Farouk Sha, who says he has been an animal lover for years has come out as saying his own cat who he named Osama, after Osama Bin-Laden, was born with a faint marking that has become more defined as time went on. The markings, according to Sha, form the Arabic inscription “Allah” on its side along with a few other symbols which he says bear some level of religious significance.
Osama the cat was descended from his forebears, including “Twinkle” his grandmother. Twinkle, Sha recalls, would regularly sit by the radio as prayers came through and listen intently after one incident when she heard the Azaan, or call to prayer. Years passed with Twinkle listening to the Islamic prayer broadcasts over the radio and finally she beget another generation which would follow yet another. Years later, a kitten would be born that Sha would name “Osama.” When asked why he would name a kitten after Osama Bin-Laden, Sha said it was because Osama was merely a freedom fighter and not the mastermind terrorist everyone thought he was.
As Osama grew, the small markings on the cat’s back became more defined and even included a crescent moon and a star as well. “I didn’t want to tell people about the sign; I wanted them to see it on their own.,” said Sha to reporters, “Everybody who has come to my house and seen Osama has seen the sign.” Farouk Sha has big plans for his cat Osama, as well, hoping to take him on a road trip that will ultimately end in him touring the cat around on Islamic road shows. The money gained from these trips, he says, would be used to help injured and destitute animals without homes everywhere.
There is a very real question here, not just with this case, but with a number of cases. It seems to have a striking resemblance to the number of cases where the face of Jesus has appeared in toasted cheese sandwiches, or windows where the Virgin Mary would appear after a foggy day. It seems a strange way for divine entities to attempt communication with mortal man. Or is there some truth in this? After-all, faces don’t merely appear in toasted cheese sandwiches, but also in galaxies and nebulous clouds older than the history of Earth itself. To treat any one object or creature with these markings with reverence seems silly at times, but to understand that in chaos there is a spark of possibilities and one of those possibilities is divine imagery. Such a spark neither confirms nor denies the existence of any divine entity, nor does it attempt to explain the nature of understanding these entities. What it does do, is open up the possibilities and help us understand that there is more in our universe, even the physical one, than we could possibly understand. And any apparently random action can appear random to us, but depending on your beliefs, you can make it something more if you desire to. Is Osama the cat a sign of some divine revelation? To answer that you would have to either preclude any previous religious artifacts appearing to manifest imagery in religious sequence apparently randomly or accept them as well. And considering the vastly different backgrounds they come from, the topic becomes all the more confusing.