I blame my parents…My mother I tell her face to face that I blame you…Not disrespectfully, but as a matter of fact for having me lead a life of nothingness…Why was I not taught about my Faith? Why was I not made to be interested in Islam, the teachings of the Quran and the Ahadith…?
For most of my life I have gone through life in pain, doubts and uncertainty…Unhappiness had clouded my every thought and justification for an action…Anything I did was to please myself and chasing pleasures to search for that elusive peace of mind that only the fortunate are bestowed with…
How many times in feelings of despondency and desperation have I thought about killing myself, running away or at least becoming an invalid…Everyone has pity for an invalid…I could whine and nobody would mind…I knew suicide was Haram, so I would imagine and wish for a daaku or a robber to ask me for my money by pointing his gun at me, to which I would refuse and he would kill me…No suicide there…Maybe while walking down the road, someone would mow me down with their car…No suicide there either…
Such a wasted life of confusion…Always questioning, doubting asking myself if any action I am doing is right or wrong…What would others think if I did this or that…No surety, just doubts and self-doubts and genuinely fake smiles…
In my search for peace, I fell in love with books…I scoured book stalls for books I could dive into and surface with a pearl or pearls of wisdom that would bring me some sort of peace…I found them, only to disintegrate a little later…Buddhism, Daoism, Bible even parts of the Puranas…Nothing…
Alhumdulillah, 9/11 happened…Until that time, I hadn’t opened up the Quran much and practically knew nothing about the Ahadith…Islam started getting a lot of exposure and came in the limelight…So said to myself, well, I am born a Muslim, so why not see what it has to say about life?
So I got to the local Masjid, took out a book of selected Ahadith from the shelf, and the first Hadith I ever read was:
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Being somewhat of an environmentalist, it struck me deeply…No other religion mentions being an environmentalist or being Earth conscious…I kept reading more and then I wept…
As I read more and more a picture appeared to me as to for whom the Quran and Ahadith are meant for…They were meant for me and my thoughts…They were for someone sensitive and who cared deeply to what happens around them and what they are supposed to do at what time…To eliminate confusion and to strengthen me in the belief, that I may be alone on Earth, but I am not alone in :Allah:'s Kingdom…
The teachings of the Quran and Ahadith were meant for someone with a meek, confused and humble spirit…They were meant to strengthen the spirit and to dissipate confusion, to form an identity based on a Belief…They were meant to instill in me fearlessness, even if the world should oppose me and I would still come out smiling…They were meant to bring peace to the aching heart, and the words just sank in…
No wonder that the first of Islam’s adherents were the harried and the harrowed, the meek, the gentle, the weak, the subdued, the forlorn and the beaten…Even today, the message of Islam keeps bringing solace and comfort to many who approach its teachings with the will to absorb and curiosity…
The illiterate, the hardened, the boisterous, the loud, the pushers and the aggresors will never find Islam to be to their liking…Islam is a religion for those who have a gentle soul, yet it gives them the strength to stand against any force the earth is willing to pit against them…The hard-hearted are like a rock…When raindrops fall on them they are deflected with the same force, yet those with a gentle spirit are like fertile soil…When a seed of knowledge is planted, it sprouts to bestow its own fruits of knowledge…
So I have set out on this journey of knowledge for my Faith…I still blame my parents for all the years of misguided and depressing years of my life, but this time, they smile, because I too am smiling when I say it…
May Allah :swt: give all the Muslims the understanding of True Islamic Faith, Ameen, Summa Ameen…
