God Is Dead!

by Abdassamad Clarke

WHO KILLED HIM?

We did!

We located Him

and confined Him to the heavens,

excluding Him from the earth.

We dared to make images of Him.

We gave the Ancient of Days

a long grey beard

and a human form.

We cast His role

as lying at the beginning of creation,

with odd interventions

here and there in history.

We only conceded to Him "Acts of God"

strange capricious disasters

which insurance companies

will not cover.

We restricted His worship to drafty,

old, stone buildings,

one day out of seven.

We gave Him Who has no form as we know it,

a human form,

and when a mortal human being

reminded us of God's transcendence

we elevated that man into a deity.

Our scientists stole His laws,

straight plagiarism.

The planets had moved in elliptical orbits

for millions of years

before Newton 'discovered'

the Laws of Motion.

Lacking a Supreme Being we elevated nature

to a position not hers.

Then we methodically set out

to conquer this power,

devastating land,

sea, our food

and the very air we breathe.

Already satisfied that we had got rid of God,

we revived an assembly of lesser gods

that would have confused the Greeks,

embarrassed the Romans

and are the envy of the Hindus.

We are contemptuous of worship and prayer,

yet we pass our lives

in a thousand empty rituals,

adoring and propitiating

a multitude of friendly

and hostile gods.

We spend lives dedicated to eating and drinking.

Is this not worship?

We have committed ourselves

to spending the greater part of our lives

making money,

and by that we make money our god,

for no ascetic monk in his little cell

ever showed more complete devotion.

We have restored the old idol

of voluptuous sexuality,

and its nubile form graces our newspapers,

films, our walls

and our dreams.

It, in its turn, has rewarded us

with venereal diseases,

their sister AIDS

and social disintegration

on an unparalleled scale.

We are too proud to bow before God,

but we will crawl on our faces

to the bank manager,

when we run into trouble on our mortgages.

We are, in fact, living our lives

in order to buy our houses,

like Pharaoh

who dedicated his reign

to building his pyramidical tomb.

With God passed away Heaven and Hell

and in their place we put the fantasy,

never-never land

of computer graphics

and its fully-automated,

centrally-heated,

double-glazed,

fast-food brothel

which has unfortunately

the terrifying potential

to metamorphose

into the Gulag Archipelago,

genocidal massacres and state tyranny

as a way of life.

So God is dead

We killed Him.

Yet the God we killed does not exist anyway.

God one-of-three

does not exist.

God old man with grey beard

does not exist.

God remote above the heavens

does not exist.

God of this or that people

does not exist.

God who sent His son

does not exist.

There is no god,

But Allah.

iii

Allah is One.

He is not located in any place,

for if He were,

He would be limited and so,

not divine.

He has no form,

for He is the ceaseless originator of all forms.

He eternally creates the entire cosmos,

and He sustains every photon,

atom, cell

and quasi-stellar object

at every instant.

Without Allah they do not exist.

He sustains every living thing,

Christian, Jew, Hindu or Atheist.

He is not the Lord of the Arabs,

or the Jews,

or the Christians,

but Lord of the Worlds,

of all beings

and of all Being.

No thing resembles Him,

no image nor concept,

yet He is the Hearing, the Seeing.

He has no son,

for His son would have to be a god

with limitless power

and it is impossible

for two omnipotent beings to exist,

they would limit each other.

Anything limited is not a god.

He is terrible might and power,

and sublime mercy and compassion.

He is far exalted above

being one out of a pair of opposites.

He is Allah.

He is the Answerer.

He is the Vast.

He is the Universally Merciful.

God is dead.

Allah is,

The Living Who does not die.

God Is Dead!

by Abdassamad Clarke

10 August, 2005 18:59