20. THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

                                                                             

Seize any morning news spread you get your hand at and gaze around for the swift headlines, and just tell me what you get there. You would agree with me, for sure, that the whole life on this earth is all balled up, totally packed up with rattled and fussed up incidents. Yep!Innocent kids easily sucked in gun culture, run spilling innocent blood all over their studying classrooms. Small pretty angels taken at gunpoint and molested and gang raped and murdered for gains.

Bullying gays, hefty lesbians, lusty pimps,mobsters,hooligans, and number one frauds would be seen flag marching on the public highways. Pedophiles abducting small children for their sinful bouncy-bouncy dry runs, half-naked and poor teenage girls traded publicly for one nightstand, baby faced boys covertly hijacked to be fervently shot at the backdoor. Public figures in higher echelon, we see indulging in lowly and shameful aberrant activities in the public places as sacred as the parliament houses.

 Abduction, abdication, dishonesty of the highest order, we see, inherent in every stage of the government machinery. Smuggling, drug pedaling  trafficking,  squandering of the public treasury by the greedy and ferocious hands are daily routine. Gambling to easily amass wealth is the major news feed today. brothers plotting to kill brothers to get hold of their wealth is a daily incident.“The world is too much with us,” said William Wordsworth. It is time we apply instant brake on it.

My dear dad and as well as my devout ancestors had an answer as to how the brake could be applied to this sinful worldliness. To my dad and so to my ancestors the Islamic Aqaaids and the iman were the total essentials on which the whole lot else was to be structured. If there was blotch in either of these two key grounds, they interpreted that the total life was futile and off track. They chose to display that the life, Allah had prearranged for us was provisional abode on this earth with “a purpose and principle.” He has created us and immensely provided us with all sustenance so that we could live a blissful divine life with all his blessings. We are powerless and quite dependent on him for everything. Whatever we think we do here is his doing and that was already predestined. Everything goes according to his will within the framework of freewill and destiny.

This life, dad would tell, was a trying place like a school. The life here is trivial, full of treachery, envy and selfishness. It is just transitory and temporary and Allah would in conclusion evaluate our free willed actions in accordance with the measure Allah has predetermined. To everyone according to ones actions Allah would award as to how one had fared in the school. The hereafter would be an everlasting dwelling where the good and the god-fearing would live eternally in joyfulness and serenity.

For this cause this life on this earth, they taught us, was nothing but a “Maya-like-nothing” and that we should make every enterprise to organize ourselves for the everlasting abode to come; taking less serious view of this mundane world. This ideology would definitely make us to less identify ourselves with this worldly life alone and seek to balance our life in this world meaningfully.

Allah, his Messenger, the Koran, Islam and the Shariah consequently should come before the whole lot else. Iman, worship, fasting, zakah, hajj and a life as per the code of shariah was to be the foremost and most important for a Muslim than anything else in this world. This would make him live a peaceful life away from greediness luxury and sinister courses. Everything else was only secondary, inferior and insignificant. If one says that this was radical and zealous, then we are joyful to be identified so.