The Two Pathways

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم    Climb atop highest mountains, Pierce your sight into the heavens, Expand your vision to the horizons, Dive deep into the darkest oceans,   Tell me now, do you find the Creator in creation? Or can you grasp His grandeur with imagination?   Will you then worship your hand’s creation? Or other beings lower in station? Or pious dead awaiting resurrection?   What is wrong that you don’t reason! Ditch gods created by humans! To your Creator - alone - show devotion!   Follow His messenger sent to all nations, You will be rewarded with eternal dominion, In paradise, reclining high in station, With words of recognition and congratulations, Rivers, fruits, shades - delights beyond imagination, In seats of honor near Lord of creation.

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم " What are these statues to which you are devoted? " Ibraheem asked his people. They replied, " We found our fathers worshiping them ". He said, “ Indeed, you and your forefathers have been clearly astray .” He asked his father, who crafted idols  - " why do you worship that which does not hear, nor sees, nor does benefit in anything?! " He continued, " Do you desire made-up gods instead of Allah? What then is your thought about Lord of all worlds? In fact, your Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth, Who created them both. And to that I bear witnes s". In the temple, Ibraheem saw the idols that his people worshiped, with foods in front of them as offerings. He addressed them saying " Will you not eat?! Why is it that you don't speak?! " Then he smashed all the idols except biggest of them and left. Horrified to see their idols lying in ruins, people guessed that Ibraheem was behind this and

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم يا أيها المدثر قم فأنذر و ربك فكبر O you enveloped (in garments)! Arise and warn! And pronounce the greatness of your Lord. (Al-Qur'an 74:1-3) In the city of Makkah surrounded by inhospitable deserts and dry mountains, unappealing to empires, with water and resources in scarcity and ignorance in abundance, rose a Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) calling to worship of the Creator alone and shunning worship of His creation, warning of a severe punishment prepared for the those who reject Allah and His messengers, and giving glad tidings of immense reward to those who worship Allah alone and submit to Him in obedience. Entrusted with the burden of delivering the message to humanity, wherein lied their success and redemption, Muhammad (ﷺ) exerted with all his wealth, energy and self in conveying the message and desired sincerely for people to accept and follow it. ( 1 ) فلعلك باخع نفسك على آثارهم إن لم يؤمنو بهذا الحديث أسفا Perhaps, you, would kill yourse

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم، ملك يوم الدين. إياك نعبد و إياك نستعين. اهدنا الصراط المستقيم، صراط الذين أنعمت عليهم غير المغضوب عليهم ولا الضالين All the praises and thanks be to Allah, the Lord of the 'Âlamîn (all that exists). The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. The Only Owner (and the Only Ruling Judge) of the Day of Recompense (i.e. the Day of Resurrection). You (Alone) we worship, and You (Alone) we ask for help. Guide us to the Straight Way. The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger, nor of those who went astray.   (Al-Qur'an 1:1-7) We have many differences, most of which we ignore, but there are few which are deep enough to cause division. These are things significant to at least one of the differing groups. What color one wears, for example, may not cause division, however if one were to differ over what traffic light colors mean, then sure it will cause division as it

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم و قالوا لا تذرون آلهتكم و لا تذرون ودا و لا سواء لا يغوث و يعوق و نسرا... And they said 'Never leave your gods, and never leave Wadd , nor Suwa' nor Yaghooth or Ya'ooq or Nasr '... (Al-Qur'an 71: 23) Shortly after the dawn of humanity, people were already affirming their love and allegiance to their gods, when Nooh (1) عليه السلام came to them asking to shun these gods. They enumerated their gods as an act of defiance - Wadd, Suwa', Yaghooth, Ya'ooq and Nasr . These were names of noble men who had lived before them, known for piety, loved by people and had following among them. When they died, Satan advised people to make their images and statues to remind themselves of their goodness and to motivate themselves to be like them. As generations passed, purpose of these images and statues was forgotten and the knowledge of what these noble men had preached faded away. At this point, Satan inspired people saying that

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم There have been people in the past, who believed that there was no God and that the world was a product of chance, but these were regarded as rather foolish. Things began to change in the Nineteenth century, when Darwin wrote his book “ Origin of Species ”, in which he concluded, based on similarities between different species that they must have evolved from common ancestors. He proposed a mechanism that could explain the evolution of different life forms and named it “ Natural Selection ”. This, he proposed, was a very slow and random process, which accumulated small incremental changes over millions of years, to shape the life as we know it. Even with these ideas, Darwin did not explicitly deny existence of God and carefully avoided being termed an atheist. However, his theory became popular and widely accepted by atheists, who had finally found a justification for their belief and became its evangelists. They maintained and propagated that the theory