Adam - the first Human or first Homo Sapien?

As a Muslim my belief in the Quran is unshakeable, which is perhaps natural since each religion holds its holy book in complete reverence. That is what belief in religion is all about, you cannot be part of a religion and not believe in what constitutes its foundation. Biblical scholars have for years used archaeology as a means of discovering and proving the events narrated in the Bible. However as most Biblical scholars agree, since the Bible was compiled over several years and most of the chapters were written centuries after they were revealed there have been problems with the accuracy of dates and geographic locations. It is sad that Muslims have not devoted such a scientific pursuit of a book that they know has not changed a bit since the day it was revealed. Most of our study of the Quran has been more to do with jurisprudence and practices. We have completely ignored the fact that it is a book of history as well as science.

If there has been one question that has dogged most scholars and created the biggest rift between science and religion, it is the question of who was Adam and when did he live? If science says that humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years till we got to our present stage and the early humans were little more than animals, then how do we explain the fact that Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions say that Adam and Eve were the first humans on this planet and that Adam was the first Prophet? Based on our understanding of what a Prophet means we know that these are people who are guided by God to bring their people on the right path and that they posses knowledge which is unknown to the others. But science tells us that this level of consciousness was perhaps beyond the first man and woman. We know that science is accurate and we also believe that religion is true, but 2 truths cannot be opposite to each other. One would be the truth and the other false – at least that’s what conventional wisdom and logic dictates. Or is it??

We seem to treat the Wisdom of God very superficially. If the Quran is a book valid till eternity then it is logical to deduce that there will be layers of meanings which will be understood by generations of human beings as their knowledge expands. This simply means that it is impossible to think that people who lived a 1000 years ago would have read the Quran and were able to appreciate its historic and scientific aspects the same way that we do or that our future generations will. Perhaps we need to examine things from a different perspective. I recently came across the National Geographic’s Genographic project on the web https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/atlas.html . It shows the migration of humans across the globe over thousands of years. At the 60,000 years ago mark there was a little dot that said “Adam” and the explanation was fascinating.

It said “ Adam is the common male ancestor of every living man. He lived in Africa some 60,000 years ago which means that all humans lived in Africa until at least that time. Unlike his Biblical namesake he was not the only man alive in his era. Rather, he is unique because his descendants are the only ones to survive to the present day. It is important to note that Adam does not represent the first human. He is the coalescence point of all genetic diversity found in the world’s disparate peoples. Adam had human ancestors as well but we have no genetic evidence of them. The changes to the Y chromosome that we follow back through the generations to identify Adam end in the commonality of that shared ancestor”.

I found this information fascinating. Perhaps Adam was the first man not because he was the first homo sapien on this planet, but because he was the first human with the consciousness which we have come to accept as the hallmark of our species. Early homo sapiens by no means seem deserving of the title of ‘Ashraf ul Makhluqat’ or Supreme Creation, but perhaps Adam was the first human who was sent down to earth with this aspect of his character and who would then continue to pass it down to all humans and which is why God destroyed all genetic evidence of other humans of that era.

Quran does not really give any specific dates to various events recorded in its pages, perhaps because the time frames were too large for people of that day to comprehend or perhaps because it is meant to spur us on a voyage of discovery. My wish is that one day Muslims would again actively take on science and history as active pursuits like the earlier followers of Islam and some solid research is conducted free of dogmas, until then people like me will continue to put forward theories which are in part fact in part conjecture.

Intolerance - the seed of a carnivorous monster!

Tolerance – a simple word and yet its attainment has become as elusive as the mythical fountain of youth. For a species that owes its existence theologically to the first 2 humans Adam and Eve and scientifically to the first Homo Sapiens that emerged out of Africa the amount of hate we show our own is astonishing. No animal kills its own species unless their lives or territories are threatened. Even then their fights are more a display of strength meant to scare rather than annihilate the other party. But humans are different.

We kill sometimes for the pure pleasure of watching others suffer, sometimes we kill the innocent whom we don’t even know in order to strike fear in the hearts of our enemies, at other times we kill simply to make our point of view heard or accepted. The funny thing is that we also have justifications to make ourselves feel better about these acts of violence. Even the psychopathic serial killer will have some kind of justification for his behaviour – granted that the justification is warped and sick, but in his mind he is right. The rational for most of the other crimes are labeled as honour, self-preservation, justice, liberation, rebellion against oppression etc. But I feel at the heart of all these rationales is one root cause – intolerance.

As humans we have developed this great urge to be photocopiers, we only want people who are like us to be around us. Those who have wealth cannot tolerate the poor and similarly vice versa. Those who are corrupt cannot tolerate those who are on the straight and narrow. People in power cannot tolerate the helpless and the helpless cannot tolerate the powerful. Followers of one religion cannot tolerate the other religions and people from one geographic area cannot tolerate the rest of the world. And the worst part is that after all this intolerance towards everyone else at times we cannot even tolerate ourselves. Our sub-conscious tells us that there is something not right within us and our life is not as it should be and that is where our internal intolerance manifests itself as depression and even aggression. But being humans we readily find another external source for our intolerance and put all our energies into resisting that reason.

I am no fool and I am certainly not in search of Utopia. I know that as long as we inhabit the planet violence will be a part of our civilization. It started with Kane and Abel and will continue to the end of the world. Tribes, kingdoms, countries and civilizations have always gone to war and will keep doing so. But there is one big difference between the past and present – in the past wars were fought by soldiers defending their people’s right to live. Today we kill because we feel the others do not have a right to live.

We have got to come to terms with the fact that the beauty of this world lies in its diversity, if we do not agree with someone's philosophy it does not give us the right to decide that they should be terminated. We tend to cover up our most heinous crimes under the guise of morality and ethics, because then we convince ourselves that we were right. The next time you catch yourself or someone else implying that certain people or even entire communities are in some way lesser than us in terms of morals and ethics be scared, be very very scared because this is the seed that grows into a full fledged carnivorous monster in no time at all.

Vote For - None Of The Above

Years ago I saw a movie - I'm not sure but I think it was Brewsters Millions. In the movie the lead character starts a campaign 'Vote For None Of The Above' which was meant to be a nonsensical way of wasting money which became a full fledged movement. Although it just seemed very funny at that time, I'm now beginning to think if there was some wisdom in it after all.

I know most of us keep talking of democracy and how we need to give it time to strengthen etc etc. But come election time and what do we do? Do we really select the best candidate for the job of representing us? Or is our choice based on opting for the lesser of the evils being offered to us? During elections we make huge ethical compromises which have massive consequences. Often we elect people who are incompetent, corrupt and thoroughly devoid of all morals just because they represent the political party which we support, and at other times we select candidates who seem a bit more benign, a bit more competent than their opponents. Sometimes we make up our minds based on who we were against in the last term or even on the basis that we haven't tried a particular candidate or party before so why not give them a chance? We choose our hairdressers with more caution than this!

Perhaps, at least for a while in our country the concept of "Vote For None Of The Above" isn't such a crazy idea after all. Think about it - if we don't vote it doesn't really make any difference to the outcome, it simply decreases the volume of total votes and even worse somebody else votes on our behalf without our even being aware of it. But if there was a space for "None Of The Above" then we could cast our votes and show our choice of rejecting the candidates on offer. If the majority votes are cast for "None Of The Above" new elections with fresh candidates must take place in that constituency.

Now I know most of you are saying 'how impratical' or even 'how can we afford to waste so much money?' Well our so called 'practical' approach hasn't worked so far so why not be a bit crazy? As for the expense, frankly I would rather that I was wasting my own tax money myself than the politicians and bureaucracy - at least I will get an immense amount of satisfaction and empowerment from it! By-the-way folks for those who take everything they read seriously and consider it their civic duty to convert people who have insane ideas - chill! This is not meant as a way of starting a movement, just my frustration manifesting itself as craziness and in this very sane world blogs are perhaps the last frontier of insane ideas.

And The Winner Of The Blame Game Is ....

Lately I seem to be getting more and more angry. My anger is not directed towards any person in particular, it is not directed towards the ‘West’ as seems to be the popular past time these, days nor is it directed at our Pakistani government – the last one just makes me laugh hysterically in despair, not anger. I am angry at the rampant hypocrisy running wild amongst our nation.


We are a nation that starts to wave the banner of Islam at the slightest, most trivial issue, which claims that it is founded on the ideology of Islam and which is so very concerned with the rituals of the religion that they are willing to take up arms on the mere differences in which these rituals are practiced. Yet the very reason any religion needs to be followed i.e. love, tolerance, equality, joy and salvation are completely ignored. Religion is supposed to give us courage to face our challenges and yet we seem to have become a nation who finds great solace in blinding ourselves to our problems. Religion is supposed to make you accountable for your own actions so that you correct and repent whenever you stray from the right path, yet we hold everyone responsible for everything that goes wrong – except ourselves.

Avoidance of responsibility is our best defense against everything. In our individual capacity we blame the society, our bosses, our colleagues, our relatives, our social structure, our destiny etc for everything that goes wrong in our lives. As a nation we blame our government (it doesn’t really matter who is in power, we’ve been doing this for decades) anti-Islamic forces, vested interests, global economy and global politics for everything that goes wrong in the country. Never once have I come across anyone who says ‘my life sucks because of my own choices’ or ‘the only person who I can blame for my failure is me’.

This avoidance of responsibility is taught to us at a very early age by over protective parents. Children especially teenagers are hardly ever given the chance to make their own decisions hence they are never taught to understand the concept of being responsible of the consequences. Since we have never been given the confidence to make our own choices and stick by them, as we grow older and more mature we panic when faced with any major decisions in life. We tend to seek advice of anyone and everyone we can get hold of, not because we want to improve the quality of our decision, but so that in case anything goes wrong we can turn to all these people and say ‘I asked you and you told me to do this’ – basically we line up people upon whom we can shift the blame.

As a nation we bring this characteristic into our politics as well as economy. The capacity of every Pakistani to find, discuss, and analyze convoluted conspiracies in the most mundane incident is amazing, we put the best mystery writers to shame – Dan Brown spend 1 month with us and you will go away with material for your next 6 books! But not once do we hold ourselves accountable for our shortcomings. If the whole world seems to be gunning for us and if the West seems to be running our country by proxy, then who is to blame? Eleanor Roosevelt once said “Nobody can make you inferior without your own permission”. No power can destroy our nation unless we give them permission. But spouting rhetoric and spewing out clichés is not going to change anything. When every individual finds the moral courage to make his/her own choices and stand by the consequences of those decisions without blaming others, that’s the day we will become invincible.

Science and Religion

They say Islam is the “Deen e Fitrat” i.e. the Religion of Nature. The question is which nature? It is not the nature of humans that is referred to here, it is the Nature of the Universe, and the Nature of the Universe is governed by laws or principles. The study of these principles is the domain of science. Hence Islam and science go hand in hand. To understand Islam at a deeper level beyond the rituals of religion one must study science. In fact its not only Islam, but every major religion in the world is an attempt to explain the correlation between humans and the Laws of Nature. As humans we have an innate curiosity to make sense of our own creation and our place in this Universe. The earliest man gazed at the night stars and discovered constellations, modern humans spend an immense amount of time and money on peering deeper into the outer realms of the Universe to find out how exactly were we created and what will happen to us eventually. Ancient religions explained the laws of nature through metaphors which humans at that point of time could understand. As time progressed the latter religions especially Islam which is the last of the great monotheistic religions, the allegories became more evolved, the messages more direct since humans were reaching a point where such complex information could be understood and even validated. For example the description of the arrival of Doomsday changes dramatically from the Bible to the Quran. Where one mentions the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse Quran describes the events more directly and the description seems to match what scientists now say will happen in the event of a meteoric impact.

Let's now take the example of the most basic and fundamental concept of all religions i.e. Good and Evil. According to the Big Bang theory, Astronomers and Physicists tell us that within the first few fractions of a second, particles entered the Higgs Field and acquired mass. The first atoms of matter appeared, and with them appeared anti matter. Good and Evil both appeared at the start of the Universe. When matter and anti matter collide they annihilate each other, but not all particles collide hence the world we see to day. There is an asymmetry between matter and anti matter.

Which means that Good and Evil is not a human concept it is a principle of nature, and hence it is also part and parcel of human nature. The asymmetry of good and evil exists in humans just as it does in the Universe. Good will prevail at least until the time that the laws of the Universe change and when and if they do the Universe itself will be annihilated.

My Legacy - who I am and why I am this way Part 1

A legacy is a heavy burden to carry. And when that legacy has more questions than answers it obsesses you and colours every aspect of your life. You tend to find connections in your present to the past events obscured in history. It propels you on a path that is completely different from your peers and perhaps even alienates you to what is happening around you.

I was born with one such legacy. A mystery which has consumed me since I was 5 years old. At the age when children are told fairy tales, I was being told about my grandfather. When children start to dream about what glories their future will hold, I was thinking about how I would be able to fit in the missing jigsaw puzzles of my grandfather’s life. It is no wonder that I grew up with an avid interest in history. Later on as life unfolded I was able to piece together some aspects of this story and I started wondering how events which happened over a hundred years ago are still shaping the present.

Those who know me well are aware of my almost fanatic adherence to my privacy, so they may wonder why suddenly I have decided to share this story. There are 2 reasons for divulging this story and putting it on the Net. One, because I am hoping that by chance someone would stumble on this who can provide me help in filling the gaps and secondly, because I don't want this story to die with me (don't worry folks I intend to hang around for a long time) but I am really the last of the bloodline of this part of the family and perhaps the only person who knows these bizarre aspects of my grandfather's life, sharing this story is my way of preserving his memory.

The starting point of this story is my mother’s father Ibrahim Bey. My mother was just 11 at the time of Indian partition when he left her in Lahore and went back to Ahmedabad to wind up everything. He was shot on his way back and my mother never saw him again. Even during his life he spent long spells of time away from home so the events of his life are very sketchy. It seems that he had migrated from Turkmenistan at the age of 5 along with his father Ismail Bey to Afghanistan where his father passed away and he was raised at the Afghan royal court. In his teen years he left Afghanistan and came to Lahore where he married my grandmother who was the daughter of one of the Afghan courtiers. He later set up permanent residence in Ahmedabad where he owned a workshop called Russian Autos. My mother tells me that he displayed the sickle and scythe emblem of Russia on the wall of his workshop which it seems had to be covered up during World War II. All employees including himself were issued 2 uniforms and he would be one of the first people to cover up the frays and tears with patches.

On the surface the story up to this point seems pretty normal but these were just some aspects of his public life. His private life was a different matter altogether. It seems that when he married my grandmother they honeymooned in Kashmir and he drove her there in a car. When my grandmother enquired where he had acquired this car from he simply said that it belonged to his boss (at that time Russian Autos was not established) They stayed there for over a month and my grandmother always wondered which boss in the world would lend his car to an employee for over a month? Remember this was the early 1930's cars were not something common people owned. He disappeared for months and upon his return merely said he was with his boss. My grandmother never found out who he worked for or who this mysterious boss was. These long periods of absence along with his reluctance to share the details of his work eventually ended up in the couple’s alienation and finally divorce.

My mother remembers that he had a huge wall safe and at times it was stacked with money and there were other times when it was completely empty, no one knew where the money came from or where it was spent. She was very close to her father and she recalls that her father had a contraption which he kept hidden and at times late at night she saw him fiddling with it under a blanket covering his head and the machine, she later understood that it was a wireless transmitter and receiver. So what on earth was he doing with a wireless? He was an extremely well dressed man and followed very strict etiquettes especially at meal times. It was also known that he provided safe passage and refuge to Muslims from Central Asia but the British suspected him of being a Russian spy. Some claimed that he was working for the Turkish liberation movement, a fact which years later was acknowledged by Ismet Inonu himself in a letter addressed to my mother. So was my grandfather a double agent? Or was there more to his story? Who was he? What did he do? These questions plagued me as I was growing up. I felt that I had to know the answers. I saw my mother reminiscing about the past and saddened that she would never be able to know the truth. Her grief was compounded by the fact that he had left a diary for her with his friend but since this was the time of Indo-Pak partition, and she was in Lahore while her father's friend was in India she never saw him again nor did she get her father's diary.Her distress caused me to become even more committed to unraveling this mystery, even if it was merely to give her peace.

By chance my father befriended an Uighur gentleman called Mr.Sabri. He was in exile and apparently dodging the Chinese government. It was he who had urged my mother to write to Ismet Inonu and it was he who gave me my first clue as to my grandfather’s ancestry. One day he gave me a book in which there was an old black and white picture and told me that this was my great great grandfather. I was just 9 years old at that time and didn’t have the sense nor the capacity to take the matter further. The book disappeared for years and recently resurfaced among old papers and letters. I started researching the person in the old photograph - he was Yakub Bey Amir of Kashghar. As I looked at the events of his life I started seeing parallels in my own. As I studied his fall and death some of my grandfather's bizzare actions started making sense.

For those who are interested I will be sharing the results of my findings in the next part of this article.

From Promethues to Adam and Eve - the story of human evolution

Fire has played a crucial role in not only the development of our civilization but our evolution as a species as well. It was the consumption of cooked food that allowed humans to digest foods which were impossible to do so otherwise which in turn allowed our bodies to absorb a multitude of much more complex nutrients. Some say that it was these nutrients which led to the evolution of the human brain in its present form. The brain which made us the dominant species of this planet – the rulers of Earth.

According to Greek mythology Prometheus and Epimetheus were two Titan brothers. Prometheus (whose name means foresight) convinced his brother Epimetheus (meaning hindsight) to side with the Olympian gods in their war against the Titans and thus became a few of those rare Titans who found favour with the gods. Prometheus tricked the gods during an arbitration between them and the mortals. Zeus saw through this deception and was enraged and as a result he decided to withhold the gift of fire from mankind. Prometheus managed to steal the fire from the gods and gave it to mankind which of course made Zeus even more angry.


Prometheus being someone who had foresight warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gift from the gods since he knew that the gods would not let the stealing of fire go unpunished. However Epimetheus being hindsight personified never learnt anything until after he had suffered the consequences, hence he accepted happily Pandora - the first mortal woman. Pandora was accompanied by a box which contained gifts from the gods. Curious to know what the box contained she opened it and released vice, passion, labour, old age, sickness and other innumerable evils which would forever cause misery to the mortals.


Although there are slight differences in the story of Adam and Eve in the Judaic, Christian and Islamic tradition, especially as Islam rejects the concept of the original sin, by and large the facts of the story are the same. Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge (the forbidden tree according to Islam) which caused them shame and subsequent expulsion from Eden and the sufferings of mortal life on Earth.


What I find fascinating is how the Greek mythology and the monotheistic religions both seem to be pointing at the same thing albeit from completely opposing directions. The very thing that makes us human i.e our capacity to think is what causes us so much misery and pain. Animals operate on instinct and although we do find emotions present in animals, it is only the human race who feels guilt, lust, anger, emotional pain, depression etc. All these emotions are a result of our ability to process thoughts, in other words result of the advanced human mind.


As I mentioned earlier the role of fire in the evolution of the human mind has been critical, hence the result of the stealing of fire by Prometheus did perhaps open a Pandora’s box in a way. In the monotheistic traditions, even though there is no mention of fire, but again it was the result of eating the forbidden fruit which led to all present day human woes. Perhaps in these traditions we are not talking about the cause i.e. fire but the effect which was the development of the human mind as a result of the food we started eating. Or perhaps the very act of defiance was the first step in being human i.e. Adam and Eve took a decision, a very human characteristic.


In any case it seems that human beings realized early on that the very thing that makes us God’s ‘supreme creation’ is also what makes us most vulnerable to pain. The more we quest knowledge the more we realize how little we know, the more we have the more we want, the more pain we are in the more we crave to be happy, the gap between what we have and what we want seems to be never ending and ever widening and it is this gap which is at the source of our unhappiness.