As our lives hurtle along apace, we wonder what will become of us tomorrow and what can be said of our store of good deeds. As Muslims we are taught that when we are gathered back together on that Revered Day we shall protest that we lived our life for but a day. It will be as if time had not dragged on at all. Pondering the swift passage of time, a dear friend proposed that we should understand the saying of our Blessed Prophet that time will decrease as the Hour approaches as meaning that the value of time will decrease. Our days, the solicitor noted, have been chopped into the smallest of units and the more an item of value is chopped into smaller articles, its value reduces correspondingly. Thus we are troubled by a minute's delay, whilst our predecessors were happy to journey for a day, noting that the angels travel down to earth in a day the like of which is a thousand years. I believe there is truth in his view, but none of it weakens the approach of the Hour.

As I look back on the speed with which the past five years have passed me by there is a sense of regret. Time is all we have; as said another friend, time is the most breathtaking of our Lord's creation. It is both unfathomable and true; He can stop it at will and extend it without limit. Indeed, He promises that our days in this fleeting abode will seem like nought compared to the days of the hereafter. As another week passes us by it is only natural that we ask what we have done to draw closer to our Lord. Conversely, what has distracted us and led us away? Are we on call to every whim of the breaking news? Are we reactionaries, darting in one direction and then another, led by every plot and plan? Believing that we are doing good we jeopardise our obligations in our race to respond to every provocation placed before us.

We have no idea what will become of us tomorrow as time hurtles along apace; taking stock of our store of deeds, we recognise that time is too precious. When we are gathered back together on the Day of Judgement we will complain that we tarried for just a few hours, but our complaints will have no impact. On that Day, all truth will be known.

Some months ago, a national newspaper carried a story about the tendency that exists amongst the ordinary man to believe in conspiracy theories. From the assassination of political leaders to the premature death of a famous person and from technological achievements to acts of war, the official story always seems to be accompanied by numerous counter explanations. There exists in mankind a yearning for the truth and yet we recognise that our appreciation of reality can only ever be partial.

When in the afternoon of 11 September 2001 our production manager at work informed us that somebody had flown a plane into one of the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, my initial foreboding thought was that Muslims were involved. I was not aware of the scale at that stage: in my mind I had the picture of a tiny single-prop Cessna and the memory of the 1993 plot to explode a bomb underneath the towers. When I returned home that evening and saw the images on the television news, that initial reaction changed. Overtaken by emotion, I was almost physically sick, the repeating images burning onto my eyes, and I could no longer accept that initial conclusion of mine. This was not the action of a single mad man, incinerating himself as his plane disintegrated as it crashed through the windows; here was a calculated, co-ordinated act of extreme brutality in which two commercial jets had been flown with absolute precision to their destination, massacring a civilian population. As one who had looked into the concept of war in Islamic Law, which prohibits any action that would cause harm to non-combatants--even to the extent that Muslim soldiers may not chop down fruit trees--I could not accept that Muslims were responsible.

Thus when an ordinarily sensible friend sent me a link to an article on the Internet that disputed the official story, I--like many other otherwise intelligent individuals--found myself clinging to alternative theories and the many questions that remained unanswered. It did not help that the media had been reporting dubious stories about the terrorist mastermind's passport being found in the rubble of the World Trade Centre, not to mention a "Smoking Gun" video that feature a fat Bin Laden. For a couple of months I was scouring the internet for "the truth", looking for evidence that "we'd been set up". Much of the speculation was clearly detritus originating with right-wing Christians, Milleniumist, Messianists, Supremacists and others united on pro-gun, anti-federal government, anti-UN and anti-Semitic politics, often with strong views about a move towards one-world-government and a new-world-order: whackos in common parlance. Still, the doubts remained and all of us wanted to prove that Muslims had no part in that horrific act.

In time I came across the declassified document concerning Operation Northwoods which had been published on the National Security Archive's website in 1998 and was featured in a CNN documentary on the Cold War in the same year. This 1962 document presented various outline plans of action that could be used to garner public and international support for US military intervention in Cuba. The suggestions included staging sabotages and sinking an American ship at the US Military Base at Guantanamo Bay and blaming it on Cuban forces, hijacking civilian planes, sinking boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba and setting up terrorist attacks in Washington and Miami, and blaming them on the Communists. Unlike the wild speculation of the internet?s gathering of eccentrics, most of whom had their own quite unpleasant agendas, here was a genuine declassified document which could be viewed independently of the united anti-something extremists. However unlikely it was that the actions of 2001 were part of some grand conspiracy on the part of the United States government, this document was evidence that a precedent of past intent existed. Somewhat naively I wrote to Jon Snow at Channel 4 News, pointing him towards the National Security Archive located at The George Washington University. He wrote back to tell me that he would look into it. A week later he went off to New York to see the devastating carnage first hand where he would have concluded--as I did later--that Northwoods was just a long forgotten historical document. Soon afterwards Channel 4 broadcasted a documentary debunking the conspiracy theories associated with that fateful day.

Over the years since then I have received my fair share of emails exploring one alleged conspiracy or other. Obsessed with isnad however, I am the kind of person who feels compelled to trace emails back to their source--claims about computer viruses that not even the best brains of Symantec, Norton and Microsoft put together can fix have taken their toll on me--and so most of my friends have learnt to leave this cynical character off their mailing lists. Occasionally I revert to thinking that things may not be as they seem, but I am generally no longer interested for we believe in the Day of Judgement when all truth will be told.

When the massacre occurred in London in July 2005, I managed to avoid the conspiracy theories for a whole week. Most of the Muslims I know had long been saying that it was only a matter of time before one of the extremists in our midst did something like this. Indeed, after the Madrid train bombings I found myself looking at my fellow passengers suspiciously on my way to and from work. When the explosions occurred that July, I desperately hoped that it was the action of extreme Anarchists timed to coincide with the G8 Summit, but I somehow knew that this was unlikely. Working in the National Health Service, our organisation had been put on standby for an evacuation of injured people as London hospitals filled up. The initial estimates of number of dead were in the high hundreds, far outnumbering the eventual death toll, and all normal work ceased as we went into emergency response mode.
For the days that followed my anger was intense. Selfishly my initial thoughts were around how I would have felt had it been my wife who had been cut to pieces, for until a month earlier that shattered Edgware Road train took us to work every day. Selfishly too, my thoughts were about this spelling the end to Muslim life in Britain: at work uncomfortable comments were being made about Muslims all around me. A few days later, however, a link to the BBC's audio archive arrived in my inbox and I found myself listening to the famous interview in which crisis management expert Peter Powers explained that he had been running a walk-through of a simulated terrorist act which was premised on bombs going off simultaneously at the same stations that had been targeted in the actual attack, at exactly the same time that morning. It was not long before I was listening to the archive on the BBC website, catching his comments on Radio Five Live. Although we later learned that the walk-through was simply a paper-based exercise of little significance, I was soon saying to my friends, "things may not be as they seem", but they probably were. Thank goodness we believe in the Day of Judgement.

Perhaps conspiracy theories are convenient for us, helping us to avoid taking ourselves to account. Seeing a plot where there is none--almost to the point wherein the plotters are considered omnipotent--is considered preferable to putting our house in order. To be fair there are some quite valid reasons why many of us chase after alleged conspiracies from time to time and it is not always tired anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as is often alleged. Quite apart from the fact that Islam prohibits indiscriminate violence and forbids suicide, it is sadly true that we are all too familiar with the current state of the Muslim community. Al-Qaeda is seen as a ruthlessly efficient operation, but we know the state of our mosques, the disrepair of which provides clear evidence of a lack of organisational skills on the part of their members. A key characteristic of Al-Qaeda operations is said to be the use of synchronised bombing and yet we live in a community famed for its laxity around punctuality: it is so bad that lateness is the first non-sunnah a convert picks up when becoming Muslim. Sleeper cells are apparently able to launch operations on their own and yet we have difficulties taking the initiative to clean the dishes left in the corner from iftar a year ago. Of course I am being cynical--perhaps in ignorance--but these are genuinely the kinds of thoughts that cross our minds every time we hear of complex Muslim plots.

There have been occasions when I would have been happy to believe in some of the conspiracy theories knocking around on the Internet and in the cafes of Edgware Road. The one-world-government new-world-order theory that makes much of George H. W. Bush's speech on 11 September 1990 has its appeal: why get out of bed in the morning when we know that everything is being controlled by an all-powerful group of individuals. Unfortunately, despite its origin lies in fundamentalist Christian eschatology, today's Muslims are investing in this nationalist ideology to their detriment. With each act of barbarity that seems to be the work of Muslims some sort of need to explain it away arises. Seeking out conspiracy theories is the easy response, but real Muslims are people of truth. If we do not know where the truth lies, we rely on our Creator with whom stands all truth. On that awesome day which will last fifty-thousand years, all truth will be made apparent. There is wisdom in our Creator's great plan.

Today we can travel between different locations faster than ever before, whizzing along in our cars. Journeys that once took weeks, months, even years, can now be covered in hours. When I arose this morning I did not have to go out of my house to draw water for the day. In mid-winter I do not need to venture outdoors for fuel. At night there is no running around getting lamps lit. I arrive at work just after eight and leave again just after four. I have more time on my hands than the generations of the previous millennium and yet I complain that I do not have enough time to do everything that needs to be done. And so what will be my excuse before my Lord on that awesome Day when I will complain that I tarried on the earth for but a matter of hours, for that will be as it seemed on a day lasting fifty-thousand years? That the internet evaporated my evenings? That I was too busy to seek knowledge? My life is ease and I have no excuse. For followers of the two traditions, it is a reality that is drawing near.