HAVE you ever been to a sushi bar? Different colourful sushi offerings go past you on a slowly moving belt. You decide to pick up one delicious-looking package, this is your choice. It tastes wonderful, that’s your fate. It may have tasted awful, that would still be your fate. You had the choice to pick up any of the dozen or so plates moving about you.

Your selection could have been influenced on a recommendation from a friend, or from your last experience in the same sushi bar, or just a random pick. Still, you had the choice of picking up whichever one you wanted. The result, however, is your fate. If you think of it, going to the sushi place was also your choice in the first place, you could have gone to some other restaurant. Whatever happened, in the sushi bar and onwards, was your fate from the choice you made about coming there, and from the choices you made further onwards.

Why is this important? It gives you a powerful motive to always make choices with rationality. If you choose to believe that everything is written in fate, you can very easily excuse yourself for making bad choices; how many times have we heard ourselves say, ‘what could have I done? This was my fate!’ Well, did you have another choice? Did you make the right choice? In most situations in life, we have a choice to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, A or B or C. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we had absolutely no other choice. This is what our intuition or our perception of reality and eventuality is telling us. We probably had another choice, but it did not seem to be our natural or preferred choice.

When the Lord asked Ibrahim to sacrifice Ismail, Ibrahim could have defied Him; what choice did he have? Sacrifice his own son? Well, he did not go with the obvious choice. What happened afterwards? His son was saved and his example became eternal. Ibrahim had a choice, the Lord wrote his fate. His act is repeated every year by every Muslim who can afford an animal to be sacrificed. The Lord will judge you on the choices you make, and then you submit yourself to the result of these choices which He has authored. That is your fate.

The Lord will judge us on the choices we make.

Once you submit yourself to His omnipotence, you submit to this idea that the Lord has complete control over His subjects. If He wanted, He could have made us robots. There could be a fixed and final script, that would be our programming file, and there we’d go executing it to the finest detail. He could have destined one robot to utter failure, another to complete dominance, yet another to fame, another to famine; He is the Lord after all. But would it be fair then to judge us and reward and punish us based on this fixed script? If He is the Ultimate, why would He want to be unfair to us? Do you think He would write the game, write the script, consume you into acting out that script, and then judge you on that script and its execution? What’s the point then?

What if it was like this; He designed a game, He designed you, and then He made a matrix. You have choices over most things. You can’t choose where you are born, to whom, what race, what gender, what would happen to you until you are conscious enough to take your decisions. But hey, there is no accountability for all these phases of life as well. This is just the background of your act in the game. Now you are a person no matter at what stage of your life and now you can make choices and the scoring starts. You have a choice to eat A or B or C, to go to school via route A or B or C, to wake up at 7am or keep sleeping until 10am, small tiny matters, but all your choices. However, if you wake up at 7am, you have a different scenario facing you; you wake up at 10am, the setting changes. You control your choice; you don’t control what’s the result of your choice.

All that happens to us is not a matter of choice of course. Events keep happening around us which are none of our doing; someone close to us falls ill; some accidents happen to which we are directly exposed. What are these? These are all challenging levels of the game itself; tests of character and conviction you might say. Just like once you slay a dragon in a game, another one comes out from behind the wall. Do you want to coast to the finish line without killing all the dragons? What would be your score? How will you be rated compared to other players of the game? These dragons are not your choices. But how you deal with them is your choice; and on that you will be judged.

If we keep doing what we are doing automatically, things will run as they ran in the original version. Our choices will match their fixed fate, which will result in our destiny. However, if we chose to invoke the Lord, He has the power to change anything and everything as He wishes to. We could be headed to a failure due to our choice, but if we invoke Him, and if it is His wish, we may end up with sublime success. The choice is ours, the wish is His. And Allah knows best!

The writer is a freelance contributor.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2022