What's Life All About?

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate
Assalaamu alaykum

Dear Friends

I pray that you are well.

Our life is about submission to the Will of Allah. We are expected to submit whether we know the "goodness" of the command or not. It is not acceptable for people to violate what Allah wants from them. Violating Allah's instructions is violating His purpose.

"I did not create man and jinn except to worship Me." Qur'an Zariyat 51:56

Intellect is able to tell right from wrong but this understanding is based on the assumption that matters are intrinsically right or wrong. Neither did God make them such nor the intellect. Rather the intellect discerns this innate goodness or badness in human acts. How can we be sure that what we feel good is good with Allah and what we feel bad is bad with Allah?

Good is that which is pleasing to Allah, that which results in an eternal rank with Allah. Bad is the opposite. There is a Truth that is behind Divine commands. Violating this Truth and acting contrary to Allah's commands has dreadful consequences like in the story of the People of Sabbath in the Qur'an.

We know that life is a blessing and taking it away is going against this. It is wrong to kill someone. Everyone knows that oppression is wrong. Denying one of his basic right to live is an oppression. So, we are sure that to kill someone is wrong. But Ibrahim, Allah grant him peace, was commanded by God to sacrifice his only son, Ismail, and he obeyed the command. It was a good act to offer his son in sacrifice. The Abrahamic way is complete surrender and submission. Whatever Allah wants, Ibrahim was there to surrender. This is the essence of religion--humble slavehood. His Lord rewarded him and made him a father of prophets.

We can understand the intent of God only through Allah telling us. The mind cannot know the intent of God. The mind is not the final source for right and wrong. It is a source of reasoning for the basis of religious belief.

People have values that they see to be universal and these values for them are so universal that they can't imagine not being right in everything. When they see to the contrary they do everything in their power to re-interpret the text. There is an essential problem because we need to know what Allah wants from us, not to know what we want Allah to be telling us about.

"It is not for any believer man or woman, when God and His Messenger have decreed a matter, to have the choice in the affair. Whosoever disobeys God and His Messenger has gone astray into manifest error." Qur'an Ahsab 33:36

If we interpret the law based on our own sense of right and wrong then where do we we draw the line?

"...And who is more astray than he who follow his caprice without any guidance from Allah..." Qur'an Qasas 28:50

Allah is All Wise. His commandments have wisdom. Some of these are discernible to us, some are not. Our feelings or sense of worth are meaningless. Look at where Iblis ended up because he wanted to follow his own sense instead of following Allah's command to prostrate to Adam.

Ibn Khaldun says about the intellect, "Follow what the lawgiver has commanded you of beliefs and practices for He is more keen on your felicity than you, and more aware of what benefits you than you; because it is from a realm higher than yours, and a source more expansive than yours. There is not to detract from the intellect and its insights for the intellect is a true scale, its judgments are certain, no error in it, but you cannot hope to weigh in it...what is beyond its realm for that is hoping for the impossible. That is like the case of a man who saw a weighing scale that is used for weighing a gold and then hopes to weigh with it a mountain--this does not mean that the scale is wrong, but the intellect has a level that it cannot bypass."

The point is not that the mind can tell right or wrong but to bring revelation to the forefront and align ourselves to it.

May Allah guide us and all the Muslims. Ameen. Please keep us in your night prayers. Jazakallahu khairan.

And Allah knows best.

Wassalaam