TYGER, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
- William Blake 1794
I was put in mind of this poem when over the weekend the sports world was left ‘reeling’ with the news that Tiger Woods will be quitting the game of golf indefinitely. This coupled with the ‘earth-shattering’ news that the most obsequious fan club imaginable ‘Tigerwoodsisgod.com’ is disbanding – distraught with the news of their idol’s fall from grace.
This time last month Woods seemingly had it all – the World Number 1 in golf, a billionaire who was the highest paid athlete in the world last year, married to a swimsuit model, multiple numbers of mansions each more beautiful than the last, exotic cars, a £14 million ocean-going yacht – the list could go on. Yet now his name is synonymous with ridicule and sleaze. His fall from grace could not be more dramatic or more sudden.
His story seems to personify all that is wrong with this modern secular society – the cult of celebrity. It seems that in their haste to abandon the worship of Allah, people have instead taken to worshipping those who they admire and who have all the riches and pleasures this world has to offer. They act as role models for the ambitious who lust after the taste and pleasure of success. Others slavishly follow every twist and turn of their chosen celebrity’s life, having fallen prey to that oft quote truism from GK Chesterton,-
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing— they believe in anything.
Idol worship is alive and well today – it’s just that the idols in question are not made of wood and stone – but remain as dumb as those that were worshipped in the time of Jahiliyyah.
This brings me back to Blake’s poem – ‘The Tyger’ published in 1794. Blake posed the question of how could a loving God create such a ferocious killing machine like the tiger and used the tiger as an analogy of the wider question of how could God allow evil in this world. This question is rather passé to the average Muslim who knows that when a tiger kills it is merely fulfilling its animal nature and the evil in this world suddenly makes sense when one frames it in the context of the Infinite Justice and Mercy that Allah will bestow on His creation on the Day of Judgement.
There is no doubt that Tiger Woods will spend some of his £110 million earnings and hire a PR consultant to rehabilitate his image and career with perhaps a few squeezed out tears at a press conference, a few carefully staged photographs of him with his children and wife, and in no time at all the public will be ready to anoint him again as their idol. If Woods were really clever though he would save his money and instead reflect on this hadith that would have also answered William Blake’s anxieties about the presence of evil in this world,-
