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April 22 - May 10, 2022
"Strange is the case of a believer, there is good for him in everything—and this is only for the believer. If a blessing reaches him, he is grateful to God, which is good for him, and if an adversity reaches him, he is patient which is good for him." [Muslim]
Run towards the creation, you lose God and the creation. Run towards God, you gain God *and* the creation.
Allah is Al Wadud (The Source of Love). Therefore, love comes from God—not people. As one author, Charles F. Haanel, put it: "To acquire love… fill yourself up with it until you become a magnet."
Your response to what you are given is also inconstant and changing. So if you’re chasing a feeling, you’ll always be chasing. No feeling is ever constant. If love is dependent on this, it too becomes inconstant and changing. And just like everything in this world, the more you chase it, the more it will run away from you.
As humans, we don’t deal well with emptiness. Any empty space must be filled. Immediately. The pain of emptiness is too strong. It compels the victim to fill that place. A single moment with an empty spot causes excruciating pain. That’s why we run from distraction to distraction, and from attachment to attachment.
They fill something inside of us that we think we need…that we think we can’t live without. And so, even when we struggle to give them up, we often abandon the struggle because it’s too hard.
Why can’t we just let go of things? I think we struggle so much with letting go of what we love, because we haven’t found something we love more to replace it.
When a child falls in love with a toy car, he becomes consumed with that love. But what if he can’t have the car? What if he has to walk by the store every day, and see the toy he can’t have? Every time he walks by, he would feel pain. And he may even struggle not to steal it. Yet, what if the child looks past the store window and sees a Real car? What if he sees the Real Ferrari? Would he still struggle with his desire for the toy? Would he still have to fight the urge to steal it? Or would he be able to walk right past the toy—the disparity in greatness annihilating the struggle?
We understand fully that there is a lesser model (dunya: coming from the root word ‘daniya’, meaning ‘lower’) and there is the Real model (hereafter).
One of our greatest problems as an ummah is as the Prophet told us in a hadith: wahn (love of dunya and hatred of death). We’ve fallen in love with dunya. And anytime you are in love, it becomes next to impossible to get over that love or separate from it—until you are able to fall in love with something greater. It is next to impossible to dislodge this destructive love of dunya from our hearts, until we find something greater to replace it.
In his book, Eggerichs explains that extensive research has found that a man’s primary need is for respect, while a woman’s primary need is for love. He describes what he calls the "crazy cycle"—the pattern of argumentation that results when the wife does not show respect and the husband does not show love.
On the other hand, when addressing the wife, the focus is different. Why are women not told again and again to be kind and loving towards their husbands? Perhaps it is because unconditional love already comes naturally to women.
The Prophet has said: "When any woman prays her five, fasts her month, guards her body and obeys her husband, it is said to her: ‘Enter paradise from whichever of its doors you wish.’" [At-Tirmidhi]
We always ask God to cure us of our hardships but we never stop to consider that our hardships are curing us.
We seek help in the creation, including our own selves. We look for help in what seems closest. And isn’t that exactly what dunya (worldly life) is? What seems near. The word ‘dunya’ itself means ‘that which is lower’. Dunya is what seems closest. But, this is only an illusion.
How is it that sometimes we have more patience with the big challenges in life than we do with the everyday small ones?
A calamity of any type is not hard to bear because the calamity itself is difficult. The measure of ease or difficulty in hardship is on a different scale—an unseen scale. Whatever I face in life will be easy or difficult, not because it is easy or difficult. The ease or difficulty is based only on the level of Divine help.
Ibn Attaillah al-Sakandari said it beautifully: "Nothing is difficult if you seek it through your Lord, and nothing is easy if you seek it through yourself."
So the problem is not the trial itself. The problem is not the hunger or the cold. The problem is whether we have the provision needed when that hunger and cold come. And if we do, neither hunger nor cold will touch us.
In my childish idealism, I failed to understand that this world is inherently imperfect.
And we need to recognize that growth never comes without pain, and success is only a product of struggle.
This type of forgiveness is at the very heart of being a believer. In describing these believers, Allah says: "And who shun the more heinous sins and abominations; and who, whenever they are moved to anger, readily forgive." (Qur’an, 42:37)
See, to understand the statement "only good things happen to good people and only bad things happen to bad people", we must first define ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
When the lens itself is distorted, so too is the image seen through it.
For those of the second worldview, anything that brings us closer to our purpose of nearness to God’s love is good; and anything that takes us away from that purpose is bad. Therefore, winning a billion dollars may be the greatest calamity ever to happen to me if it takes me away from God—my
God only gives good (nearness to Him) to good people, and bad (distance from Him) to bad people. The greatest good is nearness to God, in this life and the next.
That is why the Prophet has said: "Strange is the case of a believer, there is good for him in everything—and this is only for the believer. If a blessing reaches him, he is grateful to God, which is good for him, and if an adversity reaches him, he is patient which is good for him." (Muslim)
When we miss a plane, lose a job, or find ourselves unable to marry the person we want, have we ever stopped to consider the possibility that it may have been for our own good? Allah tells us in the Qur’an: "…But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah Knows, while you know not." (Qur’an, 2:216)
When the Prophet was suffering from a high fever, he said: "No Muslim is afflicted with any harm, even if it were the prick of a thorn, but that Allah expiates his sins because of that, as a tree sheds its leaves." [Bukhari]
When Prophet Musa (as) was traveling with Al-Khidr (who commentators say was an angel in the form of a man), he learned that things are often not what they seem, and that the wisdom of Allah cannot always be understood from the surface.
Allah says in the Qur’an: "It is He who created death and life in order to test you, which of you are best in deeds. And He is the Exalted in Might, Oft-Forgiving." (Qur’an, 67:2)
"Do you suppose that you will enter the Garden without encountering what those before you encountered? They were afflicted by misfortune and hardship, and they were so shaken that even [their] messenger and the believers with him cried, ‘When will God’s help arrive?’ Truly, God’s help is near." (Qur’an, 2:214)
Their response was not to look at the test. Their response was to look through it. They looked through the illusion and focused on the One behind it: God.
The worldly body is a prison for the believer, not because this life is miserable for the believing soul, but because that soul yearns to be somewhere greater.
What we often don’t realize about the abandonment of salah is this: No scholar has ever held the opinion that committing zina (fornication) makes you a disbeliever. No scholar has ever held the opinion that stealing, drinking or taking drugs makes you a disbeliever. No scholar has even claimed that murder makes you a non-Muslim. But, about salah, some scholars have said he who abandons it, is no longer Muslim.
Consider for a moment what satan did wrong. He didn’t refuse to believe in Allah. He refused to make one sajdah. Just one. Imagine all the sajdahs we refuse to make.
And yet, think how lightly we take the matter of salah. Salah is the first thing we will be asked about on the Day of Judgment, and yet it is the last thing that is on our mind. The Prophet
It sounds comical, but the truth is, we put the needs of our body above the needs of our soul. We feed our bodies, because if we didn’t, we’d die. But so many of us starve our souls, forgetting that if we are not praying our soul is dead. And ironically, the body that we tend to is only temporary, while the soul that we neglect is eternal.
The irony of this truth is that many people are deceived into thinking that they need to first turn their life around, before they can start to pray.
One can only imagine what would happen if a king were to come to our door, offering to give us anything we want. One would think that any sane person would at least set their alarm for such a meeting.
Others reduce it to a simple exercise in empathy with the poor.
By controlling and restraining our physical needs, we gain strength for the greater battle: controlling and restraining our nafs (our soul’s desire).
I think what happens in this type of situation is that we mix up our means and our ends.
It’s just perfect because it acknowledges that Allah only knows best, and then asks for Him to bring what is best and take away what is not best.
More importantly, it creates a false sense of self-importance, where every insignificant move I make is of international importance.
"The mutual rivalry for piling up (of worldly things) has preoccupied you." (Qur’an, 102:1)
I’m like a prisoner because I have given up the keys to my happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and disappointment to the people to hold.
Riyaa is a consequence of living in the orbit of the creation.
He said: "Detach yourself from the world, and God will love you. Detach yourself from what is with the people, and the people will love you." [Ibn Majah]
