Thursday, January 8, 2009
Pearls & Gem : Hoarding
You are obsessed by greed for more and more
Until you go down to your graves
Nay ,but you will come to know.
Nay ,but you will come to know !
Nay ,if you but only knew it with the knowledge of certainty
You would indeed see the hell that you are in .
In time ,indeed you will see it with the eye of certainty .
On that day you will be asked what you have done with the boon of life .
The Glorious Quran on the issue of 'Hoarding' .
Surah 102
Leopold Weiss was travelling with his wife ,Elsa ,in September 1926 ,in a Berlin subway when he noted a well dressed business man ,with a beautiful suitcase on his knees and a large diamond ring on his hand .It was an upper-class compartment .
" But when I looked at his face ,I did not seem to be looking at a happy face .He appeared to be worried :but not merely worried but acutely unhappy ,with eyes staring vacantly in space and the corners of his mouth drawn in as if in pain -but not in bodily pain...Then I began to look around at all the other faces in the compartment-faces belonging without exception to well dressed ,well fed people :and in almost every one of them I could discern an expression of hidden suffering ,so hidden that the owner of the face seemed to be quite unaware of it "
Shocked by the transformation of a routine train ride into a moral vision ,he shared this experience with his wife ,Elsa .She also looked around with new eyes ,and said ," You are right .They all look as though they were suffering torments of hell...I wonder ,do they know themselves what is going on in them ?".When Leopold returned home ,he chanced upon his copy of The Glorious Quran which has fallen open on the 102nd chapter .The rest was history .
Leopold Weiss went on to become Europe's most famous convert to Islam ,Muhammad Asad .He found in the Quran a voice that addressed the particular obsession of his age [ which is still our age ,despite our intellectuals' pretension to be not just 'post modern' but also 'post contemporary'].
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2 comments:
Doc,
My wife took Takaful Insurance for her car. I remember receiving a cheque from the company for a share of the profit for the previous year. I think that's a wonderful concept for not 'hoarding'.
Mat Ribut
Mat ,
The bigger picture of 'hoarding' in my view is of course crass capitalism ,corruption ,nepotism .We just have too many of these at present in our society ,at every level ,to the point 'hoarding' has become an accepted 'necessary evil' .
"Ah ,kalau you jadi PM pun you bagi jugak mega project kat anak buah you" become an accepted excuse .'Hoarding' in Malaysia starts from Sri Perdana Putrajaya ,or Sri Perdana Kuala Lumpur ,percolates down to other cabinet members ,thru to their respective ministries ,and right down to the lowly peons who deliver the cheques to the small time sub-cons .
As Dato Zaid Ibrahim succinctly put it though , in his recent Singapore Forum on Future Directions in Malaysia ,'thank God ,we Malaysians have better commonsense than our leaders .Perhaps in future we can look to a better governance .
This 'new openness' started by Pak Lah [ even though a wee bit too late to save his premiership ]will augurs well for us ,the raayats .
On the subject of Takaful as an insurance choice I do agree with you that they are more humane compared to the others .My only worry is that if they do not do their 'sums' and 'due diligence' profesionally and adequately they may run themselves to the ground with excessive claims .
The rest of the insurance companies are so meticulous and petty some claiments may be caught with their pants down over their inability to read the 'small prints' when they sign in between the dotted lines .
I see these very often in 'medical insurance claims' .
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