KOPITALK JIWA
Reflections on Surah Al-Baqarah, Ayat 27
There was one Bahasa Melayu composition that almost every child of my generation remembers.
Cita-Cita Saya.
I was probably eight or nine years old, in Primary Three. We had only just begun learning how to write short karangan of around a hundred words. Yet our teacher was already asking a question that would take a lifetime to answer.
Apakah cita-cita kamu?
What did we want to become when we grew up?
The answers came easily for many of my classmates.
Saya mahu menjadi doktor.
Saya mahu menjadi guru.
Saya mahu menjadi jurutera.
I admired their certainty.
Mine was different.
It was not that I lacked ambition.
I simply did not know.
My greater challenge was making sure I wrote enough words. So I added another sentence. Then another. Sometimes I repeated the same idea in different ways. Sometimes the composition wandered. As long as I reached the required number of words, I felt I had completed the assignment.
Looking back today, I smile at that little boy.
How could he possibly know what he wanted to become?
He had barely begun to understand life.
The truth is, none of us knew.
We were trying to describe a future that only Allah already knew.
— — —
Life, however, has a gentle way of editing the compositions we confidently write as children.
Some who dreamed of becoming doctors became technicians. Some who wanted to teach found themselves running businesses. Others discovered professions that did not even exist when we were sitting in that classroom.
That was not failure.
That was life.
As we grow older, we slowly discover that life is not measured by how closely it follows our plans, but by how faithfully we respond when our plans change.
Perhaps that is why the Qur’an speaks to us in ways we only begin to appreciate with age.
Surah Al-Baqarah, Ayat 27 does not begin by talking about success or failure.
It begins by talking about something much deeper.
It speaks of people who break their covenant with Allah after accepting it, sever the ties that Allah has commanded to be maintained, and spread corruption upon the earth.
At first glance, the verse seems to describe other people.
The corrupt.
The unjust.
The wicked.
Yet tadabbur asks us to pause before pointing outward.
— — —
Could this verse also be inviting us to look inward?
Not every broken covenant begins with a dramatic act of rebellion.
Sometimes it begins with a neglected prayer. A promise quietly forgotten. A kindness postponed until tomorrow has no tomorrow.
Rarely do people lose their way overnight.
Like a boat drifting from its course, the movement is often so gradual that it goes unnoticed until the shoreline has disappeared.
— — —
Perhaps that is why Allah mentions three things together.
A broken relationship with Him.
Broken relationships with one another.
And finally, corruption upon the earth.
The order is not accidental.
When the heart loses its direction, relationships begin to fracture. When relationships fracture, societies eventually suffer.
The corruption we see around us often begins long before it reaches the streets.
It begins in hearts that slowly forget the promises they once made.
— — —
As children, we thought the important question was what we wanted to become.
We filled our compositions with ambition, with certainty borrowed from imagination, with futures we were far too young to understand.
Life edited those compositions quietly, over decades, in ways our Primary Three selves could never have anticipated.
Ayat 27 is not asking what we planned to become.
It is asking what we have allowed ourselves to drift into.
Not through one grand betrayal, but through the slow accumulation of small neglects — promises half-kept, covenants half-remembered, relationships tended less carefully than we intended.
The composition is never truly finished.
It is still being written.
And the Author already knows how it ends.
— KopiTalk Jiwa
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