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Alas, there are other sides of the legacy. The society in which we are brought up, the education system and the impact of the media all affect one’s outlook. Some aspects which I am acutely aware of include cynicism, scepticism and suspicion. There is a degree to which these aspects can be healthy, but they can also affect one negatively. Recently we have been watching the DVD of a “great” debate between Dr Naik and Dr Cambell on the subject of scientific accuracy in the Bible and the Quran (note that I put great in quotation marks, indicating cynicism already), which we were given as a gift. I find I cannot watch such debates, for I find myself disputing the claims of the Muslim as well as the Christian, I note that I find fault with the conduct of the participants, I find myself saying, “Well I’ve never met a Christian who says that.” I end up being told to seek refuge in Allah from Shaitan the accursed.

Modernism, I suppose, makes us look at the world differently than did our predecessors. I am very much aware that the way I think and act is far removed from the ways of those who passed before us. Even if I try to practice the Sunnah, it will be severely wanting in comparison to the generations past, for I have been conditioned by my environment to the extent that things once viewed as extremes are now the norm and things once seen as normal are now considered wild aberrations. From an article about Muhammad The Messenger of God I read the following the other day:

The contemporary mind seeks for causes to ‘explain’ phenomena and, having discovered how this or that came to exist, forgets to ask why it came to exist. For the traditional Muslim, on the other hand, a person, a thing, or an event in what it is because God has looked upon this possibility hidden in His treasury — as yet unmanifested, unexpressed — and has thereby brought it out into the light of existence: ‘His command when He intends a thing (to come into being) is only that He says onto it: Be! And it is’ (Q 36:82).

Very true indeed.