0 views
Reclaim Your Heart
When Sara met Ahmed, she immediately knew. He was everything she had always dreamed of. Meeting him was like watching the sun rise in the middle of a snowstorm.
His warmth melted the cold. Soon, however, admiration turned to worship. Before she could understand what had happened, Sara had become a prisoner. She became a prisoner of her own desire and craving for that which she adored. Everywhere she looked, Sara saw nothing but him. Her greatest fear in life was displeasing him. He was all she could feel, and without him, happiness had no meaning. Leaving him made her feel as though her soul was being peeled from her very being. Her heart was consumed with only his face, and nothing felt closer to her than him. He became to her like the blood in her veins.
The pain of existing without him was unbearable because there was no happiness outside of being with him.
Sara thought she was in love.
Sara had been through a lot in her life. Her father walked out on her when she was a teenager, she ran away from home when she was 16, and she battled drug and alcohol addictions. She even spent time in jail. However, all that pain combined could not compare to the pain she would come to know inside this new prison of her own making.
Sara became a captive inside her own desires. It was this captivity that Ibn Taymiyyah radi Allahu `anhu (may Allah be pleased with him) spoke of when he said, “The one who is (truly) imprisoned is the one whose heart is imprisoned from Allah and the captivated one is the one whose desires have enslaved him.” (Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Wabil, pg 69) The agony of Sara’s worship of Ahmed was more intense than the agony of all her previous hardships. It consumed her, but never filled her. Like a parched man in the middle of a desert, Sara was desperately pursuing a mirage. But what was worse was the torturous result of putting something in a place only God should be.
Sara’s story is so deep because it demonstrates a profound truth of existence. As human beings, we are created with a particular nature (fitrah). That fitrah is to recognize the oneness of God and to actualize this truth in our lives.
Therefore, there is no calamity, no loss, no thing that will cause more pain than putting something equal to God in our lives or our hearts. Shirk on any level breaks the human spirit like no worldly tragedy could. By making the soul love, revere, or submit to something as it should only God, you are contorting the soul into a position that it, by its very nature, was never meant to be in. To see the reality of this truth, one only has to look at what happens to a person when they lose their object of worship.
His warmth melted the cold. Soon, however, admiration turned to worship. Before she could understand what had happened, Sara had become a prisoner. She became a prisoner of her own desire and craving for that which she adored. Everywhere she looked, Sara saw nothing but him. Her greatest fear in life was displeasing him. He was all she could feel, and without him, happiness had no meaning. Leaving him made her feel as though her soul was being peeled from her very being. Her heart was consumed with only his face, and nothing felt closer to her than him. He became to her like the blood in her veins.
The pain of existing without him was unbearable because there was no happiness outside of being with him.
Sara thought she was in love.
Sara had been through a lot in her life. Her father walked out on her when she was a teenager, she ran away from home when she was 16, and she battled drug and alcohol addictions. She even spent time in jail. However, all that pain combined could not compare to the pain she would come to know inside this new prison of her own making.
Sara became a captive inside her own desires. It was this captivity that Ibn Taymiyyah radi Allahu `anhu (may Allah be pleased with him) spoke of when he said, “The one who is (truly) imprisoned is the one whose heart is imprisoned from Allah and the captivated one is the one whose desires have enslaved him.” (Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Wabil, pg 69) The agony of Sara’s worship of Ahmed was more intense than the agony of all her previous hardships. It consumed her, but never filled her. Like a parched man in the middle of a desert, Sara was desperately pursuing a mirage. But what was worse was the torturous result of putting something in a place only God should be.
Sara’s story is so deep because it demonstrates a profound truth of existence. As human beings, we are created with a particular nature (fitrah). That fitrah is to recognize the oneness of God and to actualize this truth in our lives.
Therefore, there is no calamity, no loss, no thing that will cause more pain than putting something equal to God in our lives or our hearts. Shirk on any level breaks the human spirit like no worldly tragedy could. By making the soul love, revere, or submit to something as it should only God, you are contorting the soul into a position that it, by its very nature, was never meant to be in. To see the reality of this truth, one only has to look at what happens to a person when they lose their object of worship.
