Beliefs

Conclusion

After living in this world for over 90 years, I have come to the conclusion that it is Chance, not some Deity, that determines the outcomes of one's actions. Of course, the outcome also depends on the amount of effort one puts in, but the final determiner is Chance.

Growing up, I naturally started by adopting the beliefs held by my parents. We were 'cultural Muslims', rather than religious ones (as was the case with the bulk of 'modern' Muslims of the time, and probably still is).

When I went to college in Lahore, for a while I got caught up in a 'religious wave' that was sweeping across the campus; I would even participate in collective prayers held in the boarding. This lasted for a while, until it was overtaken by an enthusiasm for the creation of a Muslim state, Pakistan; my religious beliefs were replaced by an enthusiasm for 'political Islam'. This latter situation continued when I joined the Army in 1948; we tended to look down upon overly religious Muslims. Such feelings were reinforced by the fact that almost all the Muslim religious parties (such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, Majlis-e-Ahrar, etc) opposed the creation of an independent Muslim state in India when the British left.

In the Army, I met Major Ihsan-ul-Haq, and he became a friend and mentor. Besides being a proficient military man, he was also something of a scholar of Islam. I became interested in his beliefs, and, like him, started following the beliefs of Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, a noted scholar of Islam who had written extensively on the subject. Ihsan told me about Parwez's views: he believed the Quran had a Divine origin, but all the later beliefs cluttering up 'religious Islam' were man-made additions that had departed from the pristine purity of the real Islam. These views made a lot of sense to me, and I adopted them.

When I went to prison in 1972, and after the Army officers incarcerated in Attock Fort (and, later, Campbellpur Jail) were dispersed and sent to various prisons, and I found myself alone and in solitary confinement in Multan Jail, I decided to use this opportunity to study the Quran. Even though I had always believed in the book, I had never had the opportunity to study it in detail. I decided to rectify this, and soon started a regular daily study of it, making notes as I went along. I would spend several hours each day in this pursuit. Since I didn't have access to a Concordance of the Quran, whenever I came upon a verse or a term that puzzled me or needed clarification, I would read through the entire book, making notes on the issue or term in order to understand it properly. Because of this, I must have read the book over a hundred times! I also read many other books on Islam and other religions.

As my study deepened, I found my views going beyond those of Parwez, especially his belief that the Quran had come down to us unchanged, and was exactly the same as had been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. I picked out several 'problems' within the text, and added a section on them to my Notes on the Qur'an. (I wrote these Notes (by hand) in registers during my imprisonment; after I came to Canada I had them typed up). In 1980, soon after my release from prison, I wrote an article entitled "Al-Hudaibiya", which was based on my studies during my imprisonment; this was published in the (US-based) Muslim World periodical, and several other publications. (The links to my Notes, and this article, are to be found in the Writings section of this Website).

After my release from prison in 1979, I came to Canada (in 1980). My initial years here were spent in work in order to support myself and my family. It was only after retirement that I was able to resume my work on the Qur'an. In 2006 I wrote up a paper entitled "Rediscovering Islam", which was published in some web and print magazines. In this paper I summarized the beliefs I had come to hold based on my study, in prison, of the Qur'an. Later on (in 2012), I also summarized these beliefs in another paper entitled "The Issue of God"; this paper dealt mainly with the concept of God that I thought appropriate, and gave the reasons why I thought this concept should be generally accepted. Both of these articles were based on my study of the Qur'an, and are included in the Writings section of this Website.

However, in the last few years, staying mostly at home, and spending most of my time reading (on my computer) I find my views on the subject changing. Now, it seems to me, there can legitimately be valid doubts about the existence of any such supernatural Being. I can understand why humans, at different stages of their lives, feel the need for conjuring up such an entity, but that doesn't provide proof of its existence.

In fact, I have come to the conclusion that this Being may well be a human construct. I think that this (believing that there is a God) is a valid action for a human being to undertake at certain stages of their life, but that is about all. I don't think we really know whether there is such an entity, since there is no real evidence that he functions in our world. Believing that such an entity does NOT exist is as valid a belief as the opposite. Of course, the whole elaborate paraphernalia that has been constructed around this belief (in the existence of a Deity) in the form of various religions is something I have questioned, and not believed in, for a long time.

The originators of the idea of the existence of a Deity did so, not in order to give any special significance to human life, but often to control others -- by commanding them, on behalf of the Deity, to act in certain ways. (A strong argument for this existence was based on the human desire for immortality. Belief in this possibility required belief in some kind of religion with a Deity providing a prolongation of life after death).

Another aspect that deserves mention is how chance rules our lives. For example, my brother, Kaiser, died in a car crash in 1952; his car was hit by a large truck, head on, while he was trying to overtake a long tractor-trailer on the highway. It was probably a matter of a couple of seconds: if he'd had those, he could have gotten back on his side of the road. I was once in a similar situation, caught in a rented (and hence unfamiliar) car on the wrong side of the highway while trying to overtake a long vehicle, with a car coming towards us at full speed; somehow I got back on the right side of the road with a second or two to spare, just as the oncoming car sped by, horn blaring. I got the two seconds -- and am still alive! Kaiser didn't get those two seconds -- and was killed. (How many other such occasions might there have been when I escaped death by a few seconds -- without being aware of my narrow escapes?)

Kaiser died at the age of 22; I am now in my 90th year. He was every bit as intelligent and talented as I am. Chance favoured me; it did not favour him on that occasion.

What I have learned in my 90 years is that no supernatural being directs events in our world, or permits (or forbids) certain things happening; we do what we wish, or what we must, but what determines outcomes is how much effort we put in, and Chance! Often, it is pure chance that determines the outcome.

A good example of this interaction of one's actions and chance was our coming to Canada in 1961 for the Canadian Army Staff College course.

I was a Battery Commander in Lahore in 1961, and my artillery battery was out in the field on ‘collective training’ with the infantry brigade we were linked to. The Army Chief came to visit the brigade one day to see them doing their stuff, and the brigade commander took him around; as the supporting artillery commander, I was part of the group. A battalion of the brigade was deployed in a defensive position, and they had with them some 106 mm recoilless anti-tank guns. These were new additions to the army (as part of US Aid), and the Chief wanted to see one. The gun detachment commander went through his mock drill of ordering the crew to engage an ‘enemy’ tank, and then ran to his foxhole about 20 yards away.

The Chief, watching this, turned to the brigade commander and said, “Why does he not stay with the gun?”, and the brigadier mumbled something about changing this procedure. The antitank company commander and I were standing behind these two, and I nudged him and asked him to clarify the matter. But, as usual in our army, he believed in keeping his head down. So, when he wouldn’t speak, I said, “There’s a perfectly good reason for it, sir”. The Chief turned around to me, and I explained it to him (it is because the dust and smoke, kicked up by the gun when it fires, would obscure the view of the detachment commander, and he would be unable to correct the next shot fired by the gun, if that was necessary).

Later on I learnt that, as the brigade commander was driving him back to the city, the Chief asked him who I was. When he gave him my name, the Chief remarked that it seemed familiar as he had seen it in some document that had crossed his desk recently; he turned to his ADC and asked him to call his office when they got back, and find out. The Chief’s ADC called the brigade commander later that evening and said that the General wanted him to inform me that I was going to the Canadian Staff College later that year. This was great news for all of us, since I knew that this course was 2 years long, which meant that the family could accompany me to Canada.

A couple of days later, we were utterly taken aback when my unit received an official letter from GHQ saying I had been picked to go to the Staff College in Australia!

This was an unpleasant surprise, especially as this course was only 10 months long, and thus the family couldn’t accompany me. I was quite upset, and asked for an interview with our division commander. When I told the general what had happened, and that I wanted to put in an official complaint, he replied that he was playing golf with the Army Chief that evening, and he would mention this to him! To cut a long story short, it seems the usual shenanigans had occurred in GHQ (someone influential had managed to get my name switched with his brother’s on the file). The Chief was annoyed, and had my name put back in to go to Canada.

The point I wanted to make (in recounting this long tale) was that this trivial occurrence (of my speaking up that day) changed the whole course of my (and the family’s) life. Apart from the wonderful two years we spent in Canada (making quite a few friends there), this event had long-term consequences. Even though it is quite possible that we would have come to Canada anyway after my release from prison (several of Jamila’s brothers were already here), but I only got my government job (responsibility for writing and implementing the provincial nuclear emergency plan) because the official who wanted this plan done (Ken Reeves) was someone who had been a friend at the Canadian staff college, and knew that I would be able to do it well. That led to my employment with the Ontario provincial government, which I served for 12 years or so before retiring with a pension. This also resulted in my being able to compete for, and win (in 1996), the contract for rewriting the provincial nuclear emergency plan, which has enabled our current comfortable retirement in Toronto. Life in Canada would have otherwise been very different for us both, and for our children.

My winning the contract for rewriting the nuclear plan was also due to the play of chance. The person who had the final say on the matter was a former colleague, who now headed the branch. He and I had not got along, and he would have liked someone else to get the contract. The two final contenders for the contract were a US company and me; the former had made the plans for several US states, and was the one he preferred. But they made an elementary mistake in their proposal, which led to the selection committee having little choice but to pick me. The contract for which the Ministry had invited proposals was for the first part of the plan, but within an overall budget of around a million dollars allocated for all the plan parts (and so stated in the write-up). The US company's proposal covered the entire plan, and they bid about a million dollars for the work; my bid was for the first part only (which was on tender at that time), and for much less. That was how I got this contract in spite of Jim Ellard -- and, as a result, obtained contracts for all the subsequent parts, since the US company lost interest in the work, and there were no other serious contenders.

If we accept the reality that chance, plus the effort we put in, determine the results of our actions, it should cause us to use our own minds to determine our path in life, to fully exert ourselves to achieve what we wish to do, while understanding that we only have limited influence on outcomes, with Chance (rather than some Deity) offering us opportunities, and quite often determining the result of our efforts.

Unfortunately, such wisdom (about the absence of a Deity as a causative factor in our world, with all its implications) usually comes to us only towards the end of our lives! On the other hand, maybe that's not such a bad thing -- otherwise, some of us may decide that a life spent doing things is not really worth it.

In my own case, a firm belief (at a certain stage in my life) in the existence of a Deity (who, I believed, acted through humans) propelled me to do many of the things I have done (all positive achievements, as far as I am concerned), and stoically accept the personal consequences that arose from doing them. (I honestly cannot say now if I would have done all these things had my current belief about the non-existence of any Deity prevailed at that earlier stage of my life.)

I do not really know how luck figures in this mix. For example, see this article ("If all our actions are shaped by luck, are we still agents?").

There is no doubt that I have been extraordinary lucky in my life. I am now over 91 years old, but still in good health; most importantly, my mind is still functioning fairly well. Of course, it is no longer as quick or supple as it used to be; I need to focus it on a task, and it takes me much longer to complete it. Most of my contemporaries are either dead or quite ill, often with impaired brains or other organs. (Perspective is restored by two old friends who are a few years older than me, but still fairly active -- 'Ben' Qasim, whom I got to know when I came to Canada, and (Colonel) Anwar Ahmad, a PMA course-mate, who lives in Mississauga, near Toronto).

I am also very lucky in that Jamila is still with me; she has some physical problems but her brain is still functioning well -- better than mine (she is almost a year younger than me).