Say:”If the ocean were ink the words of my Lord, sooner would the ocean be exhausted than would the words of my Lord, even if we added another ocean like it, for it’s aid.” Surah Khaf
Don’t ask what motivated me to write this piece, ok you asked and I shall tell you. Ink. That’s right, the idea of using all the waters of the world, the pacific to the arctic, the warm fluids of equatorial Atlantic to the frozen sloshes of Antarctica take all the water for ink and write the praises of Allah on every surface you can find. Go on, make use of every nook even that little space at the corner of the page. Use no margins, no 12 spaced font, no calligraphy, scribble, draw, shorten, do whatever you must and continue to write the words of Allah, King of kings atop his throne.
The oceans would run dry.
The verse appealed to me because it effectively does two things. One, it shows you what you are up against and two, it puts you in your place.
I am such an o so arrogant little thing, a good grade on a test gives me an ego boost, a thousand video views on YouTube pumps my trumpets. Make me famous and I might just become invincible, or so I tell myself. I would not want to think about my uselessness, who does? To hell with education, sports, all the other things I and you aim for when we will be rotting under six foot of mud and sludge in a few years. Some of us at least think we should rot nobly. As if the worms and beasts of the earth discriminate when eating away our skin and dissolving our bones and mixing them with the earth. In the olden days, the time of Lords and Kings and Knights and Squires, Kings would have their praises engraved in the throne room, they would accept bards and noble men from across their dominion to sing high praises and gallant ballads about them. Imagine a ballad that never ends, imagine a song of praise that ceases to stop. No do not imagine Homer’s Iliad or the longest sentence in English in Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, nor the gigantic volume War and Peace. This infinite praise that never ends is introduction to our Creator. I occasionally think about sleep and how the staunchest of men become vulnerable to sleep. Even Kings and Presidents sleep. Their Creator does not. Humbleness 101. Stay in your place Son of Adam.
Math can tell us many things. It gives shape to our world and has a strange talent of explaining inexplicable phenomenon by unwinding their patterns. Take a ton of tennis balls and roll them off the top of a mountain. Random, uncoordinated chaos. Yet math can put a number on this event.
If we fail to graph the limit of the universe to the precise calculations of mathematics how can we achieve to grasp that of its creator? Our oceans contain a large body of water, but what is that to the jumble of trillions of stars littered across the expanse of the Universe? And to imagine, Allah is ABOVE this, all of it. He sits atop his throne befitting his majesty and warns his creation : You build giant ships to sail the expanses of the ocean and you die if left exposed to it. Me? If the ocean were ink, it would not come close to even describing who I am in writing.
There, humbleness 101. My ladies and laddies stick that in your ego and feel the burn. The burn is good, the burn is fresh and most importantly, it hurts oh so much when we realize we are NOT as important as we previously thought. There are bigger and better things at play around us. How big? Well……read the verse above.
Halalhassan 