Ibrahim, or Abraham, is considered the patriarch of the three major monotheistic religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. When Abraham was a young man, he was told by Allah to leave his profession, to leave his home, his country and to go out into a new land. He was promised that he would be the father of a great nation whose people numbered more than the stars in the sky.
But he was told to leave everything he knew, and for this prophecy to occur, he would have to leave everything that he knew and for the new nation to be born, it required a cutting of all of the ties to everything that he had or knew in his existant life. There had to be a new start, there had to be a new beginning, there had to be a new way, there had to be a new road, there had to be a different way… a way that was no longer connected to the past.
Abraham did it. He took up and he left. He left his family. He left his home. He left his country. He left everything that was familiar to him to start again.
The stories of the prophets, the stories of the wise men, the stories of the walis, the friends of Allah. Why do we repeat them? There are many reasons, but one of the reasons is in order to learn more about the nature of our own existence, in order to learn more about who we are and what we should be doing in our life.
All of us are born into families. All of us are born into cultural situations. All of us are born into certain languages. All of us are born into a context. This context, wherever it is, has a lot of people living in it and seemingly flourishing in it in one way or another, and maintaining a lifestyle in it. If you have been around the world a bit, you will note quickly that there are many different cultures than your own, many different ways to exist other than the one we know, the one we are used to, the one we are brought up in.
Abraham, of course, lived in a culture that was flourishing, His family grew up in it. Everybody he knew grew up in it. But, he was told to leave.
Likewise for us, to actually go on the path of truth, on the straight path, on the path of understanding reality, we have to leave everything we know. We have to start over. We have to create a new nation in ourself. There has to be a rebirth of something other than that which came from the old country. So, there is the old us and the new us, unless we refuse to abandon the old us.
