

On my drive home I was minding my own business, sitting next to the window. Then the bright sunny day was blocked out and I looked outside. Smoke.

Smoke blocked the horizon. Thick, dense and opaque as it shot out of the exhaust of an old truck. As the seconds went by, the smoke trailed behind and started to spread, and one could finallay see through it. The carbon monoxide dispersed more and more; it gradually vanished into the air, and one could not distinguish it from the rest of the atmosphere.

Evil, when it is newly bred and foreign to a society, is sharp and distinct from the rest. It is noticed by all, and they dislike it. They wish it would stop, but few if any at all, take action against its spreading.

Soon, it has reared its ugly head everywhere you look — in fact, it’s so far spread that you cannot distinguish it from justice and truth, and they all look the same.

Truly, in the spreading of ugly, black thick smoke is a metaphor of how evil spreads everywhere, and makes itself indistinguishable from the good.

As salamu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakaatuh.