Are We Becoming Less Deserving Of Allah’s Blessings?
When we look at the clouds of misery casting their shadows around us in terms of hunger, wars, killings, and the many injustices, it raises many questions. What did we do to deserve this? Where are we heading? And what can we do to prevent this free fall? As we ponder and assess whether we have lived up to our responsibilities in terms of following Allah’s word – ‘The Quran’
– and what the Prophet (s.a.w.s.) instructed us, the answers can become quite obvious. We live in times when many of us have put Quran and Sunnah (prophet’s traditions) on the backburner. The Quran has been left to rest on our shelves and barely makes it to our hearts. The sunnah is something that rarely shows in our behaviors and lives.
We seem to be living during times, which was accurately portrayed by ibn Al-Qayyim many centuries ago as follows:
*The earth trembles, the heavens have darkened, evil has appeared on land and on sea because of the injustices of the wicked, and evil doers. Blessings have disappeared, good deeds are less, and life has become corrupted because of the wickedness of the wrong-doers. The morning light and the night’s darkness shed tears, because of the awful deeds that are committed. Honorable writers among the angels and others from among them have complained to their Lord because of the prevalence of misdeeds and the supremacy of atrocities.*
Why have we reached such a state? Here is what he had to say further to explain this phenomenon:
When the Glorious Quran, and the Sunnah are abandoned, because it is thought that they are insufficient, and when human opinions, analogy, discretion, and the words of (other so called) scholars are sought, people’s natures are corrupted, their hearts become dark, their understandings become confused, and their minds become distorted.
Specifically, he mentions that we have reached this state because of the following:
* Inclination has replaced wisdom.
* Vain desires have replaced reason.
* Going astray has replaced guidance.
* The wrong has replaced the good.
* Ignorance has replaced knowledge.
* Hypocrisy has replaced devotion.
* The unlawful has replaced the lawful.
* Lying has substituted truthfulness.
* Flattery has substituted (sincere) advice,
* and injustice has replaced justice.
If you see the superiority of such evils, and their slogans are set up where their armies are invading, surely the bottom of the earth would be much more desirable than its surface, the peaks of mountains would be more preferable than the plains, and accompanying beasts would be better than accompanying people.We need to learn from such a situations and Ponder and Assess and… CHANGE!
Continues…