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.