By: Haqqseeker
Source: muslimvillage.com
BISMILLĀHIR RAHMĀNIR RAHĪM
Glory to Allāh and Salutations on The Messenger of Allah (Allah’s peace be upon him).
This worldly life (dunyā), with all its glitter and glamour, is a very enticing place. At times, we get so carried away by it that we become its slave and forget our Lord. We start living a life that is totally against the commands of Allah Most High and the Sunnah of The Messenger of Allah (Allah’s peace be upon him).
It is at this time that Almighty Allah with His infinite mercy may decide to give us a jolt or a shove so that we may come to our senses and realize our mistakes. This jolt may come in the form of an accident, an illness, loss in our business or setback in any of our worldly affairs.
As soon as any one of the above calamities strikes us we get up from our deep slumber and start wondering with much apprehension, “Why such a thing has happened to me, what wrong have I done?”
At that moment if we have a little bit of faith (īmān), we start realizing how far we have gone away from Allah Most High. This realization may lead most of us turn to Allah Most High for His help. We profoundly start making supplication (du’ā). Our lifestyle gets drastically changed, our worship (ibādah) gets intensified, our giving of charity (sadaqāh) increases, we become very regular in reciting the Qur’an and our piety level reaches a new height. In short, we try our best to invoke the mercy of Allah in every respect. And Allah Most High, forgiving and merciful as He is, listens to our supplication and very gracefully wards off the problem and normality starts returning to our life.
This in real fact is a very delicate and a decisive period. It is the time when Allah Exalted and Supreme is actually testing our sincerity. He wants to know or make manifest whether His slave permanently maintains the piety level that he has just achieved in his life or does he return to the same old life full of disobedience of Allah that he was used to, prior to the calamity.
However, human nature is such that as soon as our du’ā is accepted and the catastrophe starts shifting away from our life, most of us start forgetting the favors of Allah and gradually begin to return to our past life of disobedience of the āhkām (commands) of Allah. In other words, we become our same old selves. We forget the hard times we have just gone through and how desperately we were pleading Allah for His divine help. This attitude can turn out to be very dangerous for our dunyā as well as for our Next World (Ākhirah) as it can invoke the wrath of Allah Most High.
Allah Most High, in His sublime manner, describes the situation thus in the Qur’ān:
“He it is Who enables you to travel through land and sea, till when you are in the ships and they sail with them with a favourable wind, and they are glad therein, then comes a stormy wind and the waves come to them from all sides, and they think that they are encircled therein, they invoke Allah, making their Faith pure for Him Alone, saying: “If You (Allah) deliver us from this, we shall truly be of the grateful.
But when He delivered them, behold! They rebel (disobey Allah) in the earth wrongfully. O mankind! Your rebellion (disobedience to Allah) is only against your own selves, – a brief enjoyment of this worldly life, then (in the end) unto Us is your return, and We shall inform you that which you used to do.” (Surāh: Yunus Verses: 22 and 23).
How can we express our thanks to Allah with all sincerity for accepting of our Du’ā when we were in a very precarious position? The best way is to bring permanent changes in our life in conformity with His commands and the Sunnah of The Messenger of Allah (Allah’s peace be upon him) and also, very importantly, to invite others to the same.
With plenty of seeking forgiveness (Istighfār) let us all make Du’ā to Allah Most High that He may forgive all our shortcomings in obeying His commands and also make Du’ā that He does not put us to any test and if at all He decides to test us then we may pass that test to His satisfaction. Ameen.
And Allah Most High knows best.