A Small Measure of Shirk

Without realizing it, we invest meaning into the everyday objects in our lives.  Collections, memorabilia, clothing and other possessions of our own or of others whom we love—all become invested with such meaning or emotional significance that we unable to part with them.  Fires, floods and other manmade and natural disasters not only destroy our homes, they force us to relinquish all that our homes contained.

When a Muslim sister recently lost her mother, she was faced with the difficult task of going through her mother’s papers and other belongings.  What she found was not just her mother’s personal memorabilia, but documentation of every phase of her own life as well.  Her mother had kept receipts from the prenatal visits to the doctor when the Muslimah was still in the womb.  Her mother had all of drawings, homework, report cards, and awards from school.  She had kept every letter her daughter had ever written after leaving home.

The sister found the effort to sort through and discard so much material was doubly difficult as recollections of events and phases of her own life resurfaced.  So much material that in her mother’s life was so heavily invested by her mother with value and meaning had become so much trash.  The task of separating herself from that which contained meaning in her mother’s life and had also held meaning in her own was an arduous task.  As the Muslimah put it, “I felt as if I were killing my mother and myself over and over again”. Allah sustained the sister through that painful task;  she was able to remember that on the Day of Judgment, Allah will force us to carry all of our possessions–the undoing of many of us trying to make that last journey over the bridge into Paradise.

The losses we suffer in this life are part of the way Allah purifies us.   With every loss, we have the opportunity to turn to Allah, to praise Him, to remember that from Him we come and to Him is our return.  With every loss, we have the chance to be grateful to Allah for the reminder that there is no thing or person in our lives that could ever supersede Allah. The importance of the struggle to turn to Allah in gratitude following a loss is inestimable.  Otherwise, we are vulnerable to attack from Shaitan, with the quick or gradual fall into shirk—the condition of sin in which some one or some thing is more important than Allah. 

Allah made human beings with all of the emotions that we carry within us.  At times of loss, responses range from shock and disbelief, through anger, grief, relief, guilt, self-pity, fear for one’s own life or safety or future—all of these responses are common and we may feel any number of them to varying degrees over time.  But whether the loss is small—like a treasured memento or enormous as in the devastation in war, each of us is responsible for finding a way to come back to the one thing that will never change and will never be lost, and that is the assurance and reassurance of la ilaha ilillah.

Those who stay trapped within the pain or grief or rage at their loss risk losing their Islam on top of everything else.  That is a greater loss than anything else they could ever suffer.  When the tsunami struck Southeast Asia a few years ago, a Muslimah remarked that the tsunami itself was just the first part of the test; the real test was going to be in how each survivor was able to respond spiritually to the disaster.  It may seem an easy thing to say if one has never been in the situation.  Yet the fact remains—without minimizing the suffering of any human beings—that the loss of friends, family, and home for those in war, the loss of freedom for those in camps or in prison, the loss of body and mind in rape, torture, starvation—all losses are meant to bring us back to la ilaha ilillah.

When we are caught up in pain and grief and anger, we have only to look to the first generation Muslims who were starved, beaten, tortured, exiled and killed because of their faith in Allah.  That is why it is important to struggle with loss in our lives or risk being stuck in an emotional response that leads to shirk.  Holding onto the dead, holding onto love or rage or guilt or some other response allows it to insinuate itself into our relationship with Allah.  That is the problem with shrines—no matter if they are the contents of cardboard boxes, a room kept unchanged through the years, a simple grave or a grand mausoleum. That is the problem with revenge, which is too often passed off as justice and takes us out of the bounds of Islam.  That is the problem with anything that prevents us from crying to Allah again and again to help us to remember la ilaha ilillah.

Be sure We will test you with something of fear and hunger, some loss in goods or lives or the fruits of your toil, but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere (Quran 2: 155)