An recently email has reminded me about an inspirational website.

When I first began to find out about Islam I would visit different websites and try to learn something from them. Many good websites were transcriptions of books that had either been out of publication for years, or were prohibitively expensive to buy in print format. An example is the Tafsir of Ibn Kathir, a mammoth collection of volumes that explains one scholars interpretation of the Qur’an, ayat by ayat.

However, one site was different from the other’s I had visited. As soon as I clicked on the link to this site in my Google search, I froze.

The peculiar thing about this website is not its content - which is actually quite good - but in fact its design. Check for yourself: ~ Be ~ Convinced

I couldn’t help feeling that there was something odd about the photographs on this site. I had grown accustomed to seeing photographs of masjids (”mosques”), camels and deserts, but this website had images of dolphins, luscious green fields and ships! I could have cynically dismissed this as an attempt at propaganda, but there was a deeper message.

I had learnt the meaning of spirit. For many people, a ’spiritual’ environment involves the warm glow of candles, the exotic scent of incense, the sound of a flute, stillness… For some, these things are almost a requirement for meditation. Indeed an industry has developed around this idea.

I subsequently found that I held a number of other corrupted ideas. For example, the first time that I heard about a Muslim hijabi sister doing da’wah, I was shocked! At that point I had only been Muslim for about two weeks, and had hardly seen a hijabi, let alone spoken to one. It dawned on me that the only time I’d ever seen a sister in hijab was on TV, and that without exception the hijabi was either shown as oppressed or in tears, screaming after her house had been destroyed by soldiers. This was all I had ever associated with her. The same could be said for Muslims in general: Either they were shown with guns in the air at a mass protest, or with their backsides stuck up in the air as an old man said something incomprehensible to me in Arabic. Hardly a positive image.

This website was teaching me something different. I realised that these objects had no innate association with “god” or spirituality. Photographs of a green field had as much place in a website about Islam as any other image. In fact, a photograph of a chemical processing factory could easily have taken the place of the dolphins. I admit that I don’t ordinarily feel the same buzz from such images as I would from a sunset, but that was a result of my upbringing.

I’m ashamed that I had allowed myself to become indoctrinated. I had turned off my brain and just accepted the images as fact. True spirit was the linking of all of creation with the Creator.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Islam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.