IDEA 59
The Orange Peel Plantation
And declare that “Truly I am the explicit warner” / [Of] what We sent down upon the makers of divisions, / Those who split up the Qur’an in pieces. / By your Lord, We are interrogating all of them / About what they were doing. (Q15:89-93)
Muhammad (may GOD bless him and give him peace) planted an orchard over 14 centuries ago. In it were various types of luscious fruits -- dates, figs, olives, melons, lemons, and oranges. His companions took the seeds of this orchard and planted it all over Western Asia, Northern Africa, and, over subsequent centuries, ever further afield, eventually reaching Andalusia and Indonesia.
As time went on, Muslim cultivators began to specialize, pulling apart from each other as they chose to concentrate on one particular fruit. A few formidable scholars were able to manage orchards producing more than one kind of fruit, but such multi-faceted plantations became rarer and, for lack of due care, gradually less fruitful.
These divisions became so common that lemon growers, for example, would attack the lemon groves across the way, for the sake of greater market share. In some cases, a melon farmer, for instance, would even condemn his neighbour's date farm as non-Islamic, alleging that those dates were totally unlike those grown according to the Sunnah.
These quarrels continued and multiplied for many centuries, and huge resources were wasted on fruitless battles over which harvesting method was superior or whose fruit tasted better. Inevitably, all growers suffered as buyers sought alternatives or relief from these endless disputes. Rival farmers offering non-Islamic fruits moved into Muslim territories, flooding the market with cheaper goods and even hybrid versions of originally Islamic produce.
Eventually, reform movements sprung up to counter this decline. Each movement emphasized one particular kind of failure and promised to fix it. Some talked about the soil, others about the seeds, and yet others about the planting or gathering process. Every sect was overjoyed with what they had. (Q30:32)
One dominant trend focused on pruning. All excess foliage and care for the trees had to stop, as this had not been needed at the time of the Prophet (may GOD bless him and give him peace). Some of what they claimed was true; however, as is normal or even inevitable in human nature, their teaching lost sight of the loftier end, which was tasty, nourishing fruit, and concentrated ever more fiercely on techniques and manuals. To make matters worse, they decided to uproot all competing plantations wherever they went and specialize solely in oranges.
Everything was to be orange. Lemons, melons, olives, and dates were all acceptable, provided that they looked orange. And the oranges themselves were cultivated at a scale never seen before. The fruits were larger and brighter in colour, and ordinary orchards were replaced with giant plantations, funded lavishly by the House of Orange and their minions and franchises throughout the world.
No one seemed to notice, however, that, as time went on, the fruit inside these giant orange balls, hanging in clusters from orange trees planted in endless rows for economic reasons, had shrivelled and dried out. As shipment after shipment went out to the world, people stopped squeezing the fruit to find out if there was anything inside. And, at the same time, they lost their interest in squeezing themselves as well, to find out if there was anything inside of their orange consumption. Those who did, miserably and in secret, discovered that both the fruit and the souls that loudly claimed to love oranges were empty, desiccated, and boring.
So now, in Islam, we have immense resources, time, and energy poured into endless fields of empty oranges, just hanging there, waiting to drop. We are living in a world that we can barely taste, because we are feasting on the rind (and boasting how much we love it). Consequently, day after day, we see Muslims peeling away, wandering into other plantations, and developing an appetite for free sex, addictive drugs, and other skin-deep delights that leave a bitter after-taste.
We have a Garden waiting for us. Will we recognize the fruit in it, or will we have lost the taste for that kind of spiritual reality? And will the Garden recognize us, or keep us planted well outside on account of our fruit, i.e., what we were doing all this time?
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