General
From Issue: 310 [Read full issue]
| Living the Quran |
Al-An'am
(The Cattle)
Commentary: It Ain’t No Piece of Cake Nobody says Islam is easy. Nothing of any value ever is. Indeed it is not easy to wake up for Fajr prayer on a cold winter morning. It may not be convenient to cook food for your ill neighbour. Nor is volunteering at an Islamic conference or a local food bank effortless. It may not be pleasant to offer others your shoulder to cry upon when their personal or family life is in crisis. Sure, resisting the peer pressure at school, university, or work place is extremely challenging. And we know it requires real faith and guts to speak out against oppression, racism, and tyranny. Therefore, Islamic life is a life of sacrifice par excellence. It entails a struggle (jihad) that must be ceaselessly waged, to actualize Islam, inwardly and outwardly, to make it a living reality. Complete Dedication The present verse expresses complete dedication, with every pulse and every life movement. It is a form of glorification of God and submission to Him in the most absolute of terms: it combines obligatory and voluntary prayer, life and death. All is dedicated to God alone, the Lord of all the worlds, who controls and sustains them all and conducts and determines all their affairs. It is the sort of submission to God that leaves out nothing within oneself, one's conscience or in life, without dedicating it totally to God. Sacrifice: A Struggle to Surrender Sacrifice means giving up things which are valued or desired. Those things may be (1) tangible, countable like our time, wealth or life, or (2) intangible, immeasurable like our feelings, attitudes, opinions or aspirations. They are given up for the sake of something that is more worthy or more urgent to us. Without sacrifice, our lives would be devoid of harmony and cooperation, full of conflict, a prey to self-centredness and immediate gratification of desires. Source: |
| Understanding the Prophet's Life |
| But it's only words! One day, one of the Companions asked the Prophet (peace be upon him): "O Messenger of Allah, will we be called to account for what we say?" He replied "May you be lost to your mother! People will be thrown, faces down into the hellfire, only on account to what their tongues said!" [Tirmidhi] Indeed the tongue controls the rest of our body. A well controlled tongue will keep us within Islam but a loose tongue will destroy us. The Prophet said: "When a person gets up in the morning, all the parts of his body make a plea to his tongue saying 'Fear Allah regarding us, because we follow you. If you are right then we shall also be right , and if you are wrong then we shall also be wrong'." [Tirmidhi] How often do we say "It wasn't me who said it!" or that "I was only joking". We treat lies as being trivial. However we are told that Allah's messenger did not hate anything more than lying [Ahmed]. The Prophet was once asked "Can a Muslim be a coward?" He replied "Yes". He was then asked "Can a Muslim be a miser?" and the reply was "Yes". The Prophet was again asked "Can a Muslim be a liar?" The Prophet replied "No! A Muslim can never be a liar". If we listen carefully to ourselves and to our friends speaking one day - nearly every sentence will have a swear word in it, thinking it's cool and macho to swear, copying the idols of TV and the cinema. Is it really 'cool' to swear? The Hellfire is far from being cool. People will wish they were cool then rather than being cool in this world. Remember! That every time we speak, an angel writes down what we say, and that one day we will have to answer for every single word we ever uttered. So if we swear at someone then it's written down as a sin against us. We''re only harming ourselves. The Prophet said that "abusing a Muslim is a sin and fighting with him is disbelief" [Muslim]. Instead of swearing, lying and engaging in useless talk we can use our tongues in better ways and what better than telling people about Islam. Source: |
| Cool Concepts |
Guidelines in Studying the Sunna The technical definition of Sunna is all that the Prophet did, said, or approved. When the term Sunna is used, our minds are diverted immediately to the manners and morals which we are so careful to observe, while dressing and eating, walking and praying. One may ask where can the Sunna be found for there are so many books and traditions circulated. What the Prophet has left behind however, is not merely a record of what he did or what he said. He left behind him living human beings and a living society. It is through these living human beings and through this society that one can find the Sunna. The degree of homogeneity, conformity, and consistency that you find in this Umma, even after 1,400 years, are because of this Sunna. You may walk into any masjid from Indonesia to Washington and you will find the rites and rituals of the formal acts of worship and the language of Prayer almost identical. You may walk into any Muslim home and you will find every Muslim eating with his right hand. Why? Because that is the Sunna left behind by the Prophet. These examples may seem trivial but my purpose in citing them is to point out that even on the minutest of details, uniformity exists in the Muslim Umma and this is due to the Sunna. If the Sunna is given up as a source of guidance and if the Quran is separated from the Sunna, then this Muslim society that has existed for over fourteen hundred years, through many periods of severe strains and tests and tribulations, would disintegrate. It would then be relatively easy for foreign cultures and societies to assimilate it. What gives Muslim society and Muslim communities a distinct identity and colour of their own is the pattern left behind by the Prophet. Source: |
