PAINTING BY: GEORGE DUNLOP LESLIESh. Hamza Yusuf on Islam, The Road to Submission
There is MY Islam, as an individual trying to implement in my life the ideals of Islam and using my life as an opportunity to improve my state of submission and that takes a lifetime of work. Each day of our life is an opportunity to improve our state and to improve our understanding of the world and it’s not easy. It takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of thought and it also usually takes the company of good people that will help one. It takes brutal honesty as well, of looking at ourselves and trying to get closer to these ideals. The Quran is very clear in that it says: You have in the Messenger of God, an excellent example. And so learning about his life, how he was the most forbearing of people, he was the most clement of people; he was the most forgiving of people.
He constantly smiled…that it was his nature, to smile. If you look out there just smiling is something that could really help to alleviate things. People that smile all the time now are seen almost as fools. Something is wrong with them. There is just so much ingratitude. I think that gratitude and just being filled with a state of gratitude is something that all of us should be working on. The Quran says that the devil said that he will come to all of humanity from in front of them and behind them, to the right of them and to the left of them, and then he said you will not find very many grateful ones amongst them. Gratitude was really what he was trying to remove from Bani Adam or the children of Adam. Gratitude according to Ibn Ata’allah is the quickest way to really being in a healthy state.
On this idea of really feeling grateful and reflecting, recently there was a beautiful study done at Davis by a social scientist on gratitude in which they took people over long periods of time who tended to be depressed, and negative people, and they would have them start their day by actually going over those things that they had reason to be grateful for. Over time their mental states changed drastically. It’s a very interesting study because it was done with a very strong control group in a traditional social science setting using their methodology.
Feeling that gratitude and thankfulness was the hallmark of traditional societies, even in this country traditionally was rooted in a sense of feeling grateful and feeling the blessings that we’ve been given. I think that that’s something that Muslims really need to focus on, because if you look out there at all this negative stuff, you will just start feeling miserable and if you forget that in spite of it all there is so much to be grateful for. If you’re in a wheelchair, you know the fact that you’ve got your hands is reason to be grateful.
Ibn Abbas, the cousin of the Prophet, salallahu alaihe wa salam, and one of his companions, said that any tribulation that you have, if you examine it you will always find that there is reason to feel grateful. He gave three immediately: that if it was in this world then that alone is reason to feel grateful. That it wasn’t in the next world because a calamity in the next world is much greater than anything in this world. That if it was in your worldly affairs, your material affairs, and not in your spiritual affairs then that was reason to be grateful. And that it could have been worse. Whatever affliction in this life, it still could have been worse, and that is also reason to be grateful.
Even in the midst of tribulation there is reason to feel grateful. The Quran clearly states: La in sha kar tum la a zee dan na kum…that if you show gratitude that God will increase you in that feeling of gratitude. In other words, he’ll give you more reasons to feel grateful. That is a law of cause and effect according to Muslim beliefs. If you actually display gratitude you will find more and more reasons to feel grateful and if you display ingratitude, conversely you will find more and more reason to feel ungrateful. That’s the way the universe works.
-http://www.themodernreligion.com/
