These past three months, I have been torn, I will admit as much here.
For a long while, I used to be a follower. I used to follow the crowd; try hard to fit in. Someone once asked me, “I thought you said you didn’t care what people thought of you."
Right I didn't.
Early this year, I came back to Melbourne, finding that once again, the kaleidoscope with which I viewed the world had changed. I had visited reality - it wasn't pretty, but that reality was mine. And I knew that certain things that I had taken for granted - from this point on, they had to be questioned and re-evaluated.
And so I tried to tread my own way – to listen to the 'real' me inside, that I seemed to have lost touch with some time ago. The one that didn’t like mindless conformity. The one who questioned before judging, and definitely before accepting. The one who balanced everything with moderation. For Muslims, we walk the middle path between two extremes, the Furqan as our guide.
And I learnt that just because I didn’t think like everyone else, did not mean that tolerance was out of the question.
It’s true, at times I feel almost singled out. I feel like I am the weird one for questioning and searching for answers. I feel like an outsider, for not necessarily adhering to the societal mores (for I feel like I never have, anyway).
So I see my past lives (for I have had several), and know that God has prepared me to be a ghuraba’ either way – to be a stranger, walking foreign lands.
Political theory has always been my thing. And so I delved into it. Bediuzzaman Said Nursi once wrote in one of his many treatises, “...a person sometimes gets carried away by paying attention to the enticing broad sphere of politics and conflict.”
And yes. I was carried away by it, for a long while. I started looking into everything and anything at the same time. Somewhere along the way, I lost focus, despite my eye always on the main aim (my darling housemates made sure I had my head stuck in reality). I became wide-eyed by big names and ideals, which though pressing nonetheless, had sucked me in and whirled my mind.
All of a sudden, talk and action was all that mattered.
And so alhamdulillah, a little bit of dialogue occurred not too long ago, which had me seriously considering the balance between the mind and the heart. A fellow blogger I had come across had negated my opinion, which was that the dealings of the human heart (in its spiritual form) sometimes held higher importance when it came to matters of religion. His claim that even traditional scholars had not classified the mind and the heart unsettled me.
Not confident of my own knowledge, I turned to a learned and trustworthy friend for clarification.
Just the other day, I managed to catch him for a brief discussion on the topic. And having braced myself for his blatant, uncompromising honesty (which, I had thought, might be amazed at my incredible ignorance), I asked him about the theoretical separation between the intellectual mind and the spiritual heart in the context of Islamic spirituality. We discussed the work he had recommended me, which was Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine’s dissection about the Muslim’s understanding of the position of the heart and the mind as mentioned in the Qur’an. And I asked him if my understanding was right; that the heart and the mind, in all its simplistic terms, had equal credence in understanding religion.
“Well, you know, the mind is definitely important… it’s just that the heart, it’s more so.”
And that sentence, more than anything else, struck a chord within. They were simple words, yes, but they related to me more than so many other things I had heard these past three months – the ideologies and the huge plans. All the political theory I had been keen on digesting sounded impressive, and no doubt they made me think, but they did not fill the little furrow that was beginning to dig deeper within me. By instinct, I felt that his words were true.
After discussing the study of Imam al-Ghazzali’s Ihya’ Ulumuddin with him, it dawned on me just how much I have been neglecting that most important part of my life – the spiritual one - that part of religion that the secular world despises for its ability to transcend minds, and expand the soul.
And I suppose that Banoffee, in all her maternal concern for me, had it right:
“Sometimes, when you don’t feel at ease with yourself, when your heart is uneasy, ask yourself time and again – how is my relationship with Allah? For if that part of your life is good, then everything else should be as well.”
Allahu'alam bithawab.
Labels: qalb, self-reflections