Dear Muhammad, I will Sketch You.
Dear Muhammad,
I will sketch you. It has been pointed out how absurd it is to attempt to create a sketch of your Holiness. Many a time, to sketch your sacrosanct self has been construed as intentional blasphemy. My complaint is not whether it should be blasphemous or not, it is whether or not do the culprits deserve to die at the hands of fanatics who chant the slogans of the merciful whilst being merciless.
This letter to you is a consequence of my curiosity about what love is. You, my dear Prophet, have been addressed as a blessing for the whole of mankind. It is perhaps owing to your existence that life as a whole has never again been eradicated from the face of this world. Your mercy was upon Muslims and non-Muslims alike, no person was a stranger to your mercy, not on the grounds of ideological beliefs and/or religion.
I have not had the pleasure to see you. I have not had the pleasure of being in your company. I have not had the pleasure of asking you questions that arise in mind on a daily basis. I have not had a chance to stand behind you. I have not had the chance to witness your greatness — not in person. But I am a Muslim and my faith in you; in your might, in your mercy, greatness, and compassion, knows rarely any bounds.
If to idealize and follow is to fanatically defend, if to admire and adulate is to chant slogans in a state of indentured mental slavery, I refuse to follow. Not because you are not worth our indentured loyalty — no one but You are, but because this is not your idea of admiration. You had always encouraged the notion of asking, you had always bolstered compassion in our society, yours has been a nature of peace and harmony. Yours and my God knows there is not one notion that man can think of upon which I wouldn’t allege my undying loyalty, in its most absolute sense.
But Oh Muhammad SAW, as I sit in solitude, writing to you in a mood of consternation, I can not help but remark upon how love is synonymous with admiration, and to admire is to walk the footsteps of the role model. It is the ability to seek knowledge, question, and understand that has made my species superior to the rest. How could you ever discourage either, being the superior most amongst all species?
I will follow you, with every ounce of cognition and intellect I can find in myself. And in my following you, I will love you. By attempting to deal with the people with the same kindness as you did, by being forgiving toward those that wrong me, by practising the religion, and by being courteous and kind to fellow humans regardless of their race, gender, caste, religion, or beliefs. Most importantly, I might not be able to keep either of these promises, but I will attempt to do the said things, and somewhere between my attempting them persistently and failing continuously, I hope you will notice my benign existence.
I will disseminate your message of peace and I will lay out all the traits that define your personality; almost as if on a canvas. In these small attempts to preserve the essence of your message, I will etch you. And in my own ardent way, Dear Muhammad, I will sketch you.
