My Rambling Musing I

The new semester has arrived. My last semester result is not out yet, but I am not really looking forward to it as I don’t think I did excellent – won’t be too bad either, insyaAllah. Note: I am usually, fairly fatalistic, so nothing to worry about. What’s important right now is to set my priorities right and to find the right balance with my responsibilities and interests – oh yeah, I am a person with multiple interests, and the hardest thing for me is perhaps to really concentrate on one thing at a time.

It is true that it is easy to find a person who hops from one thing to another in an ad hoc manner, but it is a rarity to find someone who is really good at what he or she is doing. That is why grandmasters are envied by many and they are hard to come by – it takes a lot of hard work, rigorous training, and a lot of sweat to produce one. Having said that, I am not negating the need to master multiple skills and knowledge, what I am saying is we should not fall into the trap of ‘jack-of-all-trade-but-master-at-none’. Of course it will be terrific if we can actually be master of multiple disciplines – I hope to be one of those in the future – berangan.

Now back to reality. I need to brush up my C++ skill for this semester and not to mention: Study hard… And Smart? How smart can you get?

I don’t know why, but I find it pretty hard to memorize formulas, facts, and even people’s name nowadays – important stuff. Somehow I have the uncanny ability to memorize strange things and small details that other people tend to forget – unfortunately these memories are not so beneficial, although it can be helpful at rare times. The theory about one's spiritual state affects one's memory is an interesting one. The memory power of the people during the prophetic and pious predecessors time was extraordinary, as Mary Carruthers, author of The Book of Memory writes, "ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories."1 That brings the question – or rather my paranoia and self-made-up excuse – about how dyslexia affects me nowadays? I no longer write sentences in mirror images, nor do I confuse ‘p’ with ‘q’ or ‘3’ with ‘8.’ I seem perfectly normal nowadays… But I thought my vision was perfectly fine too when actually I needed a pair of glasses.

I’ve been reading studies about theories of memory but it seems that we are still playing the guessing game on how we remember and how we forget. Maybe it’s just me who fail to understand those well-written treatises on this subject. What I can say is “EP” and ”HM” are scary… I hope I can be “AJ.” How do I train a seahorse, or in other word, a hippocampus? What does it mean when you have your neuropathways hardwired in strange ways - dyslexic? They say you get creative people, but deficient in certain aspects – seems familiar. Hope there will be some fatah for me, insyaAllah. On practical solution, maybe I should learn how to use mind maps more effectively to aid me in my studies – after all I think I am a visual learner and I believe my thinking is more conceptual. Note: Change of topic for the next paragraph.

Sometimes I feel like drowning… Sometimes I feel like I am in no man’s land. The voice inside me will say, “Who cares? Well they don’t, it’s your own problem, you have to stand by your own.” Then that voice will add, “It's ok, as long as He is not mad with me.” Now this argument seems familiar. Strange how sometimes I give people advice, but truthfully I myself don’t have the strength when I am in such predicament. Nothing strange perhaps, it’s called moral support – we do that to other people even though sometimes we ourselves have no idea what the solution to the problem really is.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.2

When one sets sail to the sea, it is important to read the stars properly, to have the right compass so that one does not get confuse with his or her direction. I hope that my compass is showing the real North Star. One should only expect that there will be thunderstorms and big tidal waves in the vast, silent seas of uncharted territories. Until then…

“I seek refuge with the glory of Your light, which the heavens and earth are lit form, Your anger will not befall on me, nor Your displeasure descends on me. To You is the supplication until You are pleased, and there is no control or power except by You.”3

Footnotes:-

1. Memory: Why We Remember, Why We Forget by Joshua Foer, National Geographic November 2007.

2. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (verses 111-119), T.S. Eliot 1917.

3. A portion of dua Taif incident by Rasulullah s.a.w. (I can't remember the specific chain of narration. Sorry for that.)

Our Current Condition, Our Glorious Past, And The Need For The Two Transformations

Our Current Condition
We live in a time where our community is in the state of ghafla (heedless). A time where our youth waste their precious early life with playing meaningless video games, which is the black hole of our modern society – an activity whose substance is complete nothingness. Our time spend in seclusion used to mean our time spend in remembrance of Allah, but now it means our time spend on watching vulgar images and videos in front of our computers. Today, our heartlands and our hearts are subjugated by inward and outward forces that make us submit to created things, as oppose to Islam’s mission to free us from these powers by submitting to the Creator of things. We should feel ashamed of ourselves when we talk about ‘adab or akhlak, as we no longer personify these noble concepts; in fact, nowadays other communities embody those concepts way better than us. As Syaikh Hamza Yusuf eloquently puts, “generally speaking, we are powerless, bereft, morally bankrupt – objects of history rather than subject of history, as were our pious predecessors who engaged the world with the power of truth and dispelled darkness with their spiritual light.”1

Haven’t we heard about our Prophet’s s.a.w. prayer:-

“O Allah, I seek refuge in you from grief and anxiety, impotence and indolence, cowardice and miserliness, and from being overcome by debt and overpowered by men”2

Our Glorious Past
Dr. Umar Faruq Abdallah stressed the importance for us to put some wind into our sail of ‘memory ship’, so that we have role models from our glorious past, which we can derive our inspirations from. I believe we should study figures in our tradition, especially those who are closest to us in terms of personality, expert field, background, etc. Our role models should be people who are proven to be “serious about their lives” and rightly-guided – we have a lot of people who are like that in our glorious past and some in the present. Having said that, we should not get all hung up with our past, and blame our current condition entirely to ‘others’ fault and get ourselves engross with multiple conspiracy theories that will give us no benefits.

Hamza Yusuf spoke in his lecture, Reviving The Spirit of Andalusia:-
“Our challenge as Muslims is to determine how best we can revive the ability for Islam to work with the great challenges of our time, the great transformations of our time, using the past as our compass. We must recognize that we are in the present, on a journey into the future, and the past is our North Star. We must see the principles of the past and derive strength from our past, but we must also able to reconcile with the fact that we are modern people”

Inner Transformation
Syaikh Hamza Yusuf starts his book, Agenda to Change Our Condition with the topic Taqwa, which highlights his stress on inner transformation - through spiritual struggle with the soul - as a requisite to transform our ailing condition.

There are five stations of taqwa according to Imam Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi:
- guarding against disbelief – this is the station of submission;
- guarding against forbidden things – this is the station of repentance;
- guarding against doubtful matters – this is the station of scrupulousness;
- guarding against extraneous matters – this is the station of freedom (zuhd);
- guarding against other than Allah occupying the heart – this is the station of vigilance.3

Regarding the theory of five stations propounded by Ibn Juzayy, he said that our community is suffering because the vast majority of us are only at the first or second station, and the benefits of taqwa will spread in our communities only if a critical mass of Muslims commits to moving to the third and fourth stations. In other words, we need to be serious about attaining scrupulousness and zuhd – as was the case for the prophetic and pious predecessors’ communities – if the beauty of Islam is to be truly embodied by the ummah again. Zuhd4 is not a complete avoidance of the world. It is when you have dunya in you hand, but not in your heart. So are we up to the task in elevating our stations at the very least to the third station – and beyond?

“Had only the people of the cities believed and had taqwa, We would have opened up for them blessings from the heavens and the earth” (Qur’an 7:96).

Outer Transformation
Outer transformation is about the struggle with the derogatory aspects of the society, which means upholding social justice and promoting a culture that embodies moral behavior. The inner transformation and the outer transformation should come hand-in-hand – we must change ourselves first before we seek to change the world. If we ourselves are corrupted, then we don’t have the moral authority to change others. Syaikh Hamza Yusuf stresses the need for civic involvement in our behalf as part of our effort to improve the world that we live in. I would like to quote an excerpt of Agenda To Change Our Condition that addresses the issue of cooperation because I think it is relevant to most of us – especially me, maybe, in my disarray:-

“This religion is based on recognizing the abilities of the believers that constitute the ummah and facilitating the use of their respective gifts. We need to understand that if one person focuses upon an area of concern, he or she is complementing our own work and not detracting from it by not joining us. We should not see other Muslims, either individuals or organized groups, as competitors or antagonists. Rather, we should see them as brothers and sisters and either work with them or work separately with amicable relations, the least of which is giving them the greeting of peace with a smile.

Islamic work through diverse organizations should never be the basis for negating the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood established between us by Islam. When that happens, we are no longer doing Islamic work but are engaged in politics. We should speak well of other organizations or be silent about them. Once we recognize that most of them are engaged in different aspect of the same struggle, we come to respect their efforts. If some appear to be misguided, then we should offer counsel and pray for them. If they have deviant positions or beliefs, then we should request that qualified scholars clarify with clear proofs what those deviations are.

We ought to keep in mind that Mosses a.s. was commanded to go to Pharaoh and speak to him a gentle word (Qur’an 20:44). Remembering that we are not more righteous than Mosses a.s. and that our brother is certainly not father astray than Pharaoh, we can approach the matter with gentle humility and a genuine desire for the well-being and guidance of all.

In addition, we should avoid labeling other people or groups as Salafi, Sufi, or Wahhabi, for example, as these engender animosity. Name-calling is condemned in the Qur’an, if the intention is contempt. If the intention is to elucidate a position, then we must examine our intention and also our level of understanding.” 5

I would like to note that my reference for this article is mainly Agenda To Change Our Condition by Syaikh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir. If the reader finds ideas in this article as interesting then pray read that book as it covers these topics in-depth.

Let's change our condition!

Footnotes:-
1. Ibn Juzayy, al-Tahsil (Beirut: Dar al-Arqam, n.d.) I:69.
2. Sahih al-Bukhari [7:158]
3. Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir, Agenda to Change Our Condition (Zaytuna Institute 2007) pg 2
4. A decent page that explains Zuhd: http://www.sunnahonline.com/ilm/purification/0067.htm 5. Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir, Agenda to Change Our Condition (Zaytuna Institute 2007) pg 18-19.