Game Changers

All those reminders share one thing in common – even in this digital age, I’ve hand-written them all.

Click here to listen

My game changer is the inventor of the pen. In 953, Ma’ād al-Mu’izz, the Caliph of Egypt, demanded a pen which wouldn’t stain his hands or clothes, and was given a pen which held ink in a reservoir and delivered it to the nib. As a teenager at school, I had one of those sloping wooden desks with an ink well I never used. For some lessons I had to write with a fountain pen with ink from cartridges which often leaked all over my clothes (As my kids love to remind me, this was the olden days). These days, I make a lot less mess writing down my thoughts with a pen in the form of a humble biro.  

The Book Muslims turn to for guidance and as a reminder, the Qur’an, talks about pens. One verse says, “And if all the trees upon the earth were pens and the sea was ink, replenished thereafter by seven more seas, the words of God would not be exhausted.”  The Qur’an is a little over 77,000 words. The Complete Works of Shakespeare is just over 10x that. And the UK tax code is 12 times that – 10 million words. I understand that verse in the Quran to mean there are so many signs to remind us of God’s knowledge, majesty and creation that no-one could ever write them all down.

My ideas of course are rather more humble and I write far less. Yet while I type things using technology all the time, its my pen which helps me make connections between random thoughts as well as remember the essentials. It’s probably about time I sift through all those scraps of paper to figure out which is which.

‍