this is the age. It is like the scene in Gone with the Wind where she is running through Atlanta and everybody is just stretched out, wounded and dead. You can either run through it, or you can sit and offer somebody water and pat them on the back and just say: we are human, this is it, this is the human condition. It is awesome, it is incredible, it is glorious, it is majestic, it is beautiful, it is intense, it is tragic, it is comic — it is all these elements, and that is part of the power and the wonder of the whole thing.

So the choice is to remain positive about it. Teachers especially cannot get depressed. There was a wonderful programme once on PBS about the black schools — a very, very powerful experience — in which there was a white man who had been teaching in inner cities for a very long time, since the early 1960s, and he was saying how bad it was getting, and that he was losing hope; that just the faces, the lack of light in these young black children's faces in these inner cities, was driving him to it, and he was literally saying: I am just losing hope, I am giving up. And a black man jumped up and said: we have suffered, we went through slavery, we went through the great crossing — you are not going to tell us there is no hope. We sang songs to get us through it.

And that is the joy of the human being: we are people of hope — like the rats; and if the rats can do it, we can do it. That is our greatness, that we do have hope, despite all the odds. So let us hope we are not like the people on the Titanic who think the ship is unsinkable and get too arrogant — the band plays on, and we all go down.