February 23, 12:37 am

I found myself praying for peace today.
I've been in and out of my mind a thousand times
I know You heard me.
I know I wasn't alone in that room,
shaking with the fear of fear,
the harrowing loneliness.
I cried out to You on my hands. On my knees.
With my face pushed down against the ground.
If I could have gotten lower, I swear I would.
Because that is helplessness, the truest kind…
The kind that knows nothing, not one leaf, or tear, or smile can be
without Him.
I learned something today.
Again.
This is dunya. Dunya. Not a place of ease. Only glitter.
The place where you have to feel cold and hungry.
The place where you have to worry and feel scared.
The place where it gets cold.
So cold, sometimes.
The place where you have to leave the people you love.
Where you can’t get attached, because even if you do, it doesn’t make it stay, it just makes it hurt when it doesn’t.
The place where happiness and sadness are only players, waiting for their next line in a play…
Competing for their place on stage.
The place where gravity makes you fall, and frailty makes you bleed.
The place where sadness exists, because it must.
And tears fall to remind you of a place where they don’t.
Where they just don’t.

And isn’t that just it? Isn’t jennah that place after all,
that place that Allah describes over and over and over in 2 ways?:
La khawfun alayhim wa la hum yahzanoon…
On them shall be no fear…nor shall they grieve.

But I’m still here, aren’t I?
The scar on my flesh reminds me of that.
The burn on my arm left a scar that I love.
I love it because it reminds me how weak I am.
How human.
That I burn. That I bleed. That I break. That I scar.
Yes. It is here that I am. Here that I fall. Here that I cry.
Here, just the same, that You filled that room, and lifted me to humbleness, and an acute knowledge of my own powerlessness and excruciating need for You.
And then you took care of it.
Of course You did.
Of course.
Like Younus, and Musa, and his mother. You took care of it.
You are the Peace of the peaceful.
The Strength of the strong.
The lighthouse of Truth in this storm of lies.
So, I found myself praying for peace today.

Is this love that I'm feeling?

Is this love that I’m feeling?
By: Yasmin Mogahed

“Love is a serious mental disease.” At least that’s how Plato put it. And while anyone who’s ever been ‘in love’ might see some truth to this statement, there is a critical mistake made here. Love is not a mental disease. Desire is.

If being ‘in love’ means our lives are in pieces and we are completely broken, miserable, utterly consumed, hardly able to function, and willing to sacrifice everything, chances are it’s not love. Despite what we are taught in popular culture, true love is not supposed to make us like drug addicts.

And so, contrary to what we’ve grown up watching in movies, that type of all-consuming obsession is not love. It goes by a different name. It is hawa—the word used in the Quran to refer to one’s lower, vain desires and lusts. Allah describes the people who blindly follow these desires as those who are most astray: “But if they answer you not, then know that they only follow their own lusts (hawa). And who is more astray than the one who follows his own lusts, without guidance from Allah?” (28: 50)

By choosing to submit to our hawa over the guidance of Allah, we are choosing to worship those desires. When our love for what we crave is stronger than our love for Allah, we have taken that which we crave as a lord. Allah says: “Yet there are men who take (for worship) others besides Allah, as equal (with Allah): They love them as they should love Allah. But those of Faith are overflowing in their love for Allah.” (2:165)

If our ‘love’ for something makes us willing to give up our family, our dignity, our self-respect, our bodies, our sanity, our peace of mind, our deen, and even our Lord who created us from nothing, know that we are not ‘in love’. We are slaves.

Of such a person Allah says: “Do you see such a one as takes his own vain desires (hawa) as his lord? Allah has, knowing (him as such), left him astray, and sealed his hearing and his heart, and put a cover on his sight. (45: 23)

Imagine the severity. To have one’s sight, hearing and heart all sealed. Hawa is not pleasure. It is a prison. It is a slavery of the mind, body and soul. It is an addiction and a worship. Beautiful examples of this reality can be found throughout literature. In Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Pip exemplifies this point. In describing his obsession with Estella, he says: “I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

Dickens' Miss Havisham describes this further: "I'll tell you…what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter - as I did!"

What Miss Havisham describes here is in fact real. But it is not real love. It is hawa. Real love, as Allah intended it, is not a sickness or an addiction. It is affection and mercy. Allah says in His book: “And among His Signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves, that you may dwell in tranquility with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts): verily in that are Signs for those who reflect.” (30: 21)

Real love brings about calm—not inner torment. True love allows you to be at peace with yourself and with God. That is why Allah says: “that you may dwell in tranquility.” Hawa is the opposite. Hawa will make you miserable. And just like a drug, you will crave it always, but never be satisfied. You will chase it to your own detriment, but never reach it. And though you submit your whole self to it, it will never bring you happiness.

So while ultimate happiness is everyone’s goal, it is often difficult to see past the illusions and discern love from hawa. One fail-safe way, is to ask yourself this question: Does getting closer to this person that I ‘love’ bring me closer to—or farther from—Allah? In a sense, has this person replaced Allah in my heart?

True or pure love should never contradict or compete with one’s love for Allah. It should strengthen it. That is why true love is only possible within the boundaries of what Allah has made permissible. Outside of that, it is nothing more than hawa, to which we either submit or reject. We are either slaves to Allah, or slaves to our hawa. It cannot be both.

Only by struggling against false pleasure, can we attain true pleasure. They are by definition mutually exclusive. For that reason, the struggle against our desires is a prerequisite for the attainment of paradise. Allah says: “But as for him who feared standing before his Lord, and restrained himself from impure evil desires and lusts. Verily, Paradise will be his abode.” (79: 40-41)

Love is in the air

Love is in the air
By: Yasmin Mogahed
Readingislam.com

Love is in the air. Or at least that’s what advertisers want you to think this month. While it’s nice to express your love often, Valentine’s Day comes once a year to give you no choice. And for the owners of floral boutiques and chocolate shops, Eid comes in February.

But even amidst such commercialized affections, one can hardly keep from thinking about those they love. And while we do so, we are inevitably faced with some ultimate questions.

I was reminded of those questions when I reflected on something a friend of mine had told me. She was describing how it felt to be with the person she loved. In her words, the whole world disappeared when they were together. The more I reflected on her statement, the more it affected me, and the more it made me wonder.

We as humans are made to feel love and attachment towards others. This is part of our human nature. But what I realized was, we can feel this way about another human being, but 5 times a day we enter into a meeting with our Lord and Creator. I wondered how often we ever felt the whole world disappear while in His presence. Can we really claim that our love for Allah is greater than our love for anyone, and anything else?

So often we think that Allah only tests us with hardships. But that's not true. Allah also tests with ease. He tests us with ni’am (blessings) and with the things we love. And it is often in these tests that so many of us fail. We fail because when Allah gives us these blessings, we unwittingly turn them into false idols of the heart.

When Allah blesses us with money, we depend on the money, rather than Allah. We forget that the source of our provision is not, and never was the money—but rather the giver of that money. Suddenly we’re willing to sell alcohol to avoid losing money in our business, or we need to take out loans with interest to feel secure. In so doing we are foolishly—and ironically—disobeying the Provider in order to protect the provision.

Or, when Allah blesses us with someone that we love, we forget that Allah is the source of that blessing, and we begin to love that person as we should love Allah. That person becomes the center of our world—all our concerns, all our thoughts, plans, fears, hopes, revolve only around them. If they are not our spouse, we are even willing to fall into haram just to be with them. And if they were to leave us, our whole world would crumble. So now, we have shifted our worship from the Source of the blessing to the blessing itself.

Allah says of such people: “Yet there are men who take (for worship) others besides Allah, as equal (with Allah): They love them as they should love Allah. But those of Faith are overflowing in their love for Allah.” (Quran 2:165)

It is because of this tendency to lose sight once given blessings that Allah warns us in the Quran when he says: “Say: ‘If your fathers, your sons, your brothers, your spouses, your relatives, wealth which you have obtained, commerce wherein you fear decline, and dwellings with which you are pleased are more beloved to you than Allah and His Messenger and struggling in His cause, then wait until Allah executes His command. And Allah does not guide the defiantly disobedient people.’” (9:24)

It is important to note that all the things listed in this ayah are halal to love, and are actually blessings. In fact, some of those blessings are signs of Allah. On the one hand Allah says: “And among His Signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves, that ye may dwell in tranquility with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts): verily in that are Signs for those who reflect.” (Quran 30:21)

But, on the other hand Allah warns: “O you who believe, your spouses and your children can be your enemies; beware.” (Quran 64:14)

The warning in this ayah is critical. Our spouses and our children are listed here because these are among the things we love the most. And it is in those things which you love most that you find the greatest test.

We love. And love we should. But our test is in how we love, and what we love most. Our test is in seeing through the storms of greeting cards and roses, movies and songs, and not losing perspective. Success means keeping our eyes focused on the love that is greatest, that is constant, that never breaks, or wanes, or wakes up one morning gone.

And when could that lesson be more relevant? Because after all, love is in the air.