Abdul Khaleque Khandker: Dear readers, I would like to vouch for the truth of a Hadith which is mentioned in the Sahih Muslim through relating an event. I would request you to read this story.
Many years ago, I was sitting at a handicraft shop inside a 5-star hotel in Dhaka when an Englishwoman entered the shop to buy some artefacts with two small girls with her. While the woman was having a look for the articles, her two girls were infatuated with their juvenile sports. One girl, throwing her shoe off saying to the other, “Please fetch me my shoe”! The other girl was bringing it to her saying, “Here’s your shoe, put on”.
I was observing their activities with undivided attention. Of the two girls, I saw one who resembled the British woman with the same skin complexion, same blue eyes and golden hair; whereas the other girl was looking medium complexion, normal eyes and black hair that usually resemble a Bengali mother, albeit both of them were speaking in excellent British English. I saw both the girls were attired with the same fashionable dresses apt for the English children.
That moment I remembered the Hadith, which Abu Huraira ® reported Allah’s Messenger (ï·º) as saying:
“No babe is born but upon Fitrat. It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Polytheist”. A person said: Allah’s Messenger, what is your opinion if they were to die before that (before reaching the age of adolescence when they can distinguish between right and wrong)? He said: It is Allah alone Who knows what they would be doing.
--Sahih Muslim
Out of curiosity, I enquired of the Englishwoman,
“Excuse me madam, may I ask you a question”?
“What about, please”? the woman replied with the raised brows.
I said, “Who’re these two girls”?
The Englishwoman promptly replied, “They’re my daughters. Why”?
I said, “Never mind. One girl resembles you; I mean your facsimile, but the other girl looks to be Bengali child”.
The lady wryly chuckled and said, “I took the girl for my own in her infancy from a slum-dwelling couples. Now she’s my daughter.”
I saw both the girls were fashionably attired and speaking in the same British accent.
That moment I remembered, Abu Huraira ® reported, Allah’s Messenger (ï·º) as saying:
“No babe is born but upon Fitrat. It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Polytheist”. A person said: Allah’s Messenger, what is your opinion if they were to die before that (before reaching the age of adolescence when they can distinguish between right and wrong)? He said: It is Allah alone Who knows what they would be doing.
I could also recall some lines of William Wordsworth’s poem “Ode to the Imitation of Immortality”. He said:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life`s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:”
The idea is that human child comes from heaven sinless. As he grows up, he forgets his home where he came from, and that is god from home he came on earth. Wordsworth also said, earth, like a foster mother makes a child oblivious of God and entice him committing blunder.
Here a phrase is mention worthy as saying by Napoleon Bonaparte:
“Give me an educated mother, and I will give you an educated nation”.
Therefore, merely by giving birth to the children, none can become father and mother in real sense. To be worthy parents, they must bring up the children as human being I mean, with proper knowledge so that they may find the path to get closer to the Creator, proper education and their sense of duty to other human beings and towards society they live in, and only then we will get a society sans sin, sans enmity, sans hatred and sans exploitation.