Friday Nasiha

Living The Quran

Work and Activity
Al-Zalzalah (The Earthquake) - Chapter 99: Verse 7

"And whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it."

Work has a sacredness about it, even if the task is as modest as merely sweeping a room, tidying a desk, or entertaining a guest.

When you rely upon yourself to wash and iron your own clothes and carry your own luggage, you are actually giving yourself charity.

People are created with tremendous potential energy to accomplish many things from within themselves. This energy differs in degree from one person to the next. The need to work productively is as natural to the human being as the need to eat or to procreate.

When people find good food to eat, they eat it. Otherwise, they are compelled to eat low quality food. When they are thirsty, if they find pure fresh water to drink, they will drink it. Otherwise, they are forced to drink stagnant water. The same goes for work. If they find work that contributes to society and builds their personality and self-esteem, they embark upon it with enthusiasm and pour all their energy into it. Otherwise, they do whatever work they can find.

Activity is how people respond to their inner energies. It is also how they give meaning to life and assert their importance as human beings.

Whenever political or economic systems stifle that energy, it results in people who are wretched, distraught, and lack initiative. They become like indistinguishable automatons who find it difficult to make any sense of their lives.

Political and economic systems are supposed to facilitate and mobilize work, not keep people from it. When citizens are denied opportunities for work, creative accomplishments, and active social engagement, part of their very humanity is wasted. All people need three things in their lives if they are to live well:

1. Something to do
2. Something to love
3. Something to hope for

When people work and accomplish meaningful things, they will love life more and be contented. They need to be able to identify with their work. This will allow them to strive as if they have a stake in the work they are doing. They should be able to feel as if they expect the person they love the most will live in the home they build, wear the garment they sew, or eat the food they produce. In this way, they will put something of their souls into the things they produce so that they come out as good as they can be.

Compiled From:
"Meaningful Work Is a Societal Need" - Salman al-Oadah

Understanding The Prophet's Life

Sound Aspiration

Disengaging from the malady of materialism requires engaging the higher purpose for which we were created, the prelude to which is sound aspiration (iradah). What is meant by 'sound aspiration' is the desire to draw closer to Allah through inner struggle, or mujahadah; in other words it is the heart's quest for its spiritual sustenance.

One of the fruits of this aspiration is that of being granted inner peace. The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: "Whoever makes the Afterlife his concern, Allah will gather together his affairs, place contentment in his heart and the world will come to him despite his reluctance; whoever makes the world his concern, Allah will split-up his affairs, put poverty before him and nothing of the world will come to him except what Allah has written for him." [Tirmidhi]

Perhaps the profoundest fruit that arises as a result of this aspiration is being indemnified in Allah's divine love - as the Prophet said: "Whenever Allah loves a person, He shelters him from worldliness." [Tirmidhi]

Here the question is often asked: how should material possessions and wealth be dealt with, should they be totally abandoned? The answer to this apparent 'dilemma' was aptly given by Ibn Taymiyyah who said: "Wealth should be viewed just like the toilet, in that you have need for it and resort to it when necessary, but it has no place in your heart."

Compiled From:
"Exquisite Pearl" - Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sadi, pp. VI-VIII

Blindspot!

Jesus the Man

Paul’s conception of Christianity may have been heretical before 70 C.E. But afterward, his notion of a wholly new religion free from the authority of a Temple that no longer existed, unburdened by a law that no longer mattered, and divorced from a Judaism that had become a pariah was enthusiastically embraced by converts throughout the Roman Empire. Hence, in 398 C.E., when, according to legend, another group of bishops gathered at a council in the city of Hippo Regius in modern-day Algeria to canonize what would become known as the New Testament, they chose to include in the Christian scriptures one letter from James, the brother and successor of Jesus, two letters from Peter, the chief apostle and first among the Twelve, three letters from John, the beloved disciple and pillar of the church, and fourteen letters from Paul, the deviant and outcast who was rejected and scorned by the leaders in Jerusalem. In fact, more than half of the twenty-seven books that now make up the New Testament are either by or about Paul.

This should not be surprising. Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem had become almost exclusively a gentile religion; it needed a gentile theology. And that is precisely what Paul provided. The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers to make.

Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus the man—is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in.

Compiled From:
"Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth" - Reza Aslan