Happy Monday, everyone! Here’s to the work week. Now that you’ve had your coffee as well as ample time to stare blankly at your computer screen like a zombie suffering from severe allergies, allow me to break up the monotony with another Modern Muslimah post.
Today’s hadith is a tiny but powerful one. It comes to us from the Hadith Qudsi, which are basically 40 hadith that are very well authenticated and are the words of the Prophet Muhammad (S) himself, narrated by the Sahabah (R). You’ll remember from last week that ‘sahabah’ is the Arabic word for companions, meaning friends, as opposed to any other sort of companionship.
The hadith is as follows:
Allah says: Take one step toward me, and I will take ten steps toward you. Walk toward me, and I will run toward you.
Short and sweet, and very powerful. Another Hadith Qudsi that goes along with this is the one narrated by Abu Hurairah (R). His name is actually a nickname given to him by the Prophet (S), and it means “the father of the kitten,” because the Prophet (S) saw him sitting in the street one day and playing with a tiny stray kitten that he just found, and nicknamed him that as a sign of affection. Anyway, the hadith is:
When God decreed the Creation, He pledged Himself by writing in His book (the Quran), which is laid down with Him: My mercy prevails over My wrath.
The meaning of these two hadith revolves around God’s mercy. It amazes me that God (in the Quran) is constantly maligned as being wrathful and vengeful, when God (in the Old Testament) is hardly a teddy bear. And honestly, the people that describe God (in the Quran) as being an angry and vengeful God are the ones that haven’t yet finished reading the paragraph, because the Quran goes to great lengths to describe God’s mercy.
The first hadith is the one I’m focusing on today, and the metaphor is that of converging paths. If a person takes one step toward God, God takes ten toward him, and if he walks toward God, God runs toward him.
Lace up.
The idea here, to me, at least, is encouragement. This hadith encourages Muslims to try to be better Muslims and learn more about their faith, with the imagery of God embracing the believer that inches closer to Him. It’s about Muslims being eager to learn more about their beliefs, because it conveys the message that the one seeking knowledge about Islam doesn’t do so in vain, or in a vacuum, but that God sees him and awaits him and comes to meet him.
It also applies to the conversion of non-Muslims to Islam; the same discussion above is true in this context as well, that of the non-Muslim reading a translation of the Quran or sitting through the khutbah (sermon at the midday prayer) on Friday at a masjid or just talking about Islam with an imam or a Muslim friend, whatever.
This brings me to something I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while now: conversion and reversion.
A couple days ago, my Twitter friend @Muslimerican linked me to this article about Kimdonesia leaving Islam. For those who don’t know (I sure didn’t, until a couple days ago), Kim is an Australian girl who went to live with her dad in Indonesia and converted to Islam when she was 16. She practiced the religion and wore hijab and everything. At 18, she just converted out of Islam.
Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, and has been for years and years and years. There is a lot that’s appealing about the religion. I remember, back when me and Andy were first becoming LawSkoolBFFs and he found out I was a Muslim, and I found out he’d actually read the Quran (or portions of it?) back in college, he said something that always kind of stuck with me. He said, about reading the Quran years ago, “I really remember being struck by how comforting it was.”
Anyway, despite all that nice stuff up there, what a lot of people don’t realize is that reversion rates are high, too. Pretty damn high. I have the good fortune of knowing several converts to Islam, and they are all lovely people, but they all tell the same story of finding Islam when they were young (late teens, early twenties), and being really intense about it. A lot are/were quite gung-ho, and I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. La kum deen akum wa lee adheen. (To each his own.)
All I mean is that when a person practices Islam that…strictly, chances are good that he/she is setting him/herself up for failure. Practicing Islam like that isn’t sustainable in a lot of cases. Sometimes it works out just fine. But sometimes it doesn’t, and for a new convert, it often adds to the stress and the culture shock once he/she has formally converted.
It’s hard to spend hours a day in deep prayer and still be able to lead a productive life in terms of work and other commitments and getting enough sleep. It’s hard to wear a tawb (the robes men wear, a lot like jilbabs that women wear) everywhere and tolerate strange looks day in and day out. It’s hard to cut off all contact with your family and old friends, which is what a lot of converts do in the beginning.
It’s hard. It gets to you after a while. People are only human. (Derrrr. But you know what I mean.)
Some convert back. Some stick with it. Some ease up from their rigid, Wahabi-esque practice of Islam. It all depends on the person.
In Kim’s case, her dog died. This sent her into a tailspin for a while, and she got to thinking about how in the Quran it says that non-believers will burn in Hell for eternity, and she worried about the non-Muslim members of her family burning in Hell.
In the post I linked you to above, she talks about how her fears and doubts get the best of her and she confesses it all to her mother, and she found that she just couldn’t go on believing in a God that was so wrathful and vengeful and strict and merciless.
And I was reading the post carefully and sympathetically up until that point. That was when my eyes kind of glazed over and I checked out. That sentence, about not being able to believe in the wrathful God portrayed in the Quran was all it took.
(I kept reading, and I was sympathetic to her situation, since, obviously, she’s going through a difficult time.)
But it’s like I said before: the person that says that the God in the Quran is angry and wrathful and does nothing but lay down punishments hasn’t finished reading the paragraph.
I remember remarking to @Muslimerican that I was glad I wasn’t reading whatever translation of the Quran she had, because my God sure wasn’t wrathful and only concerned with punishing people. I was being facetious about it, of course: all translations are basically the same. There’s no “Angry God” translation of the Quran that leaves out the lengthy and deep discussions of God’s mercy and compassion and forgiveness and His love for His followers.
(Heck, see the hadith I cited above.)
But what made the saddest about her post wasn’t that she was reverting, but that she would no doubt be absolutely flamed by her former-fellow-Muslims. She addresses some of the reactions in her post – how she must not have been a real Muslim because real Muslims don’t convert out, how she’s even worse than a non-Muslim because she had a chance to be a Muslim and then chose to opt out, blah blah blah.
I’ve heard that kind of ‘logic,’ and I use the term in the loosest sense, many times before. I’m ashamed of and for people who think that way and worse, actually voice those opinions. It’s ignorant and hateful. As @Muslimerican says, Hey, let’s just make sure she’s never a Muslim ever again! Let’s destroy all the goodwill she ever had or may have for Islam and Muslims! Yaaay!
Who was it – George Bernard Shaw, perhaps? – that said that Islam is the best religion, but its followers are the worst people.
I’m sad to say that my experience has pretty much been in line with that.
It’s not our place to judge anyone, a Muslim or not. Faith is such an intensely intimate concern, and it’s between a person and God. (In this case, I’m operating strictly within an Abrahamic context. Sorry not to be totally inclusive! Just bear with me.) But we’re always the first to condemn someone for not practicing his or her faith correctly.
I’ve seen and heard this over and over and over. If a girl is wearing hijab but her bangs are showing, she’s just totally shameless. A girl in a short-sleeved tee is a complete whore. Did you see that young woman in those five-inch heels? Whose attention is she trying to get? And, OMG, that one wearing all that eyeshadow – it’s absolutely disgusting!
That kid was spotted playing cards – Texas hold ‘em, maybe, no blinds and no bets – so his faith must be totally weak. That other young man was spotted talking to that young woman he’s not related to – completely inappropriate! Oh, and that one over there – he’s wearing basketball shorts. BASKETBALL SHORTS. It’s scandalous, really!
(Yes. I’ve heard adults in my community complain about all these things. In some cases, many times over. Usually, upon hearing these complaints, I ask to kindly be shot in the face.)
We find all these nit-picky little things, SO MANY of them rooted in culture and not religion (I’m sorry to shatter a few carefully constructed worlds here, but there has never been any sort of Islamic fatwa on basketball shorts), and just peck and peck and peck at each other for them. It doesn’t matter if, as I’ve seen time and time again, that kid in the basketball shorts or that girl in the bold eyeshadow are actually the nicest, politest, most decent young people on the planet that pray and read Quran and are good to their parents. They must be totally shameless and awful, for those little things.
And, as I’ve seen over and over and over again, the people condemning them are usually some of the worst people I’ve ever met. And yes, I know that’s not a very tolerant thing to say. I’m sorry. (But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.)
There’s a saying in Urdu – Iman kharaab karde ta hai. Meaning, I guess, that it’s enough to ruin your own faith in your religion, when you see people who are also Muslims behaving so awfully, and you think, ugh, if that’s what it is to be a Muslim, no thanks, I’ll just sit over here in the corner.
It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m just relating the saying. It fits.
So Kimdonesia has left Islam. I’m sure she didn’t take her matter of conversion to Islam lightly, and I’m sure she didn’t take her matter of reversion lightly. I don’t agree with her motivations or her reasons and if I ever met her I might talk to her about it if she allowed me to, but beyond that? It’s not my place to judge her. It’s not like I’m a perfect Muslim by any means.
We all do the best we can – Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, agnostics. We are all doing the best we can to adhere to some paradigm of moral conduct, organized by some higher power, or none at all. And I absolutely loathe the thought of this young girl being treated so cruelly for a decision she made that affects only her. Sure, she put her business out there on the Internet for us to discuss, but that doesn’t change this. We can discuss it all we want, but we have to draw the line at treating her so terribly because of it.
Okay, I’m off my soapbox with a new goal and plea for this weak: tolerance. I’ve been working on this for a while. I used to be quite judgmental, and have honestly been trying very hard in recent months to just back away from that destructive behavior. It serves no one, least of all me.
This doesn’t mean I’ll be tolerant of the flame comments I get here. I delete a handful of gross anti-Muslim/Islam comments on this blog every week. That won’t change. My blog, my rules. If you decide to be an ass, you don’t get to use my blog as a platform to spread your hatred and ignorance.
All this means is that I – and I hope, we – will take care to approach situations that we find troubling or disagreeable with just a little bit of understanding and compassion. It’ll go a long way, I’m sure of it. And we’ll be better for it.
A man sits in a masjid courtyard in Iran.
(Also, I would kill to have somewhere to sit with that awesome view.)
Now that I’ve bored everyone to tears, let’s move on to the outfit for this week. I wanted to do something with pants, and this is what I came up with. Remember, none of these outfits on this blog are meant to be particularly trendy or earth-shattering. Nothing high-fashion here, you guys. Just some cute, colorful outfits that are a step above your normal black/white/grey/navy work clothes.
Straight Leg Pants ………. $15
Countryside Crochet Tunic ………. $22.50
Long Multi Knit Cardigan ………. $24.80
Foldable Ballerina Flats ………. $34
First, I found this long cardigan at Forever21. It looks super warm and cozy, and since it’s got long sleeves and hits below the hip, you can wear just about anything underneath it. Personally, I hate wearing short sleeves (much less long sleeves) under a long sleeve sweater. The shirt always bunches up in the sleeve and it bugs me all day and I get really antsy. I’m already twitchy enough as it is, and this doesn’t help matters.
So when I wear my long sleeve sweaters, I usually wear a tank or cap-sleeved blouse underneath it. I avoid the bunching issue with my sleeves, and I don’t feel too warm like I often do with a long sleeve top under a long sleeve sweater. (Gross.) I liked this one from Charlotte Russe, and it worked with the cardigan, and I just ended up adding a pair of straight legged black pants.
Instead of going with black pumps I decided to add some more color by going with a pair of flats in a nice teal. I’ve always loved teal, and these flats are super cute.
And there we have a great workplace ensemble for our Modern Muslimahs!
thanks
islamickorner.com