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Archive for the category “modernity & muslimness”

27 Feb 2023
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Clothes & Souls that Make Us Want to Stand Out

One hadith states: ‘Whoever dresses in clothes of attracting attention (shuhrah, lit. ‘fame’) in this life, Allah shall clothe him in garbs of humiliation on the Day of Resurrection.’1 The way we dress can and often does, therefore, have to do with the inward state of our souls.

We are told in the scholarly commentaries that attracting attention means: To dress so that fingers start pointing at you, because of being extravagantly, unusually, or shabbly dressed, relative to the rest of society. In such a case, the intention in dressing as such is usually to either brag, boast, show-off, be the centre of attention, or desire to stand out from everyone else — all of which are base motives of the lower self.2

Al-Mardawi, one of the foremost Hanbali jurists of his age, wrote in al-Insaf: ‘It is detestable to wear clothes which involves attracting attention, or that differ from the clothes of the people of one’s city — according to the correct view of the [Hanbali] school. It is said that it is prohibitted … Shaykh Taqi al-Din [Ibn Taymiyyah] said: “Shuhrah is forbidden, by which one intends to feel superior or project humility, due to the salaf’s hatred of this.”’3

The same idea about dressing as per the norms or conventions of one’s society (providing it doesn’t clash with any shari‘ah prohibition) comes to us in a number of scholarly testimonies; from them: Sufyan al-Thawri said about the venerable salaf: ‘They hated two types of attracting attention: elegant clothing which draws attention and makes people stare, and trampish clothes that he is derided for and which humiliates his religion.’4

As for Imam Ahmad: He saw a man wearing a black and white striped cloak, so he advised: ‘Leave this and wear the attire of those in your city,’ adding: ‘It isn’t forbidden, but had you been in Makkah or Madinah, I would not have faulted you.’5 Presumably this type of cloak was a customary item of clothing in the two Holy Cities at that time.

Ibn Abi Shaybah relates: Zubayd al-Yami once wore a hooded cloak (burnasa), and heard that Ibrahim al-Nakha‘i had criticised him for doing so. So he went to him and said: ‘The people used to wear it. Ibrahim replied: “For sure! But those who once wore it have passed away. If anyone were to wear it now, he would attract attention and fingers would point at him.”’6

Even in how a Muslim man abides by raising one’s lower garment above his ankles, he does so demurely and unassumingly, without drawing more attention than is necessary by raising it too high. Otherwise it will be regarded as shuhrah, a form of attention seeking or wanting to be pointed out. Ibn al-Jawzi narrates under a section discussing excessively shortening one’s clothes, with his chain to Ibn Hani; who said: ‘I came to Abu ‘Abd Allah Ahmad b. Hanbal one day whilst wearing a tunic [that came just] below the knee and above the shin. He said: “What is this?’ and censured it, saying: ‘This should not be done again.”’7

As for the Hanbali madhhab’s actual ruling on isbal – letting the lower garment of a man fall below his ankles, if not done from pride, it is disliked (makruh); with pride, it is forbidden (haram).8

Those in Muslim majority countries have their diverse sartorial norms. As for Muslims in the West, as a norm, we take on the dress conventions of our societies; as long as it doesn’t entail any clear shari‘ah forbiddance. A believing man’s dress, therefore, should not be tight fitting, but instead be loose, modest, unassuming and, of course, be dignified and respectable. For such are traits of a believer’s inward state. As for the Arabisation of Muslim dress codes, outside of Arab cultures, such distortions of Islam and the Sunnah need to be swiftly remedied. This mindset usually springs either from ignorance, or worse still, shuhrah! But to then dress in clothes that aren’t dignified, or that tightly hug the body, is unbefitting and going to another extreme.

As for ladies, their dress is for concealment (satr) and recognition (ta‘arruf). On the one hand they dress in order to conceal their personal beauty and charm; on the other, their hijab-attire is so that they may be known [Q.33:59] who they are and what they stand for. That it must be black, or Saudi-styled, is likely to be a bid‘ah if one believes that is what is religiously-sanctioned. Instead, one finds godly and intelligent ways to make the attire reflect being locally rooted and practical, while fulfilling the shari‘ah conditions and not making ‘fashion statements’.

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1. Abu Dawud, no.4029; Ibn Majah, no.3606. The hadith was graded hasan in Muhammad b. Muflih, al-Adab al-Shar‘iyyah (Beirut: Mu’assasah al-Risalah, 1999), 3:497.

2. Cf. Shams al-Din al-Sarkhasi, Kitab al-Mabsut (Beirut: Dar al-Ma‘rifah, 1989), 30:268; al- Mawsu‘ah al-Fiqhiyyah (Kuwait: Wizarat al-Awqat wa’l-Shu’un al-Islamiyyah, 1986), 6:136-37.

3. ‘Ali b. Sulayman al-Mardawi, al-Insaf fi Ma‘rifat al-Rajihi min al-Khilaf ‘ala Madhhab al- Imam al-Mubajjal Ahmad b. Hanbal (Egypt: Matba‘ah al-Sunnah al-Muhammadiyyah, 1956), .1:473.

4. In Ibn Abi Dunya, al-Tawadu‘ wa’l-Khumul (Cairo: Dar al-I‘tisam, 1986), 127-8; no.64.

5. Ibn Muflih, al-Adab al-Shar‘iyyah, 3:497.

6. Ibn Abi Shaybah, al-Musannaf (Riyadh: Maktabah al-Rushd, 2004), 8:366; no.25655.

7. ‘Abd al-Rahman b. al-Jawzi, Talbis Iblis (Beirut: Dar al-Qalm, 1403H), 198. The basis for it is found in Ishaq b. Ibrahim b. Hani, Masa’il al-Imam Ahmad b. Hanbal (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islami, 1400H), 2:146; no.1820.

8. Cf. al-Buhuti, Kashshaf al-Qina‘ ‘an Matn al-Iqna’ (Beirut: ‘Alam al-Kutub, 1983), 1:277.

Posted in correctives & clarifications, ethics & morals, fiqh issues & usul al-fiqh, hanbali fiqh, modernity & muslimness and tagged , , , , , ,
13 Feb 2022
9 Comments

Is Today’s Islam a Failure or Success Story?

This is one of the shorter essays in my forthcoming book, God-willing, entitled: Modernity & Muslimness: Sixty Short Essays that Should Matter. As part of the introduction to the book, I wrote: In his travelogue on Islam in late nineteenth century England, Asmay started by saying: ‘Eight years ago, a faint sound began to come from the West to the East. Realising that the sound was significant, the Muslim umma sat up and took notice, cupping their hands to their ears. Giving all their attention to the sound, they could only make out this sentence, “Islam has started to appear in England.”’1 This book and its essays are a continuation of that sound, that faint murmur, which has only grown louder and more significant with the passage of time.

♦

ONE COULD ARGUE that Islam, despite what we are being led to believe, is actually a modern success story. Now this might sound strange to some, perhaps to many. So let me explain:

No doubt, media portrayals are negative, dark and gloomy. And of course, events around the world involving Muslims, or at least the ones we tend to hear about and that get most media exposure, don’t lend themselves to much joy or cheer. So perhaps we as Muslims could be forgiven for feeling somewhat overwhelmed; feeling like little corks bobbing up and down in a raging sea of Western liberal, modernity. Yet despite this, if we look at it more broadly, Islam is actually the unsung success story of modernity. 

How is that?

Well let’s ask ourselves what religion is for? That will indicate how well or not Islam is doing. Here, there’s much to give thanks for, much to admire about our current situation; and there’s much more to look forward to in the coming future too – God willing.

Islam, as religion, must be judged in terms of: Does it still offer authentic, practical guidance for salvation? The answer to that is a resounding, Yes! It certainly does.

In fact, Islam continues to be relevant and practical to a growing number of people, and accessible to them too. And one significant reason for this is that Islam is universal. The Prophet ﷺ said: bu’ithtu li’l-nasi kaffah – ‘I have been sent to the whole of humanity.’2 This echoes what we read in the Holy Qur’an: Say [O Muhammad]: ‘O mankind! Truly I am the Messenger of Allah to you all.’ [Q.7:158]

Islam, therefore, has the inbuilt capacity to be native to any soil. And we Muslims must remember this, and not practice Islam in a way which blurs this universality, or makes it appear that it is an Asian or an Arab thing. It ought to be remembered that one of Islam’s great founding stories is of a gentile, Egyptian mother; Hagar, along with her Hebrew Canaanite young child; Ishmael, and their inculturation into the native Arabian landscape, language and cultural life. That’s to say that Islam has the socio-spiritual technology to become native to any soil.

Another reason it’s a success story has to do with numbers. What the data shows is that the number of Muslims is increasing here in Europe, and that by 2030, there will be more Muslims than Christians in Britain.

Related to this is the number of people who continue to convert to Islam, despite media negativity and Islamophobia; and inspite of us born Muslims being asleep to our higher vocation of living and spreading the truths of tawhid. Islam’s message of tawhid, healing and hope, with its universality, still has a powerful appeal to people.

Yet another proof of its success is that its mosques are overflowing. Part of the reason for this, in fact a significant part, is because Islam remains practical and liveable today, even in the modern West, when other religions are capitulating to the juggernaut of modernity, or simply being stamped out by it.

All in all, then – and all praise is for God – Islam as a religion is doing what it says on the tin. It is still offering practical, liveable ways of connecting with God and living godly lives, even amidst today’s turbulence.

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1. In Yusuf Samih Asmay: Islam in Victorian Liverpool: An Ottoman Account of Britain’s First Mosque Community (Swansea: Claritas Books, 2021), 49.

2. Al-Bukhari, no.438; Muslim, no.521.

 

 

Posted in a short read, contemporary concerns, modernity & muslimness and tagged , , , ,
08 Dec 2021
12 Comments

Modernity & Compulsory Schooling: the Theft of Children’s Minds?

‘We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the class room
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey teachers leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.’
[Pink Floyd, Brick in the Wall]

IN 1800 ONLY five percent of Britain had any formal primary education. By 1900, that figure was ninety percent. Across Britain and Europe, children between the ages of five and ten were summoned to sit in classrooms to learn basic reading, writing and arithmetic. The reason why children were being sent to school was the same as why, for thousands of years, they had been kept at home: work and productivity.1

In pre-modern societies it was a given that, at the earliest possible time or opportunity, children would best help their family by going out to work in the fields, markets, workshops or factories. Modern societies, equally as interested in children’s earning power, legislated that compulsory state schooling would be the best guarantor of that power of productivity in the long run. Modern state education’s focus would be on functional literacy: teaching students just enough to make them economically productive; no more, and no less. ‘So much,’ as the educationalist John Taylor Gatto says, ‘for making boys and girls their personal best.’2

This explains why children in schools are so often bored, unconcerned and unfocused. They wonder why on earth are they being taught most of these subjects? What is it for? Most of what our children learn is school will not equip them for life in the actual world. ‘Given the extent on the emphasis on utility in the education system, it remains surprising for many modern citizens to reach middle age (or earlier) to discover that rather a lot appears to have been missed out in the curriculum. Despite the years of dedication and examination, the modern citizen is apt to look back and wonder with a mixture of irritation and sorrow why so much of what they needed to know was never taught to them at school.’3

And yet: ‘In all advanced nations, until a human is twenty-one or so, there is little else to do other than study. In sensible households, homework has a close to holy status. An army of teachers and educators, colleges and pedagogical bureaucrats is set us to feed industrial quanities of the young through the school machine.’4

When there are debates about education, and there are a lot of them, the usual focus is on how best to deliver an education to children, not what it is they should be educated in. School curricula aren’t reversed engineered  from the actual challenges and dilemmas of life. What children are taught in no way reflect the trials of life: issues of relationships, the sorrows of a meaningless job, coping with the tension of family, dealing with damaged but well intended parents, existential anxiety, the trauma of mortality, or the meaning of life and its struggles. Instead, we educate our children as if the greatest requirement of adulthood is a set of vocational or technical skills to help them earn money. To suggest that we ought to help educate them in their emotional dimensions – learning to understand themselves, empathise with others, nurture a self-confidence that isn’t narcissistic or self-damaging, or to get a handle on calm and self-compassion – would be to suggest an educational blasphemy of sorts. Yet it’s this kind of omission or failure that ensures the repeated betrayal of children’s education, and what some see as the theft of children’s minds.

RESTORE MEANING INTO EDUCATION

While modernity is interested in ‘useful’ learning, in the pre-modern world, those who were educated at a school or college were taught two things in particular: a holy text, and learning of high culture and dignity. Here in the West it meant the Bible and the classics, and in the Muslim East and West it meant the Qur’an and comportment (adab). Pre-modern education was about pursuing truth and wisdom, not money. Meaning and a sense of the sacred where at the centre of pre-modern education.

Modern education, by contrast, has no overarching educational philosophy behind it any more. Meaning is wholly absent.5 We as Muslims believe, as do other traditionally-minded religious people, that true education must be rooted in the sacred. The very first revelation of the Qur’an was in fact: Read in the name of your Lord who created! [Q.96:1] When education is cut-off from the sacred, it is corrupted or destroyed. It becomes meaningless. Children and teenagers throughout the educational establishments across the country know – they intuit it, even if they cannot articulate it – that so much of it is meaningless. ‘Why am I even studying this?’ ‘I’m being taught stuff that doesn’t have any meaning.’ ‘It can’t be all about getting a job so as to make money, when many billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others, dropped out of college.’

But when an educational system is designed chiefly for functionality, not imparting wisdom and meaning, its pretty much flawed from the ground up. For the modern world demanded that children learn the skills needed to keep the economy and productivity expanding. Kids had to be prepared to keep the machinery of modernity ticking over. That is what mattered the most; not learning for learning’s sake, or for deeper wisdom, or to become cultured and a cultivated human being. So when children in the twentieth century were encouraged in school to make things out of clay, or play with coloured bricks, or to put on plays – it may all have seemed progressive to the parents, but these move were only responses to demands by employers for new sets of skills required by new types of commerce and industry. And the same is the case today. Without imparting practical wisdom, or rooting education in meaning, our children’s learning will continue to be exploited by economic and corporate agendas where: ‘wealth takes precedence over family, image over substance, acquisition of apparent goods over real goods, gall over shame, and pleasure over happiness.’6

‘Sadly,’ said Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, ‘the tragic victims of this state of affairs are our children. They come into this world capable of greatness and instead are fed to the false god of appetite, resentment, and amusement. They suffer from obesity, sexual laxity, and a loss of family and community that en-genders anger towards their parents and society. They are indoctrinated into the false belief that life is for amusement and the best things in life come easily. Few are allowed to discover life’s greatest pleasure, which is self-knowledge and mastery of the soul that leads to an ethical life for the sake of God. For many, it’s not until they reach “maturity” that they realize they have been cheated out of nothing less than a life of meaning.’7

ROOT ISLAMIC EDUCATION & MUSLIM SCHOOLS

In the traditional Muslim world, education was always about learning how to carry ourselves; of how to dispose our souls to God, and to others. It was about comportment – or what in the Islamic world is called adab.

‘Pious character, refined manners and moderation constitute a twenty-fifth parts of prophethood,’ said the Prophet, peace be upon him.8 The idea of beautiful conduct or cultivated behaviour – in contrast to that seen as crass, vulgar or ugly – is gathered in that genre of knowledge termed adab. The Arabs say: adaba ila ta‘amihi – ‘He invited [others] to his banqueting feast.’ From it comes the idea of adab being an ‘invitation’ to partake of what is praiseworthy and virtuous. In its religious sense, adab is a call to acquire virtuous qualities. Adab carries with it the sense of civility, courtesy, refined manners, and cultured breeding or upbringing. Throughout the ages of Islam, adab was that type of learning acquired for the sake of living beautifully. For adab relates to what a person should know, should be, and should do – so as to perfect the art of living.

Again, in the Islamic tradition, the two words for education are: tarbiyah and ta‘lim. Tarbiyah is from the word, raba – to ‘grow’, ‘increase’, ‘flourish’. For education is about imparting learning to a student allowing him or her to grow and flourish as a human being. 

The other word, ta‘lim, is from the root word, ‘alamah, which means ‘sign’ or ‘imprint’. In other words, to make an impression or a mark. The earliest form of writing, Cuneiform, first used about five and a half thousand years ago, was done by pushing a wedge into soft clay to create an impression or sign. That is what ta‘lim is about. It’s about creating a beautuful, cultured mark or impression on the student’s heart, mind and character.

So all in all, Islamic education – at its root – is about growing in beauty as a person; as a believer; as a worshipper of God. At its heart is the imparting of meaning. Both Muslim parents, and Muslim teachers in Muslim schools, must understand that if home-schooling or Muslims schools are to be real  alternatives to state schools, they cannot follow the very same paradigm of schooling chiefly in terms of job prospects. It can’t be mainly about tests, grades, targets, and schooling for the sake of functional literacy. Children are an amanah; a trust. They deserve much better. So while no responsible parent can ignore the fact that the schooling children recieve is important in determining their employment prospects, it’s the right of all children to recieve more. It’s their right to recieve an education which balances order and routine with freedom and creativity; which equips them with tools to flourish in the wider world: physically, emotionally and intellectually; and which points them to adab, to meaning, to the sacred.

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1. Cf. How to Survive the Modern World (London: School of Life, 2021), 213-14.

2. ‘A Short Angry History of Compulsory Schooling,’ in Gatto, Hanson & Sayers, Educating Your Child in Modern Times (California: Alhambra Productions, 2003), 16.

3. How to Survive the Modern World, 214.

4. The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School (London: The School of Life, 2021), 7.

5. This, and what follows, is based upon Shaykh Hamza Yusuf’s lecture: The School System.

6. Hamza Yusuf, ‘New Lamps for Old’, in Educating Your Child in Modern Times, 48.

7. ibid., 48.

8. Abu Dawud, no.4776. It was graded hasan in al-Albani, Sahih Sunan Abu Dawud (Riyadh: Maktabah al-Ma‘arif, 1998), 3:174.

Posted in contemporary concerns, knowledge & epistemology, modernity & muslimness and tagged , , , , , ,
14 Nov 2021

Happiness: Modernity’s Official Religion

UNTIL THE AMERICAN Declaration of Independence gave us the notion of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, people didn’t believe happiness was something that needed to be made into a specific right that they then had the ‘liberty’ to pursue. Instead, pursuing happiness is hard wired into our DNA. Its pursuit is instictive to our nature. In fact, we might question if there’s ever been anyone who acted in order to be unhappy? The pursuit of happiness is simply a human impulse and one of life’s givens.

Be that as it may, an American-style hankering after happiness is what has now been exported across the world. So whether through movies, popular culture, its capitalist, turbo-consumerist economy, or its typical go-it-alone attitude, much of the globe has brought into the American understanding of how happiness should be pursued. We all want our slice of the American pie of happiness. Yet as study after study keeps on revealing, Americans are not really happy. In fact, given all its creature comforts and consumption levels, it’s a country mired in rising levels of suicide, anxiety, depression and drug addiction. America isn’t happy … and Britain isn’t much better.

So what’s going on?

Well we might want to get our bearings straight by first asking ourselves: what do we mean by being happy? What is happiness? 

WHAT IS HAPPINESS?

As odd as it sounds, the reply to it is a bit tricky. Trying to define happiness is a bit of an unhappy task. But usually, when we moderns speak of being happy, or happiness, we means something like: an emotional state of well being, characterised by feeling pleasure or showing contentment. We are aware that happiness is a state, and states come and go, and normally don’t last long. Feelings are even fleetier. We are also aware that sometimes we can outwardly be content, especially if we think this is what’s expected of us, even if we are inwardly not happy or content. 

Indeed, our modern obsession with happiness might even be dooming us to failure. In an individualistic culture as our own, living by the social myth we’ve created that: ‘I must always be happy’, is a huge ask. This inevitably leads to disappointment, which then interferes with being happy. The great religious insight that true human happiness or fulfilment will not be found on the material plane alone cannot be overlooked.

MONEY CAN’T BUY ME LOVE … OR HAPPINESS!

There’s nothing new in the idea that material consumption doesn’t lead to happiness. That concept is a mainstay of just about every religion. But one doesn’t have to be religious to see how silly some of the claims that come out of our hyper-consumerist culture are. We are promised happiness with the next gadget, the next pay raise, the next designer item of clothing, or even the next sip of fizzy drink! Big buisinesses and advertisers have, for  over a century, promised happiness, but have led people instead into a rat race of joyless production and consumption. And society doesn’t seem to have the collective will or imagination to do anything about it.

Currently, what all the science points to is that the reason why we don’t get happier as society gets richer, is because we chase after the wrong things in our quest for happiness. 

Studies seem to repeatedly confirm the age old wisdom that the source of true human happiness are to be found in: faith, family, friendship, as well as meaningful work.

Scientists have found, again and again, that those with a spiritual practice or who follow religious beliefs tend to be happier, less anxious, and better able to handle life’s vicissitudes than those without one. Likewise, the data shows that people are happier in those cultures and societies that support social relationships as a pathway to happiness. In individualistic societies, the science suggests that people should try to focus less intensely on their desire to be happy and focus on building social relationships: visit family, go out with friends, and develop practices like compassion and gratitude; which might make us feel more connected to others. ‘Necessity may,’ it has been said, ‘be the mother of invention, but interdependence is the mother of affection.’ We humans are social creatures. But this dazzling thing called modernity, however, has ripped us out of our natural state; our evolutionary and historical social nexus, and has made us all rather anxious.

SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS PIE-CHART

Staying with a bit more science, before ending with a few short subjective, philosophical reflections. Research has also revealed that fifty percent of what in Islam is called one’s mizaj – one’s usual temperament, or mood – is determined by our genes. Some people are genetically disposed to being happier than others. Some are disposed to being more melancholic; some more gloomy or moody, and others more cheerful, reflective or humorous. Of course, we are not held hostage to our predispositions. There are things we can do to change them for the better. And that’s where the next slice of the pie comes in.

Forty percent of happiness is related to our own state of mind, we are told. And this is something we can control. So a large part of happiness depends on what we positively do, how we positively think, how we act responsibly, and how we avoid living recklessly or in the grip of addictions. Our state of mind; our attitude, and how we behave in this world can make a significant difference to our happiness. That is to say, how we act in our lives can be a game changer.

Ten percent relates to our outward circumstances. Change in weather can affect our mood and happiness, as can seasonal changes. Bereavment and tragedy are two other significant things which impact us emotionally. And there is little we can do about them, although there might be certain ways to respond to these circumstances that are better than others.

On the science of happiness, let me add this important point. Peter Singer, professor of ethics, says that ‘when ideas first come into the world, they are likely to be wooly, and in need of more work to define them sharply. That may be the case with the idea of happiness.’1 So while we might benefit from the overall facts, figures and percentages in this area, the science of happiness is still work in progress.

SHOULD HAPPINESS BE THE ULTIMATE GOAL?

Having established that we all have an inbuilt impulse to seek happiness, there seems to be a bit of a paradox – a tautology, in fact – between that and America’s Declaration of Independence which asserts that everyone is at liberty to pursue happiness. How can happiness be a right that we choose to puruse, if pursuing it is an innate part of our very disposition?

The simplest version of happiness is that it is nothing more than feeling good. This idea lies behind the philosophy that promotes it as the highest good, and the one that we as a nation have signed up to: utilitarianism. It is the philosophy of Bentham and Mill, which judges the moral worth of an action by its consequence, which is usually expressed as: ‘the greatest pleasure [happiness] for the greatest number of people.’ Thus, any action is morally good, provided it brings the person pleasure and doesn’t harm anyone else. Nietzsche disdained utilitarian thinking. ‘For Nietzsche, the idealisation of happiness puts desire for easy comfort above the aspiration for greatness … Happiness is for simple creatures, like the cat curled up in  the basket or the child splashing in a paddling pool; serious adults should have higher ambitions.’2

In contrast to this consequentialist philosophy is Aristotle’s virtue ethics. This is much closer to the traditional Islamic idea of happiness (sa‘adah), It is the ethics which says that one should do an act because it is the right thing to do, regardless of what feelings do or don’t occur as a consequence. It is to live a life of nurturing in oneself those good habits or traits known as virtues. This is where eudaimonia, ‘flourishing’ or ‘happiness’, lies.

HAPPINESS IN ISLAM

The Qur’an says: Whoever does good, be they male or female, and has faith, We shall cause them to live a goodly life. [Q.16:97] This hayyatun tayyibah, or ‘goodly life’, was understood by Muslims scholars to be a life of happiness and contentment in this world.3 This is a life of worship and obedience to Allah, and duty and sincere service to others; along with ridding the soul of its spiritual vices and nurturing in it the spiritual virtues.

Some studies have shown that there’s a correlation between happiness and religious rituals. Religious rituals helps teach responsibility to oneself and to others, and can instill discipline to keep us away from addictions, drugs or alcohol, thus contributing to our overall happiness. Likewise, religious chanting also helps increase feelings of well being. In terms of rituals and chanting, one might think of the Muslim prayer (salat), as well as the act of dhikr, or remembrance of God: invoking or reverently chanting certain phrases of God’s praise, glory or greatness. All in all, religious observance, by creating certain moral boundaries and discipline, actually helps to shield people from certain weaknesses and vices which can lead to unhappiness, such as addiction to alcohol or gambling.

For the believer, however, the real summum bonnum, the highest, ultimate happiness is as the Quranic verse says: For those who act with excellence is the greatest good, and even more. [Q.10:26] The ‘greatest good’ is understood to be Paradise with all its delights and endless bliss, while the ziyadah, or ‘even more’ is the ultimate delight of the ru’ya – the Beatific Vision of God. The Prophet ﷺ told us: ‘When the people of Heaven enter Heaven and the denizens of Hell enter Hell, a herald shall call out: “O people of Paradise! There is a tryst for you with your Lord, which He wishes to bring about for you.” “What might that tryst be?” they enquire. “Did He not make heavy our scales, whiten our faces, and bring us into Heaven and deliver us from Hell?” Then the veil shall be lifted, and they shall gaze at the Face of God. By God, never will the believers be given anything more beloved to them than of gazing at Him.’4

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1. Ethics in the Real World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016), 197.

2. Baggini & Macaro, Life: A User Manual (London: Ebury Press, 2020), 159.

3. See: Ibn Juzayy, al-Tashil li ‘Ulum al-Tanzil (Dat Tayyibah al-Khudara’, 2018), 2:775.

4. Muslim, no.181.

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