The Way is the Way

Months and years will remain months and years: 12 months, 30 days.
The sun and the moon will remain in rotation.
Summer goes, autumn comes.
Women will remain women, bearing children.
Males will not bear children.
Mothers will go on loving their offspring.
Uncles and aunts will remain warm towards nephews and nieces.

Wine will keep intoxicating, making men physically and economically impotent, ruining individuals and societies.
Interest-bearing transactions will keep destroying homes and economies.
Nudism will continue perverting men and women into gay relationships.
Gambling will keep hard-earned wealth shifting into clever, crooked hands.

People will remain honest or deceitful, truthful or liars, simple or complex.
Humans will keep living in societies, making nations, fighting, getting tired of wars, observing peace, re-starting wars.
Men and women will remain in search of Truth, find it, and be peaceful, or follow the devil and murder in the name of God, or greatness of the nation, or control of resources, making millions unhappy, jobless, broken in spirit, eating and defecating like animals and dying miserable deaths with no one to shed a tear.

If you are in the countryside, you cannot go about naked.
If you are in a mega-city with 10,000 km paved roads, 100,000 buildings, a million lamps, and 10 million humans, you still cannot go about naked.
If you are setting up an industry and have half the capital, the other half cannot still be borrowed on interest.
If you are a student with no money, you still cannot borrow it on interest for further studies.

If you are in Holland of 800 brothels, you cannot still commit adultery.
If you are in the homosexual world of USA, you cannot still go gay.
Being in Canada, Canberra, or Karnataka, makes no difference to Islam. Islam is the Paradise of the heart, before the promised Paradise of the heart, the soul and the body of the Hereafter.

If you are in Khartoum, you cannot abandon your parents in their old age.
If you are in the West of the 21st century, you are still required to take care of your parents in their old age.
If you are in the West of the post 9/11, Islam-phobia era, the beard is still a recommended Sunnah.

If you are in a village in Sri Lanka, you still have to shun wine as a Muslim.
If you are in New York, Budapest or Colombo, you still have to shun wine.
Either you follow the Islam of good Muslims of Jakarta and Makkah, Istanbul and Islamabad, or you do not. Islam remains unaltered, as it was a millennium and a half ago.

The pre-globalization, the pre-21st century, the pre-9/11, the pre-computer age, the pre-internet, pre-facebook, pre-twitter, the pre, pre, pre were no different from the decades before them: the decades of gramophone, radio, tape-recorder, telephone, and television.
Neither the distant past nor the recent past have any significant relationship with the human situation, human spiritual requirements, mental needs.
They only have their bearings, their effects, their influences.
In every new era, Muslims must know how to react, respond to new situations, take it, leave it, or modify it and adopt it – but never to adapt themselves to it.
No compromises.

People’s needs, their hopes, their fears, their moral position, their religious obligations, remain.
Changes in nationality, culture, customs, and habits, do not change your Lord.
The post 9/11, 21st century, the world of West-in-decline – is no different from the pre-9/11, 20th century, the world of West-shine – except increase in stress, hyper-tension, depression and civilizational failures.
A Muslim lives – morally, intellectually, spiritually – in the Khilafah era anyway. What does he care for the centuries that went thereafter, or how the present one goes?

The change in the earth, does not change the heaven.
The heaven is starry, brilliant, constant, soothing.
Islam is there to give the humans a sound hearing, a deep vision, a firm footing.
You aim at Paradise. If it is affluence that will take you there, then let it be affluence. If it is poverty, then welcome to poverty.
For a true believer, an apartment in Los Angeles is no better than a hut at the end of a village in Bangladesh, if he is assured of Islam – in its most spiritual form.

To be identified with the godly, is an honor by itself, a matter of pride. Let the others hang themselves, shoot each other, die dog’s death, live as they will.
But, let them not touch you, your mind, your heart, your soul. Let not their concepts contaminate your mind, your home, your society.

What did 9/11 do to Muslims?
Some shaved their beards, a few changed their names, and others changed their friends.
A handful who were active, became inactive.
Those were the choices of the individuals.
Pretty many remained steadfast, shaken, but not fallen.

A hoax was organized.
Hundreds of scientists, engineers, specialists, professors, and experts challenge the hoax, but it remains what the government and corporate controlled media portrays it – but, essentially a trial for the believers.

Islam moves on.
The caravan of the faithful marches on.
It takes the persecutions in its stride. Dogs bark. Sometimes they bite, but the caravan rolls on.
Some choose to break away. But the caravan is undeterred.
Others join in, and they move on, hand in hand, the old and the new.
And the new bring in courage, consistency, adding up to the strength.

The Light is light.
The Guidance is guidance.
The Way is the way.