Re: What Is Isra?
Before mankind could appreciate AL-ISRA it is absolutely necessary that we think over relationship between creation, divine revelation and mankind.
If I ask any of us, what happened after we were born? The only answer will be we started on our journey of discovery. Discovery of what? Knowing ourselves, our environment, our past and thought about our future.
Let us take our self awareness first, did we know who we are when we were born? The answer is, no, we ddi not know who we were. In fact we did not even know if we have a brain or how it works. The first thing we learned on our journey of discovery was to learn how to use our brains. The brain needed external input before it could start learning its own use. Let us begin with eyes. Did our brain know how to use our eyes? No, it did not know how to get information from the eyes and what to do with it. However, once it tried to look at information that it received from the eyes, it tried to get more and more information from the eyes and then it started to make sense of it little by little.
When brain tried to look at something it could not look at it straight away rather it mised target again and again but gradually through a lot of trial and error it finally learned how to control movement of eyes to get information that brain wanted to get. Please look at babies and see how long it takes them to focus their eyes properly. This is why the saying practice makes perfect. Brain learned through help of eyes to look at things then learned to make judgements about the information received from the eyes eg what the things is, how big it is, how far it is, what colour it is, what shape it is. So you can see that brain had to learn how to use itself and its senses eg eyes, ears, limbs and rest of body etc etc. Now think about how much time was involved in each step and how many mistakes were made during that time.
Just as our brains made countless mistakes in learning how to use eyes properly, so they did when they started to learn use of our ears. The information received from ears told us where is sound is coming from, how far it the sound coming from, what is making this sound etc etc. How long it took our brains to learn how to use our ears properly and how the brain made sense of information received through ears and how many mistakes we made while learning all this? So far there is no God or revelation journey just self discovery. How long it took you to perfect use of your hands and feet? Did you catch the ball the very first time when your mummy or daddy thrown a ball to you? No, your hands were here, there and everywhere but nowhere near the ball to catch it. How long it took us to learn how to throw a ball and catch it and how many mistakes did we make before we learned the skill?
Think about how long it took us to sit up or crawl or stand up or to walk and run or jump etc? How many mistakes we had to make to learn each of these like skills?
After being able to learn about ourselves we began exploring our environment ie our toys, our relatives, our household and wider world. How long that takes us to learn skills to interact with things within our environment and in wider universe and how many mistakes are made along the way?
Let us ask ourselves a question? Is it at all possible for humans to learn anything without making any mistakes? The answer is no, it is not possible. We humans are self programming robots. We are created with ability to learn things but along the way we are prone to making loads of mistakes because that is what being a human being means.
All this is called life experience or information and understanding or knowledge. So far I have not talked about God and revelation. What does that tell us? It tells us God and revelation is not the start of the journey of discovery. It is the other end of it ie when you have learned about ourselves and our universe and things in it only then questions arise in our minds, what is all this set up, who set it up and and for what purpose. Now comes the journey of discovery based on God and revelation.
Once we discover ourselves we are still like other animals, when we learn about our environment we are still like other animals because they too know how to use their brain and senses and find their way around to carry on with their lives just like people. The only time we rise above animals is when we start asking questions that animals do not ask. Those questions set us on journey to discovery of God through his revelation.
Not everyone rises to that level of thinking, most people live like animals and die away. Those who start on this journey of discovery, they do not end up necessarily on the right spot. Why not? Because like our self discovery and discovery of our environment this journey is not free of making loads of mistakes either.
Here we must realise two things. a)God is God so his word must be supposed to be purposefully perfect. b) We must necessarily due to our life experience accept that man is created without knowing anything ie with clean slate brain. The first step for man is that he must learn about himself and then about universe in which he is born and when he has learned enough he then should try and understand the divine revelation accepting the fact that he is going to make a lot of mistakes before he get it near about right.
What does this tell us? It tells us people who are ignorant about their own self awareness or lack awareness of universal realities cannot be people who can understand divine message because they do not have the needed information that helps decode divine message.
Let us take the quran for example, how many people understand its text properly? Not the people who live their lives like animals, not interested in learning things. It matters not what they claim to be their level of information and its understanding exposes them whether they are truly learned or mere big mouth for their own reasons.
Other than the Quran, all sources of information are human works. This includes works on the quran itself ie tafaseer of the quran. They are all either true or false attempts at getting what the quranic message is. I say true because not all people who try to make sense of the quran are insincere nor all are sincere because all people only do what they want to do and all do as much as they think they need to do. So we all have our reasons for saying and doing things that we say or do. That either makes us sincere or insincere with work we undertake. Learning is an open ended thing, none can claim I know each and everything there is to know. It is a very long journey because it is a very long road to travel upon. All we can do is make our journey and cover as much of distance as much we can.
All we need to do is make sure as much as it is within our capability to make sense of things purposefully. This helps cutting out confusion and chaos to a great degree.
This is why reading the quran aimlessly is useless. If one reads it for finding out what it actually says then one has to spend some time on it because that involves a lot of thinking and going back and forth many times over to try to get as close to what it really means as possible. Leading lives by asking useless things of others about God or his message and never using one's own brain leads one nowhere other than confusion and a useless life like animals. It is because it is a purposeless life.
One must always remember the quran is sole diivne source of knowledge for islam. Reports collected in form of hadith is human source of information which is not free of fabrications so one needs to be very careful in using hadith, particularly if one has no sense of the quranic text in its context. Relying on hadith reports more than the quran is a good idea. The main thing for all should be the quran and after having learned the quran one will have idea how to use hadith and which hadith are more likely to be fine and which may not be sound or dependable.
The same idea should be used for islamic history books, biography of the prophet and fiqh or islamic jurisprudence etc. People have been inventing and attributing a lot of false information to God and his messengers. The proof is the quran has repeatedly said don't tell lies about God or so and so people lied about God or his messengers. By not trying to look at things in their proper context one is not doing oneself and others any favours.
If it is difficult to understand the quran , it is not easy to understand hadith either. Was it an easy journey for us to become aware of ourselves? No. Was it easy to learn about our own environment? No. Why should we expect that understanding the message of God will be a piece of cake? Skills are not learned easily that is our life time experience but that does not mean we give up learning. That humanity must never do or it will find its life more and more difficult not easy.
Humanity is one big family so this family must help each other out in order to learn things so that we end up with better life than we have. The quran is a book that can give us solid foundation for our journey towards a better future.
The main point from all this explanation one must realise is, never to interpret the divine message against real world realities because understanding of the divine message fully depends upon it. You cut off quran from real world realities then you have destroyed your based upon which your whole life experience is based. Any book that is interpreted that way becomes useless for people and that is why people must not follow brainless people who claim to be scholars of holy books but interpret them in a way that they disconnect them from real world. Always remember if something is useless in this world it is useless in any world. People need help with way of living in this world. In other words God matters more in this world than any other world. So if God was useless in this world he will not become useful for any other world. People need to have right concepts about God as he has told them in his message. This is why attributing wrong ideas to God is a very bad idea because this renders human differences irreconcilable, which defeats the very purpose of human creation and divine revelation.
So what does word ISRAA mean? A journey to an imaginary world or something more down to earth? The quran takes humanity on a journey of learning so that it could set up its world in a way that helps humanity live a blissful life. The stories of past people are told as lessons for us as to what they got out of life when they followed divine precepts and how they suffered and ended up destroyed by going about life like worse than animals. Choice is ours to learn things and make use of our learning for the good of ourselves or just do as we please and then see what happens to us as a human population.
