 One of the main problems they have is a clash. This man made specific predictions about the Qur'an during his days, touring cities in the United States, teaching about his theological observation and deep insight into the Qur'an. Most of his predictions, explanation and suggested solutions fell on deaf ears. It seemed Muslims were not in the mood for the radical approach he was suggesting at the time. Now as Islamic theology and exegesis gain accelerated traction in the West with the positive consequences of rapid growth in development across four strata there is no better time than now to revisit what this white mathematics professor and an open-minded researcher said above the Qur'an and its delimitation of the transcendent qualities of God. For context some of you already know who he is. Professor Jeffrey Long has an amazing revision story, a story of its kind, a story that humbles all the cylinders of atheism and fires the pipes of arrogance. This is a man who lectures in one of the largest universities in Connecticut and this part, the splendor and pride that comes with such exalted position laid humble before a dreamy heart about becoming a Muslim. He indeed became a Muslim and since then has stead effort to resurrect an intellectual probe into the Qur'an and modern societal changes. Wait a minute, that doesn't explain this. Why the intellect? Why the choice? Why the suffering? Careful of what Professor Long said, I can summarize his prediction to mean Muslims must engage in intellectual discussions about Qur'anic interpretation to navigate the rapid changes in society. As a world evolves, new issues and challenges arise, requiring critical thinking and analysis to understand how Qur'anic teachings apply to contemporary situations. According to him, these will enable Muslims all over the world to make informed decisions that are in line with Islamic principles were adapted to change in times across the globe. As-salamu alaykum brothers and sisters, welcome to another episode of the Upward-Minded Thinker Show. For the purpose of awareness, please like and share the video. This is the only way others can find it on YouTube and learn as we are doing right now. Don't forget to subscribe as well to help us grow bigger and better. Now, what does the Qur'an tell us about God? You have to realize I'm just about through with the Qur'an here in my first time reading it, and now I was really caught. I searched my head, what does the Qur'an tell us about God? It tells us nothing could be compared to him. That he's outside anything that we may compare to, that our definitions do not encompass him, that our reason cannot comprehend him, that he is transcended and we are finite, that he transcends time and space and we are bound by it, that he is immortal, we are mortal, he is uncorporal, we are corporeal, that we have no way of comparing ourselves to him. Nothing could be compared to him. I thought, oh my God, I'm so close and yet so far because I'll never understand the essential link between us and God and why these three things fit into place because the Qur'an tells us that we will could never really quite understand God. Or at least that's the way I thought. And so I put down the Qur'an when I had finished it and much to my dismay, I was honestly disappointed because I thought and just the author made a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant try but he never quite made it. And so I was sitting in front of about three, four weeks later, I was sitting in Diamond Heights in my apartment watching a football game I think it was. And you know sometimes just things just slip into your minds when you least expect them and I'm sitting there watching it and all of a sudden into my mind came a thought and I said, wait a minute, the Qur'an does tell us so much about God. It tells us again and again and again but somehow I just missed it. Just skimmed over it every single time because if you turn to almost any page, if you turn to the beginning of any Sura, you could see time and time again essential information about God that I just thought was sort of a literary device, something to make it just sound more beautiful. Because if you turn to beginning of any Sura, you'll see the words Bismillahirrahmanirrahim and the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate. If you read almost any passage, long passage when you come to edit end of it, it's punctuated by dual attributive statements like God is the merciful, the compassionate. God is the forgiving, the gentle. God is the kind, the protector. God is the generous, the truthful. God is and so forth and so on. There are tens of thousands of such references in the statements in the Qur'an. What the Qur'an defines as God's most beautiful names, his attributes of perfection, repeated again and again and again on almost every page. And as I sat there sitting by the television, I started to jot them down in my, you know, on my little piece of notebook there, same notebook I used to jot these down before, and I began to list from my own mind the attributes of perfection as I remembered them, and they were, we should be, God is the compassionate. God is the merciful. God is the forgiving. God is the just, the protector, the defender of the oppressed and the weak, the knowing, the wise, the generous, the kind, the truthful, the loving, the peaceful, the source of all peace, the truth and so forth and so on. Every item I had listed in my list for the qualities that we human beings are supposed to develop, the Qur'an was telling me had its infinite source and perfection in Allah, in God. And then all of a sudden all the pieces fell together. Then I suddenly saw it as I see, most of you probably see as well, that now, I mean suddenly it all began to make sense to me. In what way do I say that? For me, his theological basis of conceptualizing God as written in the Qur'an is far too basic. Some of the attributes he listed belong to the human manifestation of the divinity, whereas God is kind, compassionate, love, peace and so on can be said to be authentic, but a go beyond those thresholds. In a philosophical sense, God can be described as a spiritual being that is transcendent and tenor or mini-portent or mini-scient and or mini-present as a spiritual being. God is immaterial and exists outside our physical realm. The Qur'an is directly silent on this, but let's see how the professor looks on from here. Well, it was now obvious why we had to develop these qualities. It was now obvious how these things on the floor here fell into place. And I'll just say it clearly. We're here to develop a relationship with God, to become closer to God. But how can you become closer to God when he's transcendent in your finite, when he's immortal in your immortal, when you're in vice versa, when he's immortal in your mortal, when he's unfettered by time and space and you are and so forth and so on? How can you become close to that one? If I want to become close to you, I need to have something to share with you, something that we have in common. So for example, if I want to come close to this young man here physically, I'll approach him because we both have bodies and I could position my body closer to him. Physical presence, bodily presence is something we both share. If I want to become closer to that gentleman back there, if I want to become closer to him intellectually, I'll reason with him so we will have a convergence of minds because we both possess reason. If I want to become closer to one of my sisters on this side emotionally, I'll try to appeal to their sentiments because we both share feelings and similar types of experiences that generate those feelings. But how does one become closer to God? What do we share with him? We share with him exactly what he gave us because the Qur'an tells us that when we came into this life, he breathes into our spirit something of his spirit and that we'd come into this world with the seed of these very qualities within us and we could either kill them, stunt them as the Qur'an says, or cause them to grow. And when we grow in these, we grow in our ability not just to experience tremendous beauty in life through all this, but we grow in our ability to receive and experience the infinite beauty, the infinite peace, the infinite truth, the infinite compassion, the infinite mercy, the internet, etc., all the way down the list that only comes from the infinite perfect source of all these. The more we grow in mercy, the more we grow in our ability to receive and experience in this life and in the next to an infinitely greater degree the mercy of God. The more we grow in compassion, the more we grow in our ability to receive and experience God's compassion in this life through prayer and through ritual and through contemplation and through other experience of others and of course infinitely more in the next life the compassion of God. The more we grow in our truthfulness, the more we grow in our ability to experience God the truth because all truth comes from God. The more we grow in these things, the more we grow in our ability to receive and experience God's attributes of perfection. The more we grow in our ability to receive and experience his being and that sort of nearness we are growing to him is tied to our essential nature and to his. It's more than just physical nearness, it's more than just a convergence of ideas, it's more than just a convergence of feelings, it's a convergence of essential beings. It's the closest type of nearness to, can feel, to, can experience. I'll just give you a quick analogy because this helped my children. Let's pretend I have a goldfish, a dog, and three children. Three daughters, let's say. And I do have three daughters. No matter how much of my love, compassion, forgiveness, caring, I pour upon that goldfish, it could only experience it to a tiny degree. It might not even really be aware of it because it's a very primitive creature. But my dog on the other hand, when I show it all my kindness, all my love, all my compassion, all of what is essentially me, it could experience it to a much higher degree than my goldfish. And through its interaction with me, through its own trying to give its own self to me, we could experience a quite wonderful relationship. But my children, especially as they grow over and go through their own experience and their own development, could receive and experience all the love and the compassion and the forgiveness and the caring and the generosity and the protection, everything I have to offer, they could experience my being to a much higher degree than my dog ever can. And we could have a relationship of beauty that I could never have with my dog, as much as I love animals. Having had three daughters, I know that the relationship that you have with three beautiful daughters could never even come close. No other relationship could approximate that. Of course, my relationship with my wife is also extremely beautiful and she might air this day. And she's a wonderful woman, really. I mean, she's the source of so much beauty. But one of the reasons why God created man was apparently to submit to him in all things. He created us in his image. He said and imbued in us the ability to be as perfect as he is in knowledge, understanding and creativity. However, as other factors came in between this arrangement, the professor got it quite rightly that we would require to cultivate those attributes of godliness so deep to be able to experience the beauty of God's transcendent potentials. This is just so theologically pure. Okay, Madam Chairman, I am ready. So that seems to bring it all together. So now I thought, wait a minute, that doesn't explain this. Why the intellect? Why the choice? Why the suffering? I thought, you almost had me this Quran. You almost duped me. You almost tricked me, seduced me into accepting this philosophy. But wait a minute. What about intellect, choice, suffering? Why do we have to experience these? Why couldn't you just programmed us to be merciful, compassionate, forgiving, etc.? Why do we have to go through all this? And then, of course, the answer came to me as quickly as I thought of it. So we are creatures, and we grow, and we become. And yes, and you could make us anything you want, but you can't contain any of those attributes I listed without these three things. In mathematics, we try, you know, three premises that go into, you know, proving a theorem, we try to see if we could take one of them away and if it's essential. And all three of these are definitely essential. For example, you could program a computer never to make an incorrect statement, but it doesn't become a truthful computer. Never heard anybody say to me, Jeff, this Macintosh is the most truthful computer I ever saw. If it's programmed, it's not truth. You could program a CAT scan to help the sick, but it doesn't become compassionate. Never heard a doctor say, Jeff, if you want to see a compassionate CAT scan, you come right over here. Because all those things, compassion, forgiveness, truth, caring, love, all are born out of choice, suffering, and reason. In order to do a compassionate deed, when we consider reaching out to someone in compassion, that person, first of all, that's inconceivable without the presence of suffering, an environment where there's suffering. And when we decide to help them or not, we reason in our minds, what is this going to require of me? It's going to require some suffering on my part, some in my giving of myself. And without that mental process, it doesn't become a compassionate deed. And if it isn't by choice, it's not a compassionate deed. It's that choice that makes it compassionate. The same thing with truth. Truth is a choice between telling the truth or not telling the truth. Oftentimes, we tell it at risk to our own personal loss. The more suffering that might come out of that choice, the greater is the truth behind it, the greater an act of truthfulness. And all the time, we have to weigh the consequences of that choice. If I tell the truth there, my teacher's going to give me an F. If I don't tell the truth, I may get an A. We weigh it in our mind. Last example, the famous wedding vow. Do you take this woman to be your wife in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, until death do you part? What are they asking us? Do you knowingly make this choice? Understanding full well, what's at stake here? That it might involve richness but poverty, health or sickness, that suffering is going to be involved, until death once a young lady told me, you know, you never really love me. Because when the growing got tough, when things got hard, when we hit rock bottom, when my life fell apart, you just got up and left. And she was right. And she understood full well that that's what love is all about. It is through giving and suffering together and hanging in there with each other and not bailing out and persevering through suffering, making that choice and knowing what you're doing. All those three things are essential. So it's very easy to see why the Quran stresses these. For in order for us to grow in these, I've dropped it. We have to add these. Watching to this point left me satisfied. He finally laid the big cut out of the bag. God deliberately planned the creation of man with the same free will and intellect as himself. We're not created like animals and thus possesses the ability to go intellectual in weighing fully the consequences of our actions in relation to religion. These principles are often intertwined. Free will allows individuals to make choices that can lead to suffering, but also to happiness and fulfillment. Intellect is used to make informed decisions and understand the nature of suffering and can lead to deeper enlightenment and understanding of one's faith. Suffering in turn can test one's faith and lead to spiritual growth and enlightenment. All these are plans of God's witness of our human frailties. Let's live it there, people. Like, share and subscribe. See you next time. As-salamu alaykum.