A Journey to a Consciousness of God
Syed Nahid Uddin
University of Cambridge
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A UCL Institute of Education study of 9,000 Britons from the 1970 British Cohort study provided for
an interesting barometer on the level of faith in the UK. The study found women were more likely to
be religious believers than men. In a sample size of 82, 88% of British Muslims said they “knew God
really exists and had no doubts about it”, whereas this was the case for 71% of “evangelical”
Christians, 33% of Roman Catholics, and 16% of those affiliated to Anglican and other churches.
I was born as a Muslim. The Islamic faith regards all human beings to be born with a fitrah, a pure
undefiled nature with an innate inclination to Tawhid (Islamic Monotheism), which is only corrupted
later, hence the never-ending discussion amongst Muslims as to whether one who enters Islam from
another religion or none is a ‘convert’ or ‘revert’. Suffice to say I was born a Muslim and brought up
in a Muslim household. I was born and bred in the East End of London as was my mother before me.
I grew up in the midst of a strong Bangladeshi community and a strong Islamic community. Growing
up, I was extremely confident in my beliefs, hardly coming across disbelief or doubts from fellow
Muslims, echoing sentiments from the aforementioned UCL survey. I cannot recall coming across
strong religious sentiments from my Christian counterparts, regarding their personal faith, apart
from the street preachers outside Whitechapel station singing gospels and as I vividly remember ‘Oh
Happy Day’. Thus I regarded Christianity as a faith absent for the most part in those whose parents
and grandparents would have considered themselves Christian and have had Christianity play a
more substantive role in their being. To me there was a simple reason for this, the intrinsic deficits in
Christianity I had come across hitherto, made belief in it collapse under scrutiny and reflection.
While Islam, with its inherent integrity, strengthened one’s belief the more one contemplated upon
it.
It was to my surprise when I entered university, transitioning into adult life, and having
conversations which scratched the surface that beneath the veneer of disbelief and disinterest,
there was a diversity of beliefs, different levels of belief and even competing and conflicting beliefs.
Some asked me why Muslims have such staunch beliefs. And others asked what made me have faith.
It was then that I was able to seriously consider the emergence of my faith, having previously
dismissed such questions due to the notion of me not believing in Islam being a ludicrous
proposition to me. If one were to tell me, while I was in the later years of my teens, that my faith,
which reverberated through every fibre of my being, would be absent in my later years, I would have
laughed at the preposterousness of the idea, questioned the sanity of the accuser, and possibly be
angered at the insinuation that I shall die not upon Islam. However, later in life, I was able to grasp
the perspective of my questioner, understand the difference in backgrounds, and understand that
my experiences of faith were as alien to them as theirs was to mine. Thus I reflected upon my faith.
So from where did my faith emerge? Well, I guess, my faith came to me at night. As a child growing
up, early bedtimes were the norm. My mother ruled with an iron fist and so I was sent to bed early,
not to be corrupted by the moral degradation of TV soaps or the other offerings of late-night TV.
And so I would find myself in bed, and I would think. No ‘Candy-Crush’ or ‘Temple-Run’ then to
tempt me away from my thoughts and occupy my time, so I pondered. I thought about the day,
processed the events of the past several hours, and crucially, I thought about the future. I thought of
my future and I counted the milestones I, like others, would pass:education, employment, marriage,
parenthood, old age then death. I realised the finiteness and mortality of my life and humanity’s.
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So I asked myself questions. What is the purpose of this life? What happens when this life ends, as
all life inevitably does? Is it as Gandalf says, “Death is just another path, one that we all must take.
The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.” “See
what?” “White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” As much as I loved
the world of the Hobbits and The Shire, I did not turn to world of J.R.R. Tolkien for the answers to
these existential questions but I turned to the teachings of Islam and the life of the final Prophet
(pbuh). And with the prophet (pbuh), as with the prophets of Islam, I can find parallels in our
spiritual journeys. The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), born and raised in Makkah, used to spend many
hours in retreat in Mount Hira, Jabal-al-Nur (Mountain of Light). There, in solitude, the prophet
(pbuh)prayed and contemplated upon creation, as well as the moral degeneration of his people, and
after a while received his first revelation from the archangel Gabriel. Gabriel, who commanded the
prophet (pbuh) to “Proclaim (or recite, or read) in the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, who created;
Created man, out of a mere clot of congealed blood; Proclaim! And thy Lord is most Bountiful; who
taught man the use of the pen, Taught man that which he knew not” (Surah Al-Alaq). And similar
was the journey of Abraham or Ibrahim (pbuh). Born to a father who sculpted the same idols his
people worshipped, Ibrahim (pbuh) rejected the falsity of his people’s ways, and so he went up a
mountain and looked to the sky to find his Lord. And so in those quiet hours of the night my spirit
searched for its Lord and Creator.
In the practices of Islam did the love of my Lord and prophet (pbuh) increase and in the teachings of
Islam did my heart find content. Contentment was my state, not the transient emotions of human
life, but the interminable peace which the heart and soul finds itself when it is one with the eternal.
During the Christmas holidays, after a period of spiritual worship and seclusion from the distractions
of the world, I found my faith reach deeper levels of intensity. I did not have the Khushoo’ (awe and
feelings of being overpowered in the remembrance of Allah a devout Muslim finds in prayer) of the
Sahabas (companions to the prophet (pbuh)), who were so connected to God in prayer, prayer
though which Allah communicates to the believer through the medium of the Qu’ran, that they were
completely oblivious to the world, such that a missile from a catapult which hit and tore the cloth of
a Sahaba did not stir him enough for him to even raise a hand in reaction. However my faith reached
a level, where at one point, I wept tears of sorrow when I realised a lifetime would need to pass
before I would be with my Lord, and I wept as I longed to be with my Lord.
And so in my mid-teens did my faith reach a pinnacle, and from then on dipped and peaked, but
generally withered as the demands of the world and the fulfilment of the base desires of one’s self,
consumed into my time and kept me from the remembrance of my Lord. And I found myself going
towards and passing the milestones I envisaged in my early years and becoming the fool my younger
self condemned, caught up in the fleeting motions of life, distracting myself with the baubles of the
world, starving my soul of the nourishment of faith. My life veered to the way of life exemplified by
the motto, which was the antithesis of Islam, YOLO. But in this decadent quagmire I can still feel my
fitrah, deep down, inclined to the way of God. My heart longs for the contentment that is its right.
But difficult it is in this time and age, and at this juncture of my life, not to be engulfed by the
trappings of the world. And so I hope, when this latest milestone is passed, I can stop denying my
fitrah and turn to Allah. Turn, so I can return to my journey to a consciousness of God.
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