A sudden meeting with Death

A piece of writing by Sayeem Chowdhury has reminded me of Death, though the story he wrote in his face book status was not about meeting death, but meeting someone by chance. So I ask this rhetorical question, in the midst of enjoyment and leisure, in the depth of our myriads of happiness and hope, one day, if the death were to be met by us, and if we were not prepared; will we have the power to ask for a delay?  You may think you know the answer, but how much have you prepared? Reflect for a few second and… but before this, I would like to say a few things about Sayeem. He and I met long before 2007. A village cousin of mine invited him and another journalist by the name Sahan to my house. Sahan now runs a printing company in the UK, and Sayeem works as an executive editor in a UK Bangla newspaper. Sayeem was the slimmer of the two, but had extraordinary talent for writing short stories in Bangla. I read a few of his stories which at any rate is awesome, but every one of his stories abruptly ends and doesn’t go far enough to become a novel. Had he found a way to elaborate and expound on the characters more, he could have turned each one of his short stories in to novels.

Sayeem had a story behind his coming to the UK, and more than that he supports a party that I don’t support, and above all, he has a spiritual vagueness that might one day put him into trouble. We all have doubts: doubts because life is full of ‘unknown’ how can we be sure of everything. Having doubts is natural; sometimes it saves us from making wrong decisions. We doubt, when something is too good to be true. Like yesterday, I had a direct message from a friend asking me to check a website. Its one of those sites that lets you dream of making money from home without actually selling anything. Sounds too good to be true ! So what’s the catch? They will ask you to send money for a kit, whether this kit will lead to your millions, one can not tell, but certainly, the seller of the idea had already made money from you, while you could be at lose.

Sayeem took a lot of chance in life, and he persisted and succeeded in one. If he had not, he would have been at losing. He dreams of launching his own newspaper one day, Because he wants to be his own boss, and publish news that he feels worthy of news; and to leave those junk stories that only meant to satisfy a political party. If he can achieve that, yellow journalism might become a thing of the past.

But now, my purpose of writing is not about Sayeem, but his thinking and argument. We could all argue that we have plenty of time to prepare our self for the hereafter. We must have had some experiences of this from our school days: Many of us might have thought, the school has just started, lets relax for a bit, the exam is a year away. Then came three months, then six, then the final exam only a month away. Now we suddenly realized !  But before we could realize, our future had become the present, and the present had become the past, the exam had already started, and we had been left with nothing to write. But the difference is, in this life we could sit for another exam, achieve our grade, but once we meet with our death, there is no coming back to sit another exam.

Back a week a go, I read in a newspaper that Steven Hawkings, after all those years of his scientific discoveries and research, he came to conclusion that there is no life after death, that all this stories about  life after death, heavens and hell are nothing but fairy tale. Indeed, a man of his understanding knows everything about science and everything about creation of the world. But if I were to ask him how this world came in to existent, he would say, why! It’s started with the big bang. Then if you ask him how the big bang had started - like all scientists - he could go back as far as millionths of a second before the big bang, but not beyond. That’s where science stops and Allah’s command begins, for him, Allah; he doesn’t need any material to create. He creates out of nothing, for he says, when he intends to create a thing, he only says to it be and it is.

The Quran tells us, a book revealed more than 1400 years a go when science of the universe, as we know it today was absent. ““Do the unbelievers not see that the heavens and the earth were joined together before we separated them, and that we brought all living things into existence from water? Why do they still not believe in God?” (21:30)

The big bang theory tells us that space and matter were together in one mind boggling mass, and in a mind boggling temperature. Then for some reason it separated and matter took over anti matter to form the universe. Doesn’t the Quran say the same thing? Modern science also tells us that all living thing is aquatic. Above verse confirms that indeed all living things were created of water.

The Newton’s force of gravity is explained in this Quranic verse:  “God it is who raised up the heavenly bodies to invisible pillars ...” (13:2). These are the pillars that you can not see, pillars of gravity.  Indeed, any person who would reflect on the creation will find that there is unity and intelligence in everything. When was the last time you looked above you in the sky? See how it is made, and how it is decorated with stars. Your eyes will come back to you, but never will you find any faults in the creation.

You may ask, when we die, and we are turned in to dust, are we to return back? That is a distance return. Well, just reflect for a second, what is difficult to create, you or the universe. And the one, who created the first creation, is it difficult to create the second time. Just look at the rain how it revives the dead earth in to life. Exactly like that will be your rising. So do not be in confusion of the hereafter, but prepare yourself for the meeting from where there is no returning. Like the story of Sayeems reference to Rabindranath ‘HOTATH DEKHA” your death will surely meet you suddenly, and you will not have time to prepare.