Mirza Yawar Baig – History lesson
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AI: Transcript ©
From my brother, my brothers and sisters,
let's,
take a little bit of a history lesson.
How long is life?
How long is human life?
Now we can't put an exact date on
it but it is estimated that about 9,000
years ago.
9000.
Keep in perspective,
Islam began with Rasool Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
1400 years ago, 1400 years ago. Roughly,
Islam is, of course, is from the beginning,
but
At that time, this began the transition from
hunting and gathering to agriculture and settled communities.
So
we are not saying that when we say
life began, we are not saying this is
when human beings came on the earth. They
came before that. We don't know how many
1000 years before that, but this is when
settled communities
started forming.
Now we pass over centuries like you would
pass over days and come to about 5000
years ago, which means from 9,000 to 5000
years ago. When we find the first writing,
now this is, remember this is so critically
important because the sign of civilization
is to write.
We find the first writing, Mesopotamian
cuneiform
script invented in Sumer.
Sumer is in present day Iraq.
The delta the the
the, place between the
Euphrates and the Tigris,
what it was,
Mesopotamia,
is the cradle of civilization. This is where
literally life began. So,
this was in,
circa
3,200
BC,
and can be traced to the present day
alphabet. So this is where we have the
link to the present alphabet. Now writing is
crucial because that is what distinguishes us from
arables and enables us to build on the
work of previous generations.
All creatures of languages,
they communicate, they have life experiences, they remember
some of them for a long time, even
teach some of them to their offspring,
but none of them have the critical
tool to transcend the time and generational barrier
where their experience can be recalled and relived
and learned from.
That tool is writing.
In the 300000
years that our species, the Homo sapiens, have
existed on earth, we only know what happened
to them from about 5000 years ago, from
300,000
to 5000.
Thanks to writing. Now, thanks to writing. We
know about ancient civilizations
like Mesopotamia.
Ibrahim Alayhi Salam lived at this time. So
we are talking about roughly 4000 years ago.
Ancient Egypt, Indus Valley,
Mohenjo Daro, Harappa,
China, Greece, Parthia,
Rome and so on.
Thanks
to writing,
we have,
the epic of Gilgamesh,
the Puranas,
the Mahabharata,
Ramayana,
Odyssey, and Iliad,
and the 5 great Tamil
epics.
Tamil, incidentally, is the oldest living language. Thanks
to writing, we know the laws, the philosophy,
history, religious beliefs, and much more of these
ancient civilizations.
Writing opens the doors to the treasure houses
of the accumulated
knowledge
of generations
across millennia.
In that period, we we passed through the
bronze age, which is
circa 3,300
to 1200 BCE,
the iron age from 1200 BCE onwards, the
Assyrians
just to give you an idea,
ancient Rome, when Julius Caesar was fighting,
the
swords of the Roubarabi
were made of bronze,
not steel,
or not iron, basically, and iron age came
later. Then we have the Assyrians, the Persia,
the ancient Persians, and later the Roman Empire.
Then the classical period, which is 800
BCE to 500 CE. So we are now,
gone over the
so called 0 in history.
Then the classical period was significant developments in
science, philosophy, and the arts. Then the Middle
Ages,
500
to 1500
CE,
which is where Islam starts,
fall of the Western Roman Empire,
a rise of feudalism,
dominance of the Catholic church and the rise
of the Byzantine Empire
with Constantinople
as being its center instead of Rome. Now
Islam 610
CE came to the world,
and then the Umayyads
661 to 750, the Abbasid
from 750 to 1258,
the Ottoman Dosmani from 12 99
to 1927,
the Mughal from 1526
to 1858,
the Safavid,
1501
to 17 36.
All of these empires came into being and
they
existed as you can see some of these
were parallel and, contemporaries of each other. We
have the Renaissance
in Europe, 14th to 17th centuries,
the age of exploration,
which is really colonization,
15 to 17th centuries, the transatlantic
slave trade, which built the nations of Western
Europe and Americas
at the cost of millions
of African lives,
the extinguishing of the ancient civilizations of the
Incas and the Aztecs,
the annihilation of the Native American and Australian
Aboriginal
people, and the enslavement of Africa.
We have the European Enlightenment,
as it is called 17th 19th Centuries,
which is basically a decline of the Catholic
Church,
the age of reason, individual rights, the decline
of Catholicism,
the rise of protestantism,
democracy and secularism.
Then comes the Industrial Revolution,
1760
to 18 40, one of the most significant
and most dramatic changes in history.
The Great Depression, the 2 World Wars in
the 20th century and the beginning
of the war without end, which we have
been seeing ever since and we are seeing
as we speak.
Formal colonies ended, replaced with ideological,
economic and psychological
colonization,
which is much more powerful and profitable for
the colonisers.
Human values, ethics, morals, organisations,
social structures,
how we live, what is important, what is
not, our health, our happiness,
all became subjugated
and molded
to what the New World Order needed
to feed the global model of infinite profit.
The focus of our intellect, our ambitions, our
motives,
the standards of satisfaction and achievement, the investment
of our time, energy, and money all indicate
what is most important for us and therefore
where our civilization is headed. I will leave
you to research and look at the numbers
of how much we invest, for example, in
food, education,
the arts, public health, medical research,
space exploration,
conservation of water,
forests,
wildlife, and energy,
all of these together versus
what we spend on weapons of mass destruction,
what we spend on wars. That will tell
you
what
and where our focus
is. The destination
depends on focus.
This is a simple rule.
Destination depends on focus.
The destination depends on focus. Islam came to
change that focus
and to guide us to the truth that
in the end, we will pay for what
we did and what we chose not to
do.
Now just to give just to put you
put this into perspective through all of this,
all the stuff that I told you, one
creature, one living being
endured
and lived. And that is
a 9,550
year old spruce tree in the Dalarna province
of Sweden.
This tree was
4,500
years old
when our story in the form of the
written word began.
So this story this, tree
was
4,500
plus something years old when
Ibrahim Alai Salam and Ismaili Salam were building
the Kaaba.
That tree was still there.
And that's not the only tree, but that's
the oldest one. The, the famous baobabs of
Africa.
There are many of them who were also
there
when,
the Kaaba was being built by Ibrahim Alai
Salam and Ismail Alai Salam.
Our brothers and sisters,
we are not unique.
We would like to think that we are
the best thing that happened to the world.
We are not. We are actually the human
race
is like a cancer, like a curse.
And unless we cure ourselves, and by cure
ourselves I mean become responsible
citizens of the world,
not of,
whichever nation state we like to call as
as our country,
and then therefore,
take that as the justification for destroying everything
else. That is not responsible citizenship. Responsible citizenship
is to own responsibility for what happens to
the whole world in the way that Rasool
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
said for the Muslim Bumba. And I and
I'm saying apply this to the whole world,
which is that if the head pains, the
whole body pains. So if everyone for each
person,
the individual
for society and the society for the individual.
This is the mindset that we need to
develop and say,
don't look at the world in the sense
of what can I get out of it?
Instead of that, say, what can I contribute
to it? Because contribution
is
the thing
which gets you
the reward.
The reward
is a consequence
of the contribution.
The more we contribute, the greater the reward,
both in this dunya. Well,