Most people in the modern world believe that the road to happiness is to get what you want and do what you want.And the society around encourages them in that belief. Wrong! The truth is that it is exactly the opposite that works and brings peace of mind.”Do what is wanted of you and accept what is given to you and be grateful”. That is the better advice.And, yes, no-one can tell you what that is -what is wanted of you.Because it appears subtly and deeply in your heart.That is why a good advisor is some-one who can listen to your heart and not talk from their minds.But they are rare,indeed! May God grant you that niamat(gift) of the competent advisor.It is one of the greatest gifts of all.Salaams,Ibrahim As-Sufi
Category Archives: Psychology
Modern Life-from my balcony
8:30 am in a lower middle-class suburb of Montreal.Watching “normal” Canadian life unfolding from my balcony.Mothers driving their kids to school and walking them and one pushing a stroller probably taking her child to daycare before it is able to walk! No fathers to be seen.Are these couples divorced or do the men have earlier shifts(possible)?They do seem to appear from time to time.Children with their heavy back-packs looking stressed about what is going to confront them at school.Some waiting at the corner for their school-buses.No-one seems particularly happy or even present! Does it really have to be like this?Is this the “the greatest civilization” as the Trumpians and Pinkerites would have us believe? Or is this the real unidentified humanitarian disaster that few dare to identify let alone talk about?!You probably know where I stand on that one lol
Salat
The ulema tell us that the salat five times a day is an “obligation”.However,obligations naturally stir up opposition in our nafs.I now prefer to see it as an “opportunity”-an opportunity to reconnect with our Creator five times a day when otherwise we would be too preoccupied with the rat-race of life in this world.What wisdom in this religion!
An Existential Statement
I have come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of people!- people who want to learn and people who want to maintain their positions. I am doing my best to avoid wasting my energy on the latter type!This is no easy matter as the latter category often pretends to be or believes itself to be open- minded,so one needs to develop a sense of observation to see the illusory nature of this supposed”open-ness”.
Love and Sin
(In response to a comment that the answer is Love and Mercy)The problem here(this is deep!) is that you can’t really love and have Mercy if you are doing serious sin(yes”sin” as unpopular as that concept is to the modernist!) Because Allah tells us that at that point He hardens their hearts.That’s the connundrum.We saw that at Woodstock! And I have witnessed that over and over again up to very recently!
Seeing the good
Aphorism of the day: See the good, focus on the good and articulate it” PS This is a good directive for people like myself who have a proclivity to see what is wrong- legitimately so- in situations and people This is not appropriate for the goody- goody types including Muslims who use Islamic teachings to deny reality. They inevitably come across as superficial and artificial which is not helpful to anyone -including themselves.
Dream Interpretation(Much more to come)
Ibn Qutaybah ad-Dinawari رحمه الله says in his book about dream interpretations, “There is nothing in which people deal with from the different sciences that is more obscure, delicate, exalted, noble, difficult and problematic than dreams because they are a type of revelation and type of Prophethood.”
Refining the Notion of “Ghiba'(Back-biting)
(After long reflection,I decided to publish this hoping perhaps to stimulate discussion)
Refining the notion of Ghiba (Back-biting)
Bismillah Erahman Erahim. This text is produced in the spirit of improving our deen not in any way in the spirit of diluting it- rather in order to make it feasible. May Allah forgive me for any errors within and hopefully some thoughtful and well-informed Muslims friends and colleagues will help in correcting any errors and fine-tuning the text.
Most Muslims are aware of the Quranic ayat (Surat Al Hujjarat 49:12) which prohibits back biting and compares it to eating the flesh of his dead brother. They are also aware of the hadith of the Prophet sal which defines ghiba as “to mention of your brother (in his absence) that which he would dislike.” The difficulty with this last statement as an absolute prohibition is that very few people can meet such a high standard. Hamza Yusuf claims that one of his sheikhs Murabat al-Hajj in Mauritania followed this principle to the letter. I, myself, never had the honour of meeting this man but I have spent a lot of time around many credible, highly pious shuyukh and none of them were able to meet such a standard. So what about the rest of us?!
Once a standard becomes too onerous it becomes counter-productive. Either we keep breaking it and fall into excessive guilt and self-hatred or we end up ignoring it which is even worse for our faith as there is an essence to this interdiction that is important to respect. After all it is present in both the Quran and hadith so we have to take it seriously.
In all fairness, the ulema have already indicated certain exceptions. Two stand out porominently:1) in legal situations where the evidence needs to be presented to come to a proper judgment and redress grievances and2) to warn people about evil-for example in dealing with a crooked business partner or a potentially bad mate in marriage .I maintain in this article that this is not enough to make this prohibition workable.
So I would suggest expanding the areas of exceptions to the three following conditions:
- Trying to solve a problem. For example, there is a very difficult person at work and it is hard to get the job done given his behaviour. Perhaps he, or she, is paranoid or hyper-emotional and hyper-sensitive. We need to meet and decide on a way to manage this problem. This will inevitably lead to talking about him or her in a way they would dislike. This seems inevitable in trying to cope with the situation. By the way, the same thing may occur in personal or family situations. It is not limited to work.
- An attempt to understand what is going on. This is related to the first point but may not involve a specific problem. For example, every time you go to the in-laws you get into an unnecessary argument with your sister-in law. You then try to talk it over with your wife and she explains to you that her brother’s wife was abused physically by her Dad when she was a child and has a problem with assertive males. Officially that discussion is “ghiba”. But in fact it may help you better manage the situation. You then become more tolerant or you tone down the rhetoric as you try to adapt.
- Catharsis: The wife (or the husband for that matter) comes home after a very stressful day at work. Her boss has been on her back all day. The business is in a financial crisis and the boss is irritable with everyone. She comes home and “blows off steam” with her husband complaining about all the bad behaviour of her boss. If she had done this to his face, she may well have lost her job. What is she to do? Repressing the feeling will just make it worse .Expressing it against the husband, a common manoeuvre by both husbands and wives one must say, will create a new set of problems.
Admittedly this can become a slippery slope .Just like the exceptions to the prohibition against lying can be used to develop a culture of deception in couples, being too slack here can lead to too much negativity and venom being circulated. As in all else, one must be vigilant (“wara” in Islamic terms).
“So what is left that remains back-biting?” you may ask. I will mention a few categories that are important and remain part of the prohibition:.
- Talking about people as a form of entertainment, as a way to spend time socially. All too common both in Muslim circles and non-Muslim ones. This overlaps with the prohibition against idle gossip.
- Putting people down in order to raise oneself. This is a noxious activity that is harmful to everyone including the perpetrator as it doesn’t really work to improve his own self-esteem.
- “Dissing” someone because one has some lingering resentment or grievance against them. This is just another illicit form of revenge.
- Making fun of some characteristic of someone as another form of entertainment. All of these are haram.
So, how do we operationalize this expanded paradigm so as not to fall into “massiyah” (disobedience)? The key is in our intentions, as in all actions. Each time we are preparing to say something negative about someone else we need to stop and ask ourselves the question: ”Is this useful ? Is this going to help me deal with a problem situation or a person?” or “Is this just idle and unnecessary talk?” Obviously this requires sincerity and watchfulness to avoid letting our nafs run amok. But, I believe there is enough room in this model to breathe so that we are not constantly over-stepping the limits of the acceptable in our social interactions. What do you think?
Salaams, Ibrahim
Myths about Ramadan
Ramadan, the month of fasting in Islam, is indeed a great month- full of spiritual effort, patience, devotion and great rewards!The spiritual atmosphere can be felt in the air as we start and reaches a peak in the last ten days.None of this is in doubt in the present text..
However, due to the human need to idealize and to use what I call “black-and-white thinking” certain myths have crept into the community about what Ramadan can and can’t do-myths I would like to dispel here, in order for people to benefit properly from this holy practice.
1)Ramadan is easy:This idea is especially common in the Arab world but I have run into it in many communities.I have heard young Arab men saying”I just lead my life as I normally do without eating.I don’t notice the difference”. Really?! I would like to ask their bosses and especially their spouses lol The Pakistani Imams at our local mosques love saying, at day 15 for example,”Ramadan is now half-over and we hardly noticed it”. Are you kidding me?! I don’t know what world they are living in but I surely noticed it and more.And I noticed the many difficulties people were having with it around me -from people with high-stress jobs who couldn’t operate as efficiently as usual to those whose health problems were acting up to people who simply couldn’t do it for health reasons-physical and psychological!
Ramadan is not easy!If it were easy the Prophet saws would not have called it”The month of patience”. Patience is required for difficult things, not easy ones.When I first started doing Ramadan, after my conversion, I had trouble believing that a whole community had been ordered to do this practice .It seemed like an advanced ascetic practice designed for the most zealous of spiritual seekers.To the credit of the Muslim community,they take it on gracefully without complaints.
Despite their denial of the difficulty of the endeavour ,it shows in their behaviour, however..Visitors and non-Muslim workers in Muslim countries have told me about how the people around them became more irritable and impatient.This is actually just as common as the bad-breath, beloved of Allah, mentioned in the hadith.And there is nothing worse than denial.It just makes everything worse.Also,the benefit is hidden in the difficulty, n’est-ce pas?If it were “a piece of cake” as they say ,there would only be no benefit to it- just hypoglycemia as a consequence.
2) Ramadan is a health food fast.Wrong! The health fasts,per se,recommended by certain naturopathic professionals, invariably involve lots of fluid intake- sometimes natural juices, other times distilled water fortified with electrolyes and nutrients.The Old Testament/Islamic fasts are exercises in abstinence-good for our spiritual development and probably our long-term emotional one as well(learning self-control) but difficult on our physical bodies and our psyches..
I can always remember the first Ramadan when I attended the Tarawih prayer in Montreal and the Imam fell down in the middle of the prayer,writhing in pain.We had to accompany him to the hospital where they diagnosed him with kidney stones.There was little doubt in my mind that it was due to or worsened at least by the dehydration of the fasting process.I did not know enough of his medical history to be able to establish whether he should have been fasting at all.For some people it is a too risky endeavour.
Over the years I have had to proscribe fasting for a number patients.They were not in good enough health to do it.In a few cases ,this was due to intense depression or bipolar disorder.They were not getting better,in fact they were getting worse, and the medications were not working.In most cases ,the next year they were fine.Alhumdulillah.
A number of pious people I have met were not able to fast because of diabetes.And then there was the epileptic convert who I counselled to fast intermittently instead of every day but wouldn’t listen to sound medical advice.Because of that he had a grand-mal seizure in the mosque which triggered an intense ‘fitna'( conflict)in the mosque between those who considered it to be jinn and those who wanted to rush him to the E.R. to see a neurologist(I was obviously of the latter group).A fight ensued and the British police had to be brought in when one of the jinn believers pulled a knife!
So Ramadan is a health challenge.Consult with your own Muslim doctor to see if it is advisable for you,if you have a concern.
3)It is advisable to sleep as little as possible during Ramadan to increase the benefits.Another bit of bad advice.Some people may be able to do it but we should keep in mind that sleep-deprivation is another stressor. So if you are already “on the edge” it could put you over either into some unwanted psychological state like excessive anxiety or even psychosis or into some physical condition like a re-currence of a previous medical condition or a worsening of an already existing one( like in the case of the previously mentioned epileptic) of even something new.
4) People will behave better because they are fasting and “the shayateen are chained up”. This one the ulema have dealt with in various ways since many have noticed considerable bad behaviour even during Ramadan.The bottom line here may be that even if the devils are chained up the nafs (human ego) is enough of a trouble-maker on its own and can raise its hoary head even when fasting-even without the promptings of the demons!
5) Ramadan is a good way to lose weight.Wrong!Some people do lose weight during Ramadan but most do not.I have participated twice in a successful Weight Watchers program .Ramadan was the only month in which I didn’t lose weight! The scientific evidence indicates that if you feed guinea pigs the same amount of calories in one dose as opposed to dividing it up in three(more or less the equivalent of what most fasters do during Ramadan lol) they get obese and sick! It is ,in terms of physical health, better to eat several small meals scattered throughout the day.I believe that is the scientific consensus and at times for certain conditions like hypoglycemia doctors prescribe that very formula.
All this being said,Ramadan is a great and holy month and we thank our Lord for His gift.We just need to be a little wiser about how we manage it it.Ramadan Mubarak and Ramadan Karim. Salaams,Ibrahim As -Sufi
Edumucation
Texas school shooting. I’m going to have to start a column entitled “ things you’ll never hear from journalists” lol This is one of them! Maybe the real problem is “schools” The entire world including the place I am now visiting, Trinidad, is obsessed with formal, institutionalize schooling. But is this really such a good thing?! For one thing, many students don’t fit in. Either they don’t have the academic learning style required or they don’t have the social skills. So then they are humiliated, defeated and alienated. I suspect that many of young, mass killers fit into one of those categories .
But even in terms of education, these institutes are lacking. Most people tell me that they have to learn their jobs anyway when they get out of school. So is there any point? If you argue that schools produce open- minded, flexible intellects , I don’t see it, myself. They are in fact propaganda machines. I think we need to go back to the age-old master-apprentice formula if we want real education. But perhaps, that’s not what the powers find really wan! They want cogs in the machine. If that is it, they are succeeding well!