Who am I, where am I, why I am here?” These questions were at a time unanswerable for me. One would certainly not deny the fact that every child has his own unique world. Children are lost in their own world, which is often far from the real world. I, too, in my childhood was ignorant of the real world, happy like other children are. My friends used to play different outdoor games but I had no interest in them. I used to play alone in my verandah where I had formed my own little world. I used to gather some matchboxes, matchsticks, a candle, and a piece of wire. It usually took me half an hour to make this structure of my own universe. Then I would roll a tennis ball over it and in no time it had been perished.
One day, while I was repeating the same activity, several questions arose in my mind. I wondered why and where I am? It made me think deeper, and I found that many other people, among them some of my friends, had the same questions, but no answers. I tried to find the answers but to no avail. It made me sad and despondent.
In deep thought once I was when an ant caught my attention. It was carrying food, probably sugar, to its home. I made several attempts to block its way but it managed to go past and finally reached its destination. I thought of my parents who also work day in and out, and overcome all odds, to make us happy and comfortable. At the same time I wondered about the existence of these small creatures and their struggle for survival.
The great revolutionary Malcolm X said, “There is nothing in our book, the Quran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully; our religion teaches us to be intelligent!” I eventually found the answers to my questions from the Holy Quran. In Surah Ad-Dhariyat, verse 55, Allah says, “I created the Jinns and Humankind only that they might worship me.” God has made every small and big thing only so that they worship him. He has given us tremendous resources, a happy life, and one of his biggest gifts, the title of ‘Muslim’. In return, God asks us nothing but to worship him.
The artificial universe that I used to make consisted of matchboxes. In the real world, they correspond to buildings and houses. The matchsticks are like human existence, the candle like the sun and other celestial bodies, and the piece of wire represents the borders between these things. In a nutshell, this world is not eternal. Rather, it must be perceived as very brief, and one day it will be destroyed by Allah. We must keep in our minds that we have to die one day, irrespective of what status we have or achieve. Allah will reward us for what we did in this world: one will go to heaven for good deeds or to hell for misdeeds. Therefore we should act as per the Quran and follow its commands, so that we succeed in this world as well in the hereafter.

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Shakir Hussain