The Abandoned Character

In an authentic hadith prophet (PBUH) said: “Have mercy on all of the mankind and the one in the heavens will show mercy to you” This is the first hadith taught in the schools of religion from the very beginning of time. When we go through the history of Kashmir through books and ask older people about their early life, we see the main characteristics of Kashmiri people were love and mercy for each other. The stories of how if one home in neighborhood would cook meat, they would share with neighbors, this was not only because the people in early times were poor but because the love people had for each other made it possible. Looking at our society today, finding mercy in people would be very difficult. We’ve developed hate for each other in our hearts and thus making our hearts sick. Our hearts are suffering from the sickness of hate and vengeance. If we look at the Muslim countries that are well educated like Turkey and Indonesia, we observer people have mercy and show patience and this is because of their education. Ignorance leads to violence and violence is not a character taught in the Islamic scripture or in the sunnah of our Prophet (PBUH). If someone harms us, we don’t harm back.          Merely taking out processions and waving green flags is not the love for our prophet (SAW), the love is when we adopt his character and act the way he acted. Our hearts have been blackened by all these poisonous stuff they fed to our brains by these tools of mass media. They have cultivated our minds in such a terrible way that we admire violent movies and videos. In psychology it’s called “The priming effect”. When our minds are shown something continuously, we tend to practice those things in real life and in this case the violence is not only verbally taught to us, but it’s being fed to us through all our main senses i.e. eyes and ears thus having a major impact on our lifestyles. People today fight each other for pride (I am not going to look like a loser, I’m going to show you who I am) this is pride and we should realize that pride only suits Allah the lord of the worlds.

With majority of Muslims, Kashmir must reflect Islamic teachings in every aspect. I acknowledge the fact that because being a conflicted area, the minds here are vulnerable and volatile but that’s where the test really begins. We ought to show patience because the real patience that Allah wants us to show is when the actual calamity befalls us.

   

According to Fakruddin al Razi, “Islam is serving the creator and having mercy to his creation.” Keeping this in mind a believer can live his life beautifully and peacefully. Ibn Qayyim al Jazuiyah said “Islam is mercy, wisdom, benefit and justice”. So if it goes from mercy to cruelty, from wisdom to stupidity, from benefit to harm and from justice to oppression, it is not Islam. We have to be merciful to others, provide benefit to people, be just to everyone, act with wisdom and we can only act with wisdom if we have knowledge, so it all comes to knowledge. We need to attain knowledge in order to act according to the core values of Islam.

Recently a person called me and informed me about a scuffle that had taken place in his neighborhood; a person’s head was smashed with a rod and that too in the month of Ramdhan. Seriously, where are we heading? We have to read about the lives of great people in our tradition, for instance look at Emir Abdul Qadir al Jazairi, he was imprisoned by the French colonizers and every French guard in the prison admired him and accepted Islam only because of his character. We have to attain that character if we want our society and our lives to get any better. The materialism fed to us has made us forget our being and we no more act as human beings and this is only because we don’t attain knowledge anymore.

The fear of Allah is the beginning of wisdom and wisdom is to act appropriately during a particular situation. Knowing the teachings of Allah and knowing how and where to apply is hikmah (Knowledge). Prophet (PBUH) said “I leave you with two things, the book of Allah and my way (Sunnah) hold on to these two things and you’ll never go astray”. We must know that his way is the wisdom. We were given the covenant and when covenant is abandoned, calamities befall us. May Allah make us from the people of knowledge and forbearance.

Author is a journalism student

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