Surrendered Heart
A series of reflections on life with God.
Introduction
This is a series on self-help through an Islamic and Qur’anic framework. When dealing with some personal life challenges, I tried to dig deep into everything I knew about hardships and tests in Islam. I had delved into the world of Islamic knowledge before, and I was attempting to derive wisdom from any source that I could find. I listened to Islamic lectures about pain and hardship. I watched motivational videos and interviews on YouTube. I binge-watched Yasmin Mogahed lectures and cried my heart out as I learned about the nature of hardship. I read Mark Manson’s book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and felt myself becoming about 10% wiser. I practically lived on Psychology.com in an attempt to understand myself better in the context of the trial that I was going through.
Luckily, I had all these resources to help guide me through my ordeal. I had past pain and trauma to heal from, and I also needed to fix mistakes that I had made. I decided to embark on a journey of healing and self-rectification. In order to do this, I had to change the way I understood pain and how I related to it. Most people spend their lives avoiding pain simply because it hurts too much. Others avoid it simply because they don’t understand it. I wanted to really understand pain. I wanted to know its role in my life so I could deal with it in a healthy way instead of pushing it away or burying it further down inside me where it could hurt me again.
This series will delve into pain and its purpose, while tying it into the greater purpose of life. It will also discuss how to effectively deal with pain and hardships in life with God by your side.
The Purpose of Life
Allah says in the 51st chapter of the Qur’an:
“And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me.” (51:56)
When most of us read this verse, we think: Okay, so Allah created us to worship Him, which means He created us to pray, read Qur’an, fast and give charity. That’s what worship is, right? Yes, but there is so much more to unpack here.
The Arabic word ‘ibadah, (used in the verse above) is often translated as worship, but that is an oversimplification of the word. The word ‘ibadah actually means submission and surrender to God.
Here are some of the ways in which Muslim scholars define the word ‘ibadah:
Ibn Taymiyyah (may Allah have mercy on him) defined worship as: “…a comprehensive term that encompasses all what Allah loves of words and deeds whether inward or outward…”
Ibn al-Qayyim (may Allah have mercy on him) said: “Worship is the utmost degrees of love to Allah while accompanied by complete surrender.”
If we were to translate the verse about the purpose of life keeping these definitions of the word ‘ibadah in mind, it would be more accurate to say that the purpose of life is to know Allah and to love Him more than anyone else, and then to surrender your entire life to Him. It is a submission of the highest degree. It is a conscious act of the heart, mind, and soul. It is a form of surrender in which you place what He wants from you over what you want for yourself.
There’s an additional way to look at the word ‘worship.’ When someone says, “He worships his mother,” or “She worships her children” what is the implication? It doesn’t mean that this person is praying to this person, bowing and prostrating to them. Even between humans, the word ‘worship’ is the strongest term that we can use to describe an intense level of love, loyalty, and devotion. We understand this to mean that this person’s life revolves around something or someone. We can extend this meaning of revolving to the verse as well.
The purpose of life is to revolve your life around God.
When we accept Islam as our way of life, (whether by converting to it or by re-affirming our commitment to it even if we were born Muslim), we essentially make the decision to submit to God. In a way, this is a one-time act of submission. In the testimony of faith, we declare that there is no deity worthy of worship but Allah and that Muhammad (peace be upon him) is His slave and Messenger. We submit our heart, our mind, our soul, and our will to Allah. We make the decision that nothing — and no one, will come before Allah in our lives. We accept Him as the Ultimate Authority in our lives.
Surrendering our hearts to Allah is a life-long process.
Accepting Islam is a one-time event. Absorbing Islam, however, is a process. We need to renew our iman, our faith in and our commitment to Allah over and over. We need to learn how to trust Allah completely. We need to learn what Allah wants from us. We need to learn how to overcome the ego so that we can submit to Allah completely. Learning these things takes time. Surrendering our hearts to Allah is a life-long process. In a way, our whole lives are training grounds that teach us how to surrender to Allah completely.
This world is a world of distractions — “play/amusement and distraction” as Allah refers to it in the Qur’an in Chapter 6, Verse 32. As we live our lives, we forget about Allah. We forget about our upcoming life in the Hereafter. We get distracted from our true purpose. We become busy with other things. Some of us start to revolve our lives around work — working 56+ hours a week while also checking emails on the weekend. Some of us revolve our lives around our families, especially our children. Some of us revolve our lives around shopping and entertainment — always on the lookout for a good deal, waiting for the next iPhone to drop, deciding what new show to binge-watch on Netflix before we’ve had a chance to finish the first one. It’s not that we’re not supposed to enjoy life. In fact, Allah tells us in the Qur’an to enjoy the blessings He gave us and then to be grateful to Him for those blessings. However, we are not supposed to become so consumed in these things that we fall into ghaflah.
Ghaflah is a concept that is often translated as heedlessness, but it can also be understood as low-consciousness. It is a way of being in which we operate from our lower self instead of our higher, God-conscious self. Allah wants us to remember Him often. It’s the only way we can avoid drowning in this ocean of low-conscious behavior in this world where we are surrounded by distractions. Shaytan’s mission is to keep us stuck in ghaflah because that way, he has more power over us to take us off the Right Path and put us on the wrong ones.
When things are going well, it’s easy to forget God. We forget just how much we need Him. As soon as a problem comes our way, we run to God. That’s not a bad thing. We should be running to God. The problem is, we should be running to Him all the time, not just when we’re desperate. (And the truth is, we are always desperately in need of God, but we just don’t acknowledge it.) So by default, we live in a state of ghaflah. When Allah wants to remove us from ghaflah and put us in a state of His remembrance, He gives us problems. He gives us pain. He gives us fear, loss, and grief. On the surface, these are all negative things, but the believer has a way of turning even the worst calamities into opportunities to come closer to Allah and earn His Pleasure.
It is stated in a hadith that the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “The matter of a believer is strange, for there is good in every matter of his and this is not the case with anyone else except in the case of a believer; for if he has an occasion to feel delight, he thanks (God), thus there is a good for him in it, and if he gets into trouble and endures it patiently, there is a good for him in it.” (Sahih Muslim)
There is a way of being and operating for the believer than can assure that he will never actually be in a complete state of loss. And that is through patience and gratitude.
Everything in life has a role to play in helping us come closer to Allah. We just have to have the correct responses. We must pay attention to why things are happening in our lives a certain way. We have to become conscious people — conscious of Allah, of our actions, and of the state of our heart and soul.
So far, I have discussed one role of pain and hardship in our lives: to take us out of ghaflah and take us back to Allah. In Part 2, we will dive deeper into the role of pain in our lives.
