[1] Luxury and Modern Societies:

A feature of modern life is wide accessibility to luxury. I understand that some may lift their eyebrows at this statement. “Luxury! How while many in the world are suffering poverty and poor living conditions” some may say. 

Yes, the current state of affairs are quite miserable for humanity. Yet, human beings, at least in the northern hemisphere if not elsewhere in the world as well, are quite luxurious. Human, at least these humans have taken certain luxuries unavailable to their predecessors or even available previously to the elite as common place. 

Take flying as an example. After remaining a dream for centuries, flying started as a luxurious option available only to limited number of individuals before becoming everyone’s treat in the past years. While this has facilitated many things to people, it has made people accustomed to new levels of luxury and ease that made normal life appear difficult and uninteresting to them. Their concept of place, distance and their connection to earth and traversing has changed for good. 

In the end, luxury of sort has invaded wide spectrum of our lives and captured many folks such that it has become the new norm. With that humans have lost independence, natural options ceased to be natural. 

[To be continued]

عن أنس بن مالك رضي الله عنه قال: قال لي رسول الله ﷺ: "يا بني؛ إن قدرت أن تصبح وتمسي ليس في قلبك غشٌ لأحد فافعل، ثم قال لي: يا بني وذلك من سنتي ومن أحيا سنتي فقد أحبني ومن أحبني كان معي في الجنة" (الترمذي)

Anas b. Mālik (Allah be pleased with him) said; the Messenger of God (Allah bless him and give him peace) said to me: Son! If you can spend your days and nights with a heart clean from any ill-feeling towards anyone, make sure you do that.” Then he said to me; “Son! This is from my way and whoever revives my way loves me and whoever loves me, will be with me in Jannah” (Al-Tirmidhi)

Remembering Our Departed Loved Ones in the Glory of their Days:

MANY ARE THE emotions that assail the heart. But grief, surely, is the hardest of all. The pain felt at the loss of a loved one awakens grief, yet seldom is much gained by yielding too far to grief’s cruelty.

Yes, tears must flow. Pain must be endured. Souls must sorrow and be scarred. That you grieve not, none have the right to insist. Weep, then, but wail not; and let not sorrow’s suffering tarry too long. For your loved one would not have you sorrow more than is fitting.

What would he or she say to you, whose loss you lament? That she welcomes the love you thus show to her; but that she doesn’t want your grief to be prolonged.

She would ask that you gently put your sorrows to slumber and remember her in the glory of her days. And that although time will assuage the pangs of grief, she would want that we move on from such grief by choice.

So remember and recollect: recall the most cherished things about the one who is loved but is lost; of how she enriched our lives and the lives of others too. For this honours our departed loved ones, consoles us, keeps them with us in our hearts, and helps us to remember them in the glory of their days.

If death taketh away, life doth giveth. If a young life is taken and an older one still remains; but when did death ever promise that it’d take us in order of age?

Now is a time to reflect, not just that all things are mortal, but also that their mortality follows no fixed law.

If tragedy darkens our days, how can we deny that the sun still shines? If destiny deals a blow, how can we give up on life? If we have buried one of our loved ones, other of our cherished ones still live on.

So now is the time to cherish our living loved ones even more: celebrating our love of them and spending time with them. For we cannot love only when we’ve lost.

And while we honour those who have passed on with loving remembrance, we know that such remembrance is not without its bitterness. Yet still, let us put our sorrows to slow slumber and remember them in the glory of their days.1
________________1. Adapted and reworked from A.C. Grayling, The Good Book(London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011), 93-5.

Timeless wisdom is only appreciated by humans that ascend the limitations of their time.

(6) The Modern: Independence

Despite the continued emphasis on “human autonomy”, modern humans are debilitated by their own handiworks. Navigation apps have switched off our sense of direction, autocorrection have removed our sense of spelling and grammar, emojis have reduced our complex feelings to a bundle of ‘inanimate symbols’.

This episode of a “successive removal of our human capabilities” was preceded by another where we lost our ability to use the pens, thanks to physical and then virtually keyboard. Our fingers’ ability to recognise the shape of letters, has been taken away in favour of buttons (that would alert us to a hit) and then a flat un-recognizable virtual surface.

The ballpoint was an episode in that too. In Arabic, it is called “dry pen” and, while it refers to its mechanism, the word is very expressive of its nature, it is dry and drying. It cuts us from ‘ink’ and ‘flow’ that have always been linked with tradition and writing. The fountain pen, on the other side, refers to the mood of writing and flowing where ideas are inspired from the fountain of knowledge and flow from a mind to another.

Equally, the Arabic word for “ink” is مِداد very connected to مَدَد or divine support and continuity. This carries a lot inside it; just for you (dear reader) to reflect on.

Modern man’s claim of ‘autonomy’ is just a lie that we have believed in for we have become “subjects” to our own making rather than servants of God. Only when we return to that original position, we can say we are free.

قال ابن نباته المصري ممثلا مسألة الدور:
مسألة الدور جرت * بيني وبين من أحب
لولا مشيبي ما جفا * لولا جفاه لم أشب

Ibn Nabatah of Egypt expressed the logical issue of circularity (a rational impossibility) in verse (with some romantic hint) saying;

The circularity issue occured,
Between me and the one I love
Were it not for my grey hair he wouldn’t have turned away
And were not for his turning away, my hair wouldn’t have turned grey

To all our brothers and sisters across the world!

Eid Mubarak. May Allah, Who has granted tawfīq to complete the month, bless us by accepting it and even more by making it a real change in our life and relationship with Him and His creation. May it be an opening at all levels and a closure to the doors of forgetfulness and discomfort. May you and your loved ones have a blessed day and days ahead. Ameen

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