Re-liga | Trivia

Bismillah.

Here's a little trivia for you. How far is Madinah from Makkah by road? Surely, most of you would get it right. Yes, it's about four hours. 

How far is Yathrib from Bakka in the olden days? We are talking about the same cities here. I bet you didn't know, it's 11 camel-days.

This I learned from this book by Martin Lings whose Muslim name was Abu Bakar Sirajuddin (1909-2005). He read English at the prestigious Oxford University. By the way, the past tense of read is read as in 'red' eye. Of course you know that. Well, at first, I the silly-me thought the blurb of the book contained a typo. Nay.    

It also says, C. S Lewis or Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a close friend of Martin Lings. C.S Lewis is no stranger to the well-read amongst you. He was a famous novelist. One of his popular books was 'The Chronicles of Narnia' so I learned from Mr. Wiki.

Anyway, I have digressed. I just wanted to share with you the definition of religion as offered by the ever so brilliant Martin Lings.

How would you define religion? Religion according to Martin Lings means: "RE-establishing the bond - the LIGAment between man and God which man lost at the Fall."

Clever! And how true, we all walk and fall every now and then so we have to get up to return to that which we are supposed to do. That is the prescribed acts as ordained in the shariah. The bond with the Lord gets broken every so often, so we have to mend the torn ligament, so to speak.

That's it folks. I need to rest as it's my second night at the hospital and my dearest specialist doctor complained about my brain activity being "too active". I just love my doctor who happens to like Usain Bolt's method of running, how Usain would run straight up and not bend his body to avoid wind resistance like most runners do and despite that, he could run 10 meters in about 1 second (His 100 meter record is 9.58 seconds) that means his metabolic rate must be "some medical jargon I didn't catch", that's why he could sprint because his muscle is "another medical jargon I didn't understand". Wow! Doctors they all know about all the great scientific stuffs, don't they?

Anyway, remember, religion is about re-liga, re-establishing the ligament between man and God. So, religion is no trivia. No.