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Huma Manjra
A Manifestation of the Divine
By Khadeejah Milhan
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What if our bodies weren’t just a vessel that connects us to this world? What if our bodies were a masterpiece that carries us to the next life? According to Islamic tradition, God created the human form from clay and blew into it His spirit, or ruh. He created each of us perfectly, intending us to be His representatives on Earth. Like every other creation of the ultimate Creator, we are manifestations of the Divine. Of course, while our bodies and souls reflect some of God’s qualities, we are no match for His utter perfection. Nevertheless, I’d like to offer some reflections on how God instilled our bodies with Divine strength, wisdom, and love.
Every woman who preceded you remains by your side—rather, every woman who preceded you lives on within you: a factor of your being, woven into your DNA. You draw from their strength: their strength to leave family behind and start a new one in a whole new world; their strength to stand alone and start anew; their strength to fight battles both seen and unseen. You are an accumulation of their resilience.
God imprinted his strength within you. The strength He gave our mothers has passed from one generation to the next. In a world where healing is a privilege and survival is accompanied by trauma, your mothers survived so that you can continue to heal yourselves. They gave you power you didn’t even know you had. Even if your legs shake and your hands tremble, your body is a living artifact of their struggles and victories. They work so hard for you to be in a world where you can heal the generations to come. Use their strength to flourish and heal old wounds.
Remember: only through God’s Mercy will we have the strength to overcome obstacles. You are an accumulation of God’s Mercy and reflect His strength.
We Reflect the Love of Al-Wadud (the Most Loving)
God’s love for us is evident in every fiber of our beings. His love enables us to use our minds and limbs to enjoy His creation. Love is not just restricted to feelings. Our bodies are mechanisms for all kinds of love.
For example, our bodies yearn to love the Creator. It yearns for more than the material world—even though it was made with the materials of this world—because the glue binding it together, the spirit that gives it life, is sublime. It yearns for the Divine.
Our bodies gravitate towards one another. We seek other creatures who carry the same longing within them. The desire for the Heavenly brings us closer together. We honor the sacredness of our bodies by loving each other. A simple hand on a shoulder or a hug gives our bodies a jolt of warmth that words cannot describe.
When we experience the magnificent mountains and rainforests with which God decorated the Earth, our very beings are consumed with love. Love for the natural world, which is incomparable to anything we can create. Love for the Creator with whom we can never compare. Love for his majestic creation. When we truly experience God’s creation, we can’t help but feel closer to the Divine.
God built wisdom into your body. If He hadn’t, how could you have survived this long? I am always awed by the way our bodies are able to heal themselves. A simple paper cut will be gone in a day. A fever can be reduced to a few sniffles in a week. Even a broken bone can heal itself in a couple months. From the growling of your stomach that signals you to eat to the drowsiness that tells you to sleep, your body tells you what it needs. Even if our mind isn’t aware of it, our bodies has the wisdom to take care of us. Our hearts beating and our lungs carrying oxygen without command attests to the wisdom that flows through our veins. Our organs are on autopilot, not because we programmed them, but because God did. Like a software engineer that puts his expertise into code for a program, God instilled His wisdom in our bodies. We are simply a reflection of God’s wisdom.
The wisdom of the body isn’t limited to physical healing. Have you ever felt your body heal your mind? Has your body propelled you towards harmony? For some, the body demands to run. For some, the body craves to be held by another. For some, the body aches to breathe. Day or night, rain or shine, sleet or snow, our body alleviates stress the mind can’t process on its own.
Engrained within you is the wisdom of your mothers. Your movement through the world mirrors theirs: The way you walk. The way you talk. Even the way you flinch. Your body is your version of theirs. Bodies oceans away are the blueprint for yours. People you have never seen mirror your figure and physique. Past generations are reflected into future ones. The wisdom of our bodies forever interweaves us with one another even if worlds separate us.
Out of His love and mercy, God imbued our bodies with wisdom the human mind can only begin to comprehend.
These reflections on the body’s strength, love and wisdom are inspired by A. Helwa’s Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam. As Helwa puts it, “Every tree, child, star, galaxy, and atom carries a reflection of God’s qualities beneath the limitations of its form”
Who Wrote The Quran?
A Review of Halim Sayoud’s Research on author discrimination between the Holy Quran and Prophet’s statement By Fardeem Munir
Here’s a Muslim 101 belief: The Quran is the unchanged word of God that came down in Arabic to the Prophet ﷺ during revelation. The speech of the Prophet ﷺ is distinctly different from the speech of the Quran, which is the speech of God himself Or so is the belief. However, what would a skeptic say? They would assert that, actually, the Prophet ﷺ wrote the Quran. As Muslims we would and should be outraged. But the doubt has been planted and we must return with some answer. How do we truly know that the Quran is the speech of God? The standard issue Muslim answer is that the Quran’s language is so poetic that the Prophet ﷺ, who we knew was unlettered, would not be able to construct it. That argument, however, no matter how backed up by historical data, is also just another belief. Can we do better? In a paper from H. Sayoud from the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene, the author generates computer models against the Quran and against the hadiths found in Bukhari. These models, along with some statistical analysis, can be used to check if the Quran and the Prophet’s statements share the same author. The conclusion of the paper speaks for itself: Results of all experiments have led to two main conclusions: - First, the two investigated books should have different authors; - Second, all the segments that are extracted from a unique book appear to have a certain stylistic similarity. Consequently, we can conclude, according to this investigation, that the Quran was not written by the Prophet Muhammad and that it belongs to a unique author too. Some number crunching and machine learning later, the computer comes to the conclusion central to the islamic faith. SubhanAllah his paper, and this line of thinking, underscores the point: Islam has never demanded blind faith from its followers. The beauty of a true religion is the more questions you ask, the more answers you get, and the stronger your faith becomes. The true religion of God is antifragile, growing stronger when subject to attack.
the BRidge Between cultuRes
Understanding Oneself Through Islam
By Eman Hamed
No one ever talks about how not reading or speaking Arabic makes it difficult to find your Iman and ground your Deen. Born to an Algerian mother and an Afghan father, I celebrate and enjoy two cultures and two identities. But despite being half Arab, I never learned my mother tongue of Arabic until I came to Northwestern. I never read the Quran in Arabic, I made all of my dua in English, and for so long I felt like a failure -- I felt like part of me was missing. I felt like less of a Muslim.
For years, I felt stuck in the crosshairs of two identities where the languages, traditions, and customs deviated from one another far too much. I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting identities. I would recognize later that there was no single way of being Algerian or Afghan: just trying to be a good person and Muslim was enough.
Because I did not feel assimilated into culture, I felt like, by extension, I was not immersed in Islam and its teachings. But I soon realized the major similarity in my two identities was religion, and I need to use Islam as a tool for peace and finding who I am. In essence, my dedication to Islam really started as I searched for a place to fit in, a way to discover the intricacies of my mixed heritage. Islam increased my presence in culture as I learned Islamic history in both Turco-Mongol empires (what some present-day Afghans originate from) and in Arab empires. As I read the Quran with focus to detail, I could see the references to race and ethnicity and how Islam empashized piety over racial distinction. The Quran shows that races and tribes were created with a purpose of getting to know one another, and to make Islam a religion not just for one group or person. I understood Islam’s message as intended to encompass all of humanity, and that Islam is the bridge between my two halves.
