God Is Dead!
by Abdassamad Clarke
i
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.
ii
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.