My hubby was sad this morning when someone called him an ‘extremist’ because we pray and my daughter and I cover. He was not sad however because of being labelled. He was sad at the ignorance prevalent among us, the muslims, regarding the basics of Islam. If anything, we would not even consider ourselves standing at the foot of the tower of duties we are supposed to perform. And if that is considered extreme, what duties are our muslim brothers and sisters doing towards Allah’s satisfaction?
A few hours later I was reading Surah An’am with that thought still poking in mind. Allah says in a few ayahs in the beginning how people are blind and deaf to the signs of Allah and lie about him, how they will find out about the truth on the Day of Judgment and wish they could return to life on earth so as to do things right this time round. This led me to thinking about an episode of X-Files which showed how things will turn out in the exact same way no matter how many times and how many ways we try to stop it till we change our mindset.
Suddenly, from the thought of mindset I was trying to imagine the psychological attributes of such tyrants as Hitler, Chengish Khan, the Bush father and son and their kind and trying to imagine how much fun it would be to watch them being tried on the Day of Judgment. I was lost in the thought for quite some time when I remembered something that happened when I was hardly four years old but it has been etched in my memory with so many other childhood memories.
I had spent about three months with my mother at my maternal grandparents’ home in the village when I was three and a half or nearly four. One monsoon day, while a storm raged outside, my mother and her three brothers were having tea and muri (rice puffs) in the drawing room. The siblings chatted and laughed whenever they saw someone’s roof flying off in the wind. Suddenly, while they were still laughing, their own roof, only the part over the drawing room, flew off!
This memory brought me back to reality. My brothers and sisters still have time and opportunity to learn and practice and surpass us in ‘extremism’ and even clinch the prize on the Day of Judgment while we remain as helpless onlookers! So, there is no time to waste and no room for complacency. It is a race to the finish and it requires the same amount of dedication and concentration lest we lose the path before we reach the finish line …
A few hours later I was reading Surah An’am with that thought still poking in mind. Allah says in a few ayahs in the beginning how people are blind and deaf to the signs of Allah and lie about him, how they will find out about the truth on the Day of Judgment and wish they could return to life on earth so as to do things right this time round. This led me to thinking about an episode of X-Files which showed how things will turn out in the exact same way no matter how many times and how many ways we try to stop it till we change our mindset.
Suddenly, from the thought of mindset I was trying to imagine the psychological attributes of such tyrants as Hitler, Chengish Khan, the Bush father and son and their kind and trying to imagine how much fun it would be to watch them being tried on the Day of Judgment. I was lost in the thought for quite some time when I remembered something that happened when I was hardly four years old but it has been etched in my memory with so many other childhood memories.
I had spent about three months with my mother at my maternal grandparents’ home in the village when I was three and a half or nearly four. One monsoon day, while a storm raged outside, my mother and her three brothers were having tea and muri (rice puffs) in the drawing room. The siblings chatted and laughed whenever they saw someone’s roof flying off in the wind. Suddenly, while they were still laughing, their own roof, only the part over the drawing room, flew off!
This memory brought me back to reality. My brothers and sisters still have time and opportunity to learn and practice and surpass us in ‘extremism’ and even clinch the prize on the Day of Judgment while we remain as helpless onlookers! So, there is no time to waste and no room for complacency. It is a race to the finish and it requires the same amount of dedication and concentration lest we lose the path before we reach the finish line …
I know a girl who was nowhere near a follower until few months back she appears fully draped in hijab. No one could relate HER with hijab considering her previous self. She was interrogated by a group of confused friends as to why she turned into a "hujur" all of a sudden. Yes that's the exact word they used in a mocking/demeaning tone.
ReplyDeleteSadly, what should have been the identity of Muslim women is a tag-line of "extremism" ! Instead of appreciating and congratulating her, people are more keen on to giving her the alien look (Oh you are soo different from us!).
When we laugh at people who cover or think of them as a bunch of lunatic extremists, we hardly realize that at the end it will be these very "extremists" who will have the final laugh. It is US who are the different ones, the aliens and the pathetically ignorant!
So even if we do not cover ourselves, we should, at least, have the decency of not making fun of those who do.