Page 68 - The Debased Culture of Superficiality

66 THE DEBASED CULTURE OF SUPERFICIALITY

“. . . Praise be to Allah Who has had no son and Who has
no partner in His Kingdom and Who needs no one to
protect Him from abasement . . . ” (Surat al-Isra’: 111)

An intelligent person with faith knows that Allah is the
only Lord of everything in the universe. No matter how
much his talents, beauty, intelligence and material posses-
sions may seem to belong to him, he is always aware that
their real Lord is Allah. He lives in humility, knowing that
Allah can take back every blessing any time He wants to. He
praises and exalts Allah as the Lord of all things. When he
hears someone praising himself in a way that shows that he
has no knowledge of these truths, he realizes the extent of
the unawareness into which this superficial culture has
thrust people. He wants to wake these others out of their
unawareness, to tell them of the existence of Allah and that
He is the absolute Lord of everything.
In this regard, in the Qur’an, Allah gives the examples of
two men. One of them is a Muslim who turns to Allah with
all his heart; the other praises himself for the many posses-
sions he thinks belong to him, and believes that they will
remain his possessions forever:

Make an example for them of two men. To one of them
We gave two gardens of grape-vines and surrounded
them with date-palms, putting between them some cul-
tivated land. Both gardens yielded their crops and did
not suffer any loss, and We made a river flow right
through the middle of them. He was a man of wealth
and property and he said to his companion, debating
with him, “I have more wealth than you and more peo-
ple under me.” He entered his garden and wronged him-