Troubled Times

Monday, April 30, 2012

Troubled Times

 Assalamu 'Alaikum

Troubled Times

The sound of the kids singing their children’s songs float over my ears as I napped for the umpteenth time at Tok Aboh’s retirement cottage in Gong Lilit, Besut. We arrived late last night from the Kota Baru family house with the usual addition of two girl cousins of Adlin, Adila and Zahir. The rest of the gang will arrive later today as we again gather for another Tok Aboh gathering. Tok Aboh has plans to add Archery  to his current proposed Kem Ibadah and Homestay. The gathering was supposed to be during the school holidays in June but we had to suggest bringing it forward as my teaching engagements in June means the family had to be elsewhere.

The innocence of the kids’ joy at being in their Grandpa’s kampong highlights my worry about what the future holds for them. What are we bequeathing them and what will they inherit from us as we exit from the world and hand it over to them to run soon? Are we making the right choices, or are we so cornered that the kids’ future is an irrelevance to our current survival? The yellow events in Kuala Lumpur over the weekend were not lost to us although we are far from the epicentre. I asked myself would 300,000 people leave the comforts of their homes to taste chemical laced water and get beaten up by the FRU if things are as hunky dory as it is made out to be? Is 100% of everything being claimed by the protesters, absolute and total lies? It cannot be, even to the most neutral of observers, it cannot be. There has to be some ring of truth to their claims that must be investigated and rectified if we are indeed the righteous people we make ourselves out to be. Justice is the key to solve all problems, and observance thereof is the key to avoid all manner of problems. I fear where we are headed to if justice is an irrelevance and there are members of the populace who condone its trampling.

Trips home to Kota Baru often gives me some quiet times to hasten my usual reads. I have just finished Nobel Laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus’ “Banker to the Poor” and am in the middle of John Mauldin’s “Endgame”. The first is the sort of book you’d wish you had read much earlier. The thoughts of Dr Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank fame, are not just about how to help the poor people of the world but is an outright debunking of popular economic thoughts. The poor is thought to be poor because they lack skills when in reality what they lack were relative pittance to buy tools to earn a living. I just love some of his quotable quotes. “Poverty does not belong in civilised human society. Its proper place is in a museum”. “Free trade must mean freedom for the weakest. Globalization must promote harmony and partnership between the big and the small economies, rather than become a vehicle for unhindered takeovers by rich economies”. And probably the most succinct to the champions of conventional economics is “…the biggest drawback about the market is that it always pushes things to the side of the powerful.”

John Mauldin on the other hand is singing the evil of debt with the world heading to a catastrophic Endgame. He quotes liberally from the seminal work of Professors Rogoff and Reinhart the original harbingers of the catastrophe of debt. We of course need only to quote Surah AlBaqarah ayah 278 and 279:

278 O you who believe! Observe your duty to Allah and gives up what remains due to you from usury, if you are (in truth) believers.

279 And if you do not then be warned of war (against you) from Allah and His messenger. And if you repent, then you have your principal (without interest). Wrong not and you shall not be wronged.

There will be no end to the problems we and the world will face if we refuse to see where we are in the context of Islam. We practise a leadership system adopted from the west. We adopted economic and financial systems which also came from the west. We are discovering truths which had always been in the Quran. We are hearing realisations from the West which has also always been in the Quran. We also belittle justice when it is the third oft repeated word in the Quran.

May Allah guide us and have mercy on our future generations.

Wassalam,

Zahid