A prayer to the Almighty

A prayer wells up from somewhere deep inside me today, a prayer to the Creator of the Universe, to the Almighty who is the guardian of all His children, of all His Creation here on earth and beyond earth. My prayer is simple:

Lord Almighty,

Do not let these barbarians take from me, from people around me, our faith and our belief in you. Do not let these coarse emblems of the Dark Ages any more kill in the name of faith, in the name of Islam. These are men in ominous headgear and with a sinister background who have defiled you – here in Dhaka and over there in Paris, Brussels, Istanbul, Baghdad and Madina.

Almighty God, our all-seeing, all-judging Allah,

These men wrapped in the funereal colours of ‘Islamic State’ are enemies of Islam, indeed are infidels and unbelievers who have set out on a macabre mission to defile the beauty of your creation, to undermine the religion which your chosen Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) told us all those centuries ago was our path to salvation. These men who on a Friday evening in Ramadan took your name before pushing the machete into the necks of all those innocent men and women at Holey Artisan Restaurant in Dhaka were denizens of the dark, inhabitants of gloom-laden caves where enlightenment does not seep in.

Almighty,

These young men, trained by bigger, larger and more sinister men in the many ways of killing people in the guise of religion are no Muslims. They have no religion, for how can one who internalizes the principles of religious conviction put one’s hands on helpless women, clutch their throats and put the knife into them to prise the life out of them? Those who know you and of your munificence do not shoot men and women and children in your name, for that would go against the great teachings of Islam, of the teachings of any and every religion on the planet we call home. These men have humiliated the followers of Islam; they have insulted the teachings of Christ, of Moses, of Buddha, of every prophet who is part of our social fabric. Their barbaric acts have not stopped them from assaulting the beauty of Sufism, have not spared those who, through the lilting charm of the songs sung in your praises, have spoken of your magnanimity for those you have caused to come to life.

Creator of the worlds,

My country, our world, our dreams of beauty – all of these have come under the baleful shadow of these gun-toting godless men who even have the gall to detonate bombs close to the mosque of the Prophet of Islam. These men, Lord Almighty, hold no respect for other people and for other faiths. They are limited in their capacity to understand that the world, since you created it, has been a home for all, for men, women and for everything that breathes and throbs with life. Their world does not go beyond their guns and grenades and machetes and their horror-inducing screams. They misread the Quran and understand it not, they misinterpret the teachings of the Prophet. Indeed, in their abysmal hollowness of thought they mutilate life into twitching objects of fast approaching death. Observe, Almighty, the sheer insensitivity with which these men have murdered Hindus, Christians, Muslims and foreigners in this verdant land of ours. Observe the depravity which has led them to killing missions in Europe and in lands where Islam, wrapped in tranquility brought on by the divinity symbolized by you, remains the fundamental belief of Muslims.

Lord Almighty,

These rapacious men are not Muslims. They do not speak the language of the Holy Prophet. They have stolen our religion from us and they have twisted it and turned it into a glistening weapon of murder and mayhem. They have burnt homes, killed fathers and sons in Syria, raped their women. If that is religion, then where is morality? Creator of the Worlds, these men of ISIS afraid to show their faces to the world have beheaded good men in the deserts of the Middle East. They have had no shame in demonstrating their lust for the Yazidi women they have captured. These barbarians have molested these women before selling them as slaves to their fellow barbarians, to be molested again and again.

These medieval elements, springing out of post-modern deserts of the mind yet steeped in ignorance, have now made it known that they will put this country, the land for which three million men and women made supreme sacrifices in their yearning for freedom years ago, to the torch. These men are not Muslims, for they have no god, Lord Almighty. They defile the sacred name of the Holy Prophet, they defile the Quran through taking your name and the Prophet’s name on the black banners they display in the background before they go looking for people to kill.

Almighty,

Give us the fortitude and the courage and the patience to forge resistance to these new Vikings of the world, these men whose prayers abound in hate and who do not reflect on the principles of Islam, of other religions and who go out, in the depths of the night, looking for blood and gore to be splattered on our streets and in our homes.
Lord Creator of the Worlds,
You who create planets endlessly and have ever new constellations of stars light up the heavens, these criminals strutting around in the black garb of ‘Islamic State’ are unbelievers out on a mission to put beauty, aesthetics, ideas, the wisdom of the ages to flight. Do not let them undermine you, O Lord.

Almighty,

Do not let these satanic creatures of the ghostly night take from us our beliefs, our songs, our poetry, our capacity to do good to those we share the earth with.

Destroy their machetes, Lord. Destroy the guns and grenades they carry in their dark robes.

Stay the hands that kill, have killed and conspire to kill – in Dhaka, indeed everywhere where Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, animists, fire-worshippers remain awed by the eternal luminescence of beauty sketched by your Moving Finger.

Let not these infidels, these kaffirs, rob us of our world, of the dreams we weave, every livelong day, around the diversity of beauty you have endowed it with.

Source: bdnews24