I agree and disagree. I agree that the most important bond in a companionship is spiritual affinity, but I also think it takes longer than a moment to find that affinity.

Kahlil Gibran is such a deep thinker, I love his quotes.

This one I agree with whole-heartedly:
“Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.”

“My slave does not draw near to Me with anything I love more than what I have made obligatory on him. And my slave continues to draw near to Me with superogatory actions until I love him. When I love him, I become his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees, his hand with which he strikes, and his foot with which he walks.”

A person who is in union with God forgets about his own self-existence.  He thinks about God in every moment.  He sees the attributes of God manifested through everything.  And I am not talking about pantheism.  Everything is a reflection of God; even a rock is a manifestation of the attributes of God.  A rock is long-lasting, durable, and eternal.  God is ever-lasting, most durable, and the eternal.  A rock is a sign and proof of the existence of God.

So anyway, what does this have to do with womanhood?  It all began in a unique art class that I had to take as a sophomore.  I think we were assigned to design a project that had meaning to us and was a social service.  I remember a girl in my class wanted to design a service for young women, I think it was called “No More Tears.”  It’s designed for girls who have just left a broken relationship, girls who “lost” themselves in a relationship, and girls who forgot about their own ambitions and sense of self during a relationship.  As part of the project, the girls would come to the organization and bring a pair of shoes.  On their shoes they would glue and place symbols or a representation of everything that meant a lot to them.  As they wore their shoes, they would always remember what made them an individual.

I remember at the time thinking…woah!  Thank God I have not experienced this!  How does a girl allow herself to “lose” herself in a relationship?  But now as a senior, I have more understanding and sympathy.

Love is powerful and dangerous.  Just as Love for God causes the servant of God to be so consumed and forgetful of his own self…so does love for a temporal being/item.  A girl who is “in love” with her partner is willing to sacrifice and compromise almost every aspect of herself for the sake of union with her “beloved.”  When the relationship ends, she is confused and lost.  Of course, this is not the correct or right understanding of love…but what can you expect from the youth?  They are naïve and willing to take risks.  This kind of love exists on the side of the boy, as well.  However, I personally have seen only cases of a woman losing her sense of self.  This is yet another reason why many women choose to stay within abusive relationships.

In conclusion, women need to discover themselves before they seek a partner.  Independence is one of the best gifts she can offer to her husband.  The only Being that deserves a woman’s heart and self is her Creator.

“The soul is a temptress and loves to look at beautiful forms and the eye is the guide of the heart. The heart commissions its guide to go and look to see what is there and when the eye informs it of a beautiful image it shudders out of love and desire for it. Frequently such inter-relations tire and wear down both the heart and the eye as it is said:

When you sent your eye as a guide for your heart one day, the object of sight fatigued you for you saw one over whom you had no power neither a portion or in totality, instead you had to be patient.”

~ Imam Ibn ul Qayyim al Jawziyyah, rahimullah (May God’s Mercy be upon him)

When we love somebody, sometimes we test that person with difficult situations to see how much they actually love us. Like a girl might say, “What if I had leukemia/cancer, would you still love me then?” Sometimes the girl might pretend to be going through a predicament (or might actually share a real one) just to see if the guy is caring enough to help her through it.  If the girl wants to join Doctors without Borders or pursue an outrageous ambition, and the guy refuses to compromise on that basis (and the ambition is halal), obviously he doesn’t love her enough to allow her the time and space to do what means so much to her.  Maybe the girl will display her weaknesses, to see if the guy is willing to overlook them.  And what if the girl got into a car accident, lost her ability to walk, and has to use a wheelchair permanently…would the guy still love her then?  What if the girl’s father is unbearably impatient and will not allow the guy to marry his daughter until he has a stable career and house?  Will the guy be willing to wait?  This works vice versa in the perspective of the guy, as well.

Parents test their children, teachers test their students, and married couples test each other throughout marriage.

So what does this mean?  I realized that God does the same to us!  He sends tribulations and trials to test our love for Him and how much we are willing to sacrafice for His sake.  If we give up on God and faith, it’s like the guy who gives up on the girl because she has an impatient father…he is not willing to wait and be patient for good later.

Each person has their own struggle, their own tribulation.  Some are longer than others, some last years, some last seconds.  Some fall into the trap that God is angry with us, or doesn’t care, or is being unmerciful.  Yet we forget that God is sending us these trials out of His LOVE for us, and His willingness to test how well we return love back to Him.

Few minutes is up.  Back to work.  I pray Allah shortens our tribulations and lengthens our pleasures. :)

On another note, my friend Jafrin told me something really interesting.  Imam Abu Hanifa had a student…Abu Yusuf…who used to pray Asr (mid prayer of the day) during the earlier time period…the same earlier time that the followers of Imam Shafi pray in…interesting, eh?

One of my favorite topics this year at MSA East Zone Conference was a lecture delivered by Mawlana Omar on Ithar.

Ithar: selflessness, placing the well-being of your brother over yours.  Mawlana described it as “placing others before yourself”.  The Prophet (pbuh) said: None of you will have faith until he wishes for his brother what he likes for himself. [Muslim]

This is one of the hardest noble character traits to embody; one who has it has definitely attained a high station with God.  True Ithar is rare.  A sign is the ability to give to others what one loves, such as a favorite robe, food, and even a spouse!  Mawlana Omar gave several examples of the sahabas (companions of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)) and the Prophet (pbuh) displaying Ithar.

The best Ithar is to give something away that you strongly love, so that the action actually brings you pain.

Mawlana Omar said that the salik (seeker) has no rights.  This is similar to my last post: we are nothing, and are deserving of nothing, yet Allah expends on us immensely.  Therefore we should be freely able to give to others what rightfully does not belong to us.

Mawlana Omar also said that there is no love bond as strong as the one that exists between Allah and the Prophet Muhammad(pbuh). Yet the Prophet is willing to sacrifice his time with Allah to wait for all the people in his Ummah to enter Paradise before he himself enters.  This is real Ithar.  This also means that the Prophet will have to wait until all conflicts, arguments, and problems are dealt with and resolved between his followers.  So Mawlana Omar said (paraphrased by me):  “Why won’t you forgive all those who wronged you so that the prophet will not have to endure this distance from His Beloved?  If we truly loved the Prophet, then we would be willing to forgive others so that he could enter paradise sooner.” SubhanAllah!

When I came back from the conference, my good friend posted a beautiful gem on her FB.  It was the story of Abdullah ibn Omar (RA), the son of Omar ibn Al-Khattab (RA)–a man known for his great love for Islam and the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).  The former used to love a slave-girl named Rumaysaa’ who he wanted to free and marry.  However, when Abdullah ibn Omar heard the Prophet say “None of you will have faith until he wishes for his brother what he likes for himself,” he freed Rumaysaa’, and married her to his friend, Naafi!  Imagine the sacrafice he was willing to undergo in order to embody the advice of the Prophet: Ithar.  SubhanAllah.

Mawlana Omar said similar stories like this at EZ, but for some reason this story really touched me.  It made me realize that I am really lacking in Ithar.

Once in a Muslim kingdom, a man was in love with the region’s princess. He was handsome and worked in the ruler’s palace. Somehow he managed to relay his message of love to the princess. Having already heard praises of his beauty, she fell in love with him as well. Through a liaison, they would exchange messages, sharing their feelings of mutual affection. However, they could not find any way to meet inside the palace. Eventually, the princess thought of a plan. She sent a message to her beloved telling him that her father greatly respected pious people. She suggested that if her beloved were to leave his job, live on the outskirts of town, and engage himself in piety and worship for some time until he gained popularity, then she would be able to go out and meet him without restraints. He did as she suggested and settled near the edge of town. He then adopted the sunnah of the Prophet (pbuh) as his way of life and became occupied in remembrance (dhikr) and contemplation (fikr) of Allah (SWT) day and night.

After a while, his piety became well-known among the people.  The princess had been waiting for this opportunity. She asked her father his permission to go see this “holy man,” making the excuse that she wanted to request his supplication (du’a). Arriving at his dwelling, she left the entire entourage outside and went in alone. When her previous admirer saw her, he said, “Sister, please go outside. How did you enter without permission?”  The princess reminded him that she was the same one whose beauty had enchanted him and whom he had desperately ached to meet.  She had come to see him so that they could finally meet and have this golden opportunity to be alone together. He turned his head away from her and said, “Sister, that time has gone. I had chosen this life of piety in the hope of meeting you. But now my heart abounds with the love of the True King. I desire not to even look in your direction.“

–Excerpt from Love for Allah, by Shaykh Zulfiqar Ahmad, translated by Kamaluddin Ahmed

Yes.  This story changed my life and continues to aid me throughout.  I love this story so much that I wrote two articles about it for my MSA’s newsletter.  The second article was mainly about the methods of achieving this pure love from the book itself, Love for Allah (My favorite Islamic book).  I think it’s amazing how the boy’s life was so transformed that he was able to forget the girl and have absolutely no regrets.  SubhanAllah—Glory be to God.  He even started his journey to become pious with the wrong intentions.  The power of isolation and dhikr overcame him and purified his heart.

“And those who believe have intense Love for Allah” (Qur’an 2:165).

Whenever I begin to teach a class at my mosque, I always read this story.  I try to remove years of indoctrination of fake love due to Indian movies and the media in general.  I know how young teenagers think.  And I want to tell them what REAL love is.  I want them to know that if they have intense love for Allah, then they will never be distressed over worldly love.  Genuine love consumes superficial love, and that is what God’s love did for the young boy’s heart.  It cleansed him of his attachment and replaced it with most fulfilling Love ever.  The reaction from the students to the story is always interesting…some of the girls actually get sad; they feel sorry for the young woman!  Others are just shocked and amazed.  The ending of the story is unique and unexpected.

On the topic of fake love and Indian movies:

                There was a time when I was obsessed with Indian movies.  My family and I used to watch them every week—one, two, or even three.  Honestly, my family is pretty Americanized, so it was my uncle who introduced the “Indian Movie” to us.  We were at his house one day, and he played Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.  I don’t know how it happened, but my brother and I got hooked.  We carried on my uncle’s legacy in our house, with the enthusiasm and willingness of my parents.  Whenever my family looks back at this phase in our life, we laugh and acknowledge how ignorant and crazy we were.  We haven’t seen an Indian movie since…maybe five-six years ago.  A lot of the reason for this is me.  I will explain. J

We used to go to the Selden House of Spice (an Indo-Pak grocery near our mosque) every week to rent movies.  Friday night we would sit in the family room and just kill time with our beloved movies.  We would be so excited to eat dinner and just sit and stare at the screen.  I still remember the opening lines of a lot of movies advertising “EROS International”.

Before I continue, I have to explain something.  I’m the kind of person that likes to analyze and dissect movies.  I can’t just watch it for entertainment; I can sit for hours after watching a movie and think about the plot, the characters, the scenes, everything.  OK, so there was this one movie that made me really upset.  I forget the name of it but I can still relate the plot:  A girl had fallen in love with a poor guy, and he reciprocated the love.  They get stranded on an island and there is a really beautiful song in which they realize that they both feel the same way about each other.  The guy helps the girl to survive until the girl’s dad discovers them on the island.  The dad realizes that his daughter is in love and tries to stop this by hiring an agent to kill the boy.  The agent chases the young boy in his car off a bridge where the boy falls into the water, hits his head against a rock, and falls to the bottom.  Later on the boy’s body is nowhere to be found.  The young boy’s family is very poor so now they have to struggle even more without financial help from the young boy.  The young boy’s younger brother is devastated without his older brother.

Distraught and depressed, the girl moves to Europe to live with her cousin.  Her cousin tries to make her move on but she has a hard time.  One day they both go to a club where the girl meets the star of the club who happens to look exactly (go figure) like the young boy back in India who died.  The movie continues on and eventually the young boy-look alike and the girl go back to India, figure out who killed her first love and put them in jail, and then she ends up marrying the young boy look-alike.  I don’t know why…but this movie really repulsed me.  I was so upset, how can she expect the European guy to replace the Indian guy she knew in the beginning?  They had dramatically different personalities and lifestyles (poverty vs wealth, Europe vs India).  Then it hit me, he looks like the young boy.  So in the end it was a shallow decision.  As stupid as it sounds, I was sad about this movie for about 3-4 days after seeing it.  I still lamented the death of the first guy.  My Indian friend in junior high laughed at me.  She said, “but the same actor came back to play the second guy”.  But to me, the first guy was DEAD.  GONE.  The boy with a sincere heart, the one who came from a poor, humble family.  Again, at that time I couldn’t watch a movie for entertainment; I watched it and entered the movie itself.  This was when I realized that Indian movies were having an effect on my heart…a purely negative one.  Now, Alhamdulilah, I watch movies for entertainment and waste a lot less time contemplating it.  In fact, I don’t even enjoy watching movies that much, I feel like it wastes my time.

Anyway, after this movie I started witnessing sooo many other flaws of Indian movies: how almost all the love stories are superficial and shallow, how the women always seem to be dancing to entice men, how the stars always have a certain shade of skin and belong to a certain class of India’s society, how the beauty and physical attractiveness of a woman is always in focus on the camera, how all the plots seem to be the same, how long the movies are, how often the love stories contain a really old guy and a young (18-25 year-old) woman, how the same main and beloved character to many was committing (what was to me) zina (fornication) with a different woman for each of his movies.  I began to feel uncomfortable watching these movies with my dad and brother.  I felt disgusting.  Then I noticed how Indian movies display a fake side of Indian society; India is not a rich country.  Why is it that at least one of the two main characters always live in an exotic mansion?  Bollywood is a multi-millionaire corporation.  What are they doing to elevate the poor?  What upset me the most, however, was the degradation of women.  Why was their beauty and wealth emphasized and glorified over their intellect and piety?  Why is their success based solely on their marriage and love status?  Why is there such a strong emphasis on love?  WHY ARE ALL THE MOVIES ABOUT LOVE?  Why should I waste time watching other people commit zina with their eyes, words, and sometimes even limbs if doing this in real life for me is forbidden?  What’s the point of watching something that I can’t do?  THERE IS NONE.

After Devdas and Yaadein I had had enough.  Devdas sickened me because the female protagonist used to practically worship her “love” five times a day, instead of praying to God five times a day.  Both of their lives are emotionally ruined because of what?  Love. Fake love.  Yaadein was just annoying.  Annoying, shallow, provocative, long.  I felt that the movies were spreading false ideas of love and attachment to people at a vulnerable age.  I had slowly developed a loathing towards Indian movies.  I harshly started to criticize them to my parents and my brother.  I told them to stop watching them.  At first they were annoyed, and then…I don’t know how it happened, but I think I indoctrinated them.  Especially my brother and my dad.  I somehow influenced them to hate Indian movies and now when I myself have toned down a lot ..they will still refuse to watch one.  I think my brother has finally toned down as well.  But anyway, I used to blame the ills of society on Indian movies.   Too many problems among the Muslim youth?  I would say, “It’s the Indian movies…they’re corrupting the youth.”  People not obeying their parents?  “It’s the Indian movies, the youth are being taught to obey their nafs.”  My parents soon started answering in my place; they would nod their head, already knowing that I was going to start a lecture on the ills of Indian movies.

So eventually we ceased to watch Indian movies, and around this time a sisters halaqah had begun Friday nights at my mosque.  My mother and I would go there instead, and there was a boys youth group that took up my brothers spare Friday nights.

Now I am much more tolerant of Indian movies.  Over the past five years I have matured and I realize that there is good and bad in everything, and that I should take the good and leave the bad.  Movies don’t have such a harsh impact on my heart anymore.  Alhamdulilah.  And part of the reason is that I understand what love is.  Love exists only for God.  Love between a couple comes with God’s blessing after a sincere marriage.  Sure, two people can think they love each other before they get married, but (according to my mom) their affections only grow and solidify after marriage.  Most “love” before marriage is actually infatuation and lust.  And the only REAL, satisfying, and nourishing love out there is Love for Allah.  The love we have for our parents, spouses, and friends are in fact branches of Love for Allah.

Shaykh Zulfiqar termed the “love” for worldly things as ‘Ishq Majazi (Metaphorical love) and the Love for Allah as ‘Ishq Haqiqi (Real Love).  Personally, I think (and there are many scholars who also say this) that the strong bond of love one feels towards a person of the opposite gender is only a sign (an ayah) pointing to the kind of bond that can exist between Allah and His servant.  Remember, everything on earth is a sign of Allah’s existence and His Reality.  In the end, the bond of love joining God and servant is immensely more satisfying and consuming that any worldly love.  A worldly love—‘Ishq Majazi—is short-lived and unsatisfying.

              The following passage from Love for Allah is a great description of ‘Ishq Majazi:

Once a man saw a beautiful woman and exclaimed, “I am in love with you and want only you!”  In reply she said, “My sister is coming behind me, and she is even prettier than me.”  As the man turned to look back, the woman struck him on the head with her shoe saying, “You liar!  If truly you loved me, then what need was there to look in any other direction?”

As much as we may refuse to admit it, we are all like this man.  We may love something one day, but once we see something better, something more beautiful, something more interesting, we will be so quick to drop the first one.  It’s sad.  I would like to think that I am different, but unfortunately this is how the Nafs Al Ammarra is.  Only until we have attained the level of Nafs al-Mutmaina will we be able to stop desiring what is better.  Ultimately the only better being is Allah.  He is as Best as it gets.  And His Greatness and Beauty is unfathomable to us.  Alhamdulilah.