The COVID-19 pandemic has touched over seven hundred million people worldwide by now, and more than six million have died around the world. Various mutations of the virus will continue to pose threat to global health and prosperity. Another calamity that has long been in the making by the industrial world and large industries is the amount of CO2 that has been dumped into our atmosphere and global warming is finally here.
We have begun to see how our own neglect can damage our own future as it affects the health of the planet and its inhabitants, both plants and animals. A third calamity is the relentless and growing income inequality in our societies across the globe, where even in the USA, the richest country in the world, sixty percent of the households who are mostly blue collar workers have no savings to speak of and as much as twenty percent live in constant poverty. Around the globe religious persecution is on the rise, especially against Muslim minorities and other ethnic minorities along with the rise in widespread corruption in our political and economic systems. Last but not the least is the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which will accelerate human learning but also will seriously impact how we live -for good or bad, depending on our own conscious choices, either driven by commercial greed and denial of God but by a sense of reverence to God and respect for the natural world and purpose-driven existence before we meet God.
It is useful to be reminded of God’s promise in the Qur’an: “If the people in their towns had believed and acted responsibly, God would certainly have opened the blessings of the heavens and the earth for them. But they denied and neglected, so we took accounts of what they have earned (by their conducts)” (7:96). Then there is also the warning of our current conditions as stated in the Qur’an – “Corruption has spread across land and sea, because of what humankind has done with its own hands and God will make them suffer the consequences of what they have done – perhaps they will amend their ways!” (30:41)
