The God Question

On a quiet afternoon in Kashmir, a teacher contemplates a student's question about God. Not in argument, but in the silent eloquence of the mountains.

- Dr. Javid Ahmad Mallah

The air on campus carried the scent of pine and earth, sharpened by late autumn. From where I stood, the buildings of the Islamic University of Science and Technology rose with clean lines, deliberate and modest.

Behind them, the mountains stood ancient and aloof: tall, weathered, and disinterested in human architecture. I had thirty minutes before my next lecture, enough time to let a question settle in my chest: How do we find God?

A student had asked it that morning. “How do we know God exists?” she said, quietly but without hesitation. Not a rhetorical challenge. More like a hand reaching. I offered her what I had: names—Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Avicenna—and their arguments, arranged like chess moves. But she wasn’t asking for logic. She was asking for something deeper. Maybe I was, too.

I looked again at the buildings around me. Everything in them—bricks, beams, proportions—was the result of thought. They reflected a design, a mind, a will. But then I looked at the mountains and saw something else: not design in the human sense, but intention. Their shapes weren’t calculated, but they weren’t accidental either. They belonged to something larger, older. And standing before them, I couldn’t help but feel they were telling me something.