Friday, July 26, 2013

Materialistic-consumerism and Muslims



Materialistic-consumerism and Muslims:

Materialism and consumerism are consuming us every second of the day. And we even realize that that’s the case but our nafs tells us its ok, we’re living “within our means” and Allah SWT has given us a lot so it’s ok to spend that money and rizq He’s given us even if it might be on our 5th pair of shoes because we’ve “earned” it and we “deserve” it (if we were to be really given what we deserve, I don’t think it would be a pretty viewing). We’re turning into reckless buyers as such without any regard to the lasting damage we especially to the planet and indeed our own spirituality. 

We take as much as we can from the earth, fulfilling our carnal desires and then go back to praying 5 times a day. And at the end of each prayer we complain that our prayer is “mechanical”, there is no “feeling to it”.  

‘To worship according to one vision of 'man' and 'life', and to live according to another, will inevitably provoke conflict in the soul.’

If we claim to be successors of the Prophet, more than ever we need to adopt the Prophetic way. And The Prophetic way not just in worship but in our daily interactions with people and things and in all our transactions in the Dunya.

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad put it nicely:


"When we take on the Sunna, and reject flawed patterns of behaviour which have been shaped and guided by the ego and by fantasies of self-imagining, we declare to our Creator that we accept and revere the profound revelation of human flourishing exampled by the Best of Creation. Every act of the Sunna which we may successfully emulate declares that our role model is the man who had no ego, and to whom Allah had given a definitive victory over the forces of darkness. 

Modernity holds out lifestyle options centred on the self, and on the lower, agitated possibilities of the human condition. Every word of every magazine now breathes the message of the nafs: explore yourself, free yourself, be yourself. Buy a Porsche to express your identity; dress in a Cacharel suit to make a statement about yourself; be seen in the right places. 

The result, of course, is a society which pursues happiness with great technical brilliance but which puzzles over spiralling rates of suicide, drug abuse, failed relationships, and ever more aberrant forms of self-mutilation. It is a society in denial, a society in pain."

May Allah SWT give us the strength to follow the inward and the outward of the sunnah. 

Adapted with some modifications from: 
http://theconquerorofhearts.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/accountability/
 

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