Truthfulness to Ourselves:
Engaged, Transforming, Spirituality of Islam
Muslims in the modern world are in serious danger of being hoodwinked by the empty, deceptive concept of spirituality of the secular-liberal world. This new kind of liberal religion or spirituality takes pride in being irrelevant to real life. In fact, most new religions, and new versions of old religions, take pride in abandoning the idea of truth, let alone the Truth. They seek to create beautiful myths.
The name for spirituality in Islam is Taqwa. Unlike the new-age spirituality, in which being spiritual means to be a bit light-headed, a little out of touch with reality, given to irrational, romantic myths, Taqwa is to be profoundly aware of the Truth. Our spirituality must be truthful, intelligent spirituality, Taqwa, not the false, feel-good, zombie-like spirituality that is in vogue today.
Taqwa is to be aware with such intensity that that awareness, which originates in the mind through rational knowledge of Allah, the Ultimate Truth, bursts through and reflects on the heart and the physical body.
Taqwa, the Quranic concept of spirituality, therefore, is a force that shapes real life as much as it connects the human being to the Eternal Truth. We must be aware of the world around us and of the challenges that face us, without being daunted and overwhelmed by them.
Muslims around the world, it is hard to deny, are in a state of crisis. Our faith, our identity, our unity, our history, and our future arc all at stake. The enemies of Islam have gathered around us, inviting each other to take a piece of the hapless but disunited and, it would appear, defeated Ummah. We have become, as the Prophet said like froth on the surface of the ocean, a well-known hadeeth, graded as hasan saheeh, narrated by Ahmad and others. The reason for our weakness, the Hadeeth tells us, is ~"the love of this world and the hatred of death."~~ The Quran and other Hadeeths establish for us that there is nothing wrong with loving life and hating death, and that it is a natural human impulse. But this becomes a debilitating weakness when the love of this transient world is so strong that it overwhelms the love for the Truth, and the hatred of death is so strong, because one has done nothing to prepare for what is to come after, that it overwhelms the hatred for falsehood.
When Sulaymaan ibn Abd al-Maalik visited Madeenah and asked a revered Taabi `i (Successor, from the generation after the Companions of the Prophet, sallallaahu alavhi wa sallam), Abu Hazim: "Why is it that we hate death?" He said, "You have built up this world and ruined the Hereafter, and so you hate going from what you have built up to what you have ruined."
Islamic spirituality is not to flee from the world, but to subdue it and transform it. Islamic spiritual progress is not opposed to the actual earthly life. Rather, unlike in misguided religions, in Islam the two are connected. It is the momentum of spiritual and worldly excellence created by the Prophet and his Companions, may Allah be pleased with them, that led to the scientific and material progress of Baghdad, Cordoba, and Samarqand for centuries. Even though the material progress was not the immediate goal of the prophetic mission, the integrity, unity, truthfulness, selflessness, discipline, and intellectual clarity given by Islam provided the basis on which Muslims could lead and conquer in any field of life. Therefore, the first step in conquering our crisis of spirituality and worldly prosperity and conquer we can and we must is to accept the responsibility for changing our state, as believers and as the Muslim community.
Allah Almighty Says (what means): #{Allah does not change the state of people until they change what is within themselves.}## [Quran 13:1 1].
Truthfulness to ourselves requires that we acknowledge and understand our crisis, and not try to bury it under a spate of conspiracy theories and pointing fingers. We must understand the nature of our crisis in proper context.
Muslims, perhaps, are not the ones who are in the biggest crisis. Our responsibility is greater, yet our solution is in our hands. The entire human race is in a state of much bigger crisis. There is barely any intelligent observer who disputes that while humans have made great leaps of technological progress in the last couple of centuries, our inner world has become darker. We are more satisfied but less content. More pleasured but less happy. More communicated but less connected. We have more food but less satiation.
More technology but less ability. Meaning and purpose of life have diminished, if not vanished. Lives are longer and more satisfied but reasons to live are scant and unclear. Commentators the world over call this the "crisis of spirituality," which engulfed much of the latter half of the last century. The world has become full of facts, but there are no ultimate truths. People across the globe, in particular in developed, industrialized countries, are in a desperate search for meaning in life.
In modern societies, the true religion is "here and now," which comes under many covers: In philosophy, existentialism or humanism; in economics, capitalism; and in politics, secularism. This new "deen" of the modern world has reduced the job of traditional religions to a soothing myth-making. Spirituality is seen as one of the luxurious human needs, like the need for artistic expression or entertainment. In this brave new world, the job of old-style religions that speak of God and truths is sort of a hybrid between garbage-collection and entertainment. That is, religion is supposed to be important in rehabilitating inmates and misguided youth while giving an extra touch to family reunions and providing soothing myths to make real life easy.
Muslims must resist this new religion of self-worship in a truth-less onslaught that has nearly engulfed the entire world. We are the only ones who can resist it. Our resistance must be determined, learned, critical, systematic, and engaged. Our resistance must be part and parcel of our spirituality, our piety, our Taqwa. If we want to move toward God, we have to swim upstream, and if we are not aware that the stream is moving against our destination, and how much and in what direction we must struggle, we might end up moving downstream, away from our goal.