Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective
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am yadussuhū fī al-turāb
— should he bury her in the dirt? That’s what they used to do. Bury their girls alive. But then the more sane option, the more humane option for them was: I will let her stay alive but I am so angry at my wife, who gave birth to a girl, that I will put them in the tent next to mine. I will never speak to them again; I will leave the food outside; and I’ll never go back there again. So these women are completely muʿallaqah —they are just left hanging. She can’t go somewhere else and she is just sitting there because she had a daughter. That’s her fault. These are his two options: should I stay with her even though it’s humiliating or should I just bury this girl in the dirt and get the problem over with— alā sā’ mā yaḥkumūn —what terrible decisions they make. Now al-ḥamd li-Llāh we don’t go that far, at least not to my knowledge. But you know Allah did not just highlight the crime of burying the child or abandoning the child, Allah highlighted everything from the facial expression onwards. This is something important to note in the Qur’an, Allah does not just criticize actions, Allah criticizes emotions. Allah criticizes facial expressions: thumma naẓar, thumma ʿabasa wa-basar, thumma adbara wa-stakbar ( al- Muddaththir 74: 21-23). What is that? Somebody staring, frowning, just the facial expression is captured in the Qur’an as an expression of arrogance. In this case as an expression of shirk . As an expression of the lack of appreciation for what Allah has given you, so now, after these āyāt : Those who do not believe in the Hereafter deserve to be characterized with evil attributes whereas Allah’s are the most excellent attributes. He is the Most Mighty, the Most Wise. (Al-Nahl 16: 60) People who don’t believe in the afterlife; they have the worst example, the example of the ugliest kind. Allah is saying this example—this scene that He has painted—is the epitome of ugliness. There is nothing uglier to Allah than this and this is a demonstration of people who have no expectations of standing in front of Allah. They have no īmān in the ākhirah . This disease! Can you imagine? How Allah makes something a big deal and we celebrate the exact opposite and don’t see a problem with it. This is what happens when people abandon the Book of Allah. So now He says: wa-li-Llāh al-mathal al-aʿlā wa-huwa al-ʿAzīz al-Ḥakīm — and for Allah is the highest example, going back to the shirk that they do, and He is the Ultimate Authority, All-Wise. And now, after He said this—Allah has said already these people are so bad, they don’t even believe in the ākhirah— that should be enough, but He didn’t stop there. Allah’s anger at these kinds of people is so intense the next āyah is: Were Allah to take people to task for their wrongdoing, He would not have spared even a single living creature on the face of the earth. But He grants them respite until an appointed term. And when that term arrives, they have no power to delay it by a single moment, nor to hasten it. (Al-Nahl 16: 61) If Allah were to grab people because of the wrong that they do, there would not be a single creature left alive on the earth. This crime, had Allah been one that will grab people as soon as they did a crime, the entire earth would have |