Patience and Hope in God

  

"O you who believe! be patient and excel in patience and remain steadfast, and be careful of (your duty to) Allah, that you may be successful." (The Holy Qur'an, 3:201)

 

Life is a strain to which every believer is called to deal with a lot of patience. God commands the believer repeatedly in the Holy Quran to persevere in patience and constancy in the face of disasters and hardships of life. In that patience lies the happiness of the hereafter.

 

"If Allah gives you His help, none can overcome you. If He forsakes you, who is there then that can assist you after Him? In Allah the believers must put their trust." (3:161)

 

Misfortunes and calamities that visit the believer from God, such as, impatience and frustration cannot eliminate them. The believer must put absolute and clear trust in Allah to be spared from all harm because no one else can help him except God. Anything that affects the Muslim, be it exhaustion, disease, sorrow, pain, suffering or distress, "surely, God is with those who are patient." (2:154)

Kerala: A Charitable Trust

 

‘O My Lord, help me to be truly grateful for Your favours to me, and to my parents; help me to do good work that pleases You; make my offspring good. I  turn to You; I am one of those who devote themselves to You.’ (HQ, 46:16) 

As one grows older and wiser, one becomes even more conscious of one’s responsibility towards both the older and the younger generations. ‘Whosoever is unkind to our young and disrespectful of our old is not one of us’, declared the Holy Prophet Muhammad (sa). Indeed, being virtuous and showing gratitude to one’s parents is a Qur’anic duty on all believers- second in importance only to the duty to worship God: “Worship God; join nothing with Him. Be good to your parents, to relatives, to orphans, to the needy, to neighbours near and far, to travelers in need, and to your assistants.” (4:37)

Inspired by Imam- Jamaat Ul Sahih Al Islam Hazrat Khalifatullah Al Mahdi Munir Ahmad Azim (aba)’s spiritual discourses and illuminating guidance, Mukarram R. Jamaluddin Raother Saheb of Mathra recently established a charitable initiative in Kerala, India. With the sublime objective of rendering service to humanity, Jamaluddin Saheb has founded and legally-registered a Trust in fond memory of, and in the name of his beloved parents, Janab Rasavumeeran Raother (d. 1951) and Fatima Beevi Saheba (d.1986).   

Ramadan: The Spirit of Caring

 

The Month of Ramadan 

We live in a special time: never before have human beings experienced such spectacular advancement in terms of progress and enrichment; never has he had so much capacity to communicate, to live together, to converse. Yet never has he been so self-centered, selfish, and so careless about the plight of others. Unfortunately, the Muslim [nowadays] follows the same path- thus, going against divine injunctions.

 

God knows our propensity to forget and not to be persistent in recalling; that is why He has prescribed acts of worship for us in order to make our conscience and our hearts come alive to His remembrance. The fast of the month of Ramadan is part of this education, of this elevation of the soul, once a year for a month. God asks us to deprive ourselves of these essential things that are our daily concerns: eating, drinking; things so common for us that they become commonplace. Abundance makes us forget that one day we might not have any more. We no longer even know how to appreciate the pleasures we taste. Worse, there are on this earth, at the same time as we eat and we are satisfied [i.e. eating to our fill], men and women who would like to be able to have a tenth of what we consume. Because of distress caused by poverty, they have to endure hunger and thirst. But they also and above all have to endure our passivity and our disinterest. However, they are our brothers and our sisters not in Islam only but in humanity as well.

 

God has put abundance in this world so that every man can benefit from his share of sustenance; however, it is a minority that controls and consumes most of the wealth. It is such an injustice which is accentuated by our passivity when it is not our selfishness.  

The month of Ramadan has been ordained in order to instill awareness and a reminder. Above all, remember Allah with intensity and foresight. Leaving a little of this temporal world to rise to the consciousness of the Most High. The fast of this blessed month is a source of reminder for those who want to remember. Then, it wants to be a call to altruism and solidarity, because we cannot as a Muslim or even quite simply as a human being live in the indifference of what is happening in a large part of the world; to pretend that there are no men and women who live in destitution and poverty; without knowing that every day in the world many children die of starvation. “It’s normal”, we say to ourselves, “How could we know that when we’re not talking about it in the press or on television?”

 

We cannot as Muslims, as beings with a heart, step back and pretend these sad and bitter realities do not exist, and to just look where the spotlight falls.

Despair and Spiritual Hope

The dismal state of contemporary politics 

When it comes to politics, many people are nowadays apprehensive of the future of their very own land as well as that of their generations and the general population of their country. What we see nowadays is that human rights are being forsaken for money politics and the power of the fittest, especially in the corrupted realm.

This is indeed a very delicate topic to develop [like in my Friday Sermons], yet very important, as politics, true unadulterated politics is really important for the good day-to-day running of our society, countrywide as well as worldwide.

Even if good people, with good and clear conscience strive to uproot the bad weeds in society and seek to transform the political world and make it a better place for the good management of the country, but unfortunately they are met with many obstacles in their way. One of these obstacles is money, the power of money, its power to buy the conscience of people and to put aside honesty and morality, and to dance to the tunes of the corrupted. Alas, our society today, in its global view is deteriorating day by day, and the evils of society are becoming rampant to such an extent that law and order also, in many countries of the world are getting corrupted and unable to function properly to defend the best interest of the nation and the world. The people of the world are suffering due to this mismanagement of their individual societies, which in turn have a bad repercussion on the global society.

Muhammad as the ultimately True & Perfect Political Figure

By the grace of God Almighty [Allah], Islam has the necessary measures to transform a society and make it function properly, and all credit goes to Allah Almighty through His commandments through the ages, and which have been perfected in the glorious and perfect book, the Holy Quran, and put into practice by none other than the best and seal of all prophets, Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh).