Friday Nasiha

Living The Quran

Faith in Action
Al-Baqarah (The Cow) Chapter 2: Verse 143 (partial)

"God will never let your faith go to waste."

This sentence has usually been interpreted to mean: "God will never let the Prayers you did turning to the Bayt al-Maqdis go to waste." However, it also conveys more general and important truths, such as:

• Faith cannot be separated from action. One's way of life and acting demonstrate whether one is a believer or not.
  
  
• The Prayer has an essential relation with faith. The Prayer, together with the intention in it and the way of doing it, is a definite sign of the character and depth of one's faith.
  
  
• Good deeds or actions done only for the good pleasure of God and based on faith will profit in the Hereafter. Whatever is done as a requirement of faith never goes to waste provided one preserves one's faith and goes to the other world with that faith strong and intact.

Compiled From:
"The Quran: Annotated Interpretation in Modern English" - Ali Unal, pp. 73

Understanding The Prophet's Life

Love for the Master

If Allah's servant is blessed with the love for his Master, it is the height of good fortune for him. There is nothing to compare with a believer's love for Allah. For it is his greatest achievement. According to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), those Muslims who love others only for the sake of Allah will be rewarded amply for this. Muadh Ibn Jabal is on record as stating that the Prophet said: "Allah says: My love is obligatory for those who love one another for My sake. The same holds true for those who join company, maintain social relations and spend money on others for Allah's sake." (Muwatta of Imam Malik)

In this world one should, therefore, try to develop social relations out of one's concern for faith, as doing so will be profusely rewarded in the Hereafter. Even a minor good deed, such as giving a date in charity or uttering a good word, will bring excellent rewards.

Compiled From:
"Inter Personal Relations" - Khurram Murad, p. 7

Blindspot!

Leadership

In communal transformation, leadership is about intention, convening, valuing relatedness, and presenting choices. It is not a personality characteristic or a matter of style, and therefore it requires nothing more than what all of us already have.

This means we can stop looking for leadership as though it were scarce or lost, or it had to be trained into us by experts. If our traditional form of leadership has been studied for so long, written about with such admiration, defined by so many, worshipped by so few, and the cause of so much disappointment, maybe doing more of all that is not productive. The search for great leadership is a prime example of how we too often take something that does not work and try harder at it.

We need to reconstruct leader as social architect. Not leader as special person, but leader as a citizen willing to do those things that have the capacity to initiate something new in the world. In this way, leader belongs right up there with cook, carpenter, artist, and landscape designer. It is a capacity that can be learned by all of us, with a small amount of teaching and an agreement to practice. The ultimate do-it-yourself movement.

Community building requires a concept of the leader as one who creates experiences for others - experiences that in themselves are examples of our desired future. The experiences we create need to be designed in such a way that relatedness, accountability, and commitment are every moment available, experienced, and demonstrated.

Compiled From:
"Community: The Structure of Belonging" - Peter Block, pp. 85, 86