interior lives

friends, there is a story.

Maulana mawdudi (shout out to Mubarak’s work-study job), who was a big time scholar around the mid 1900s, had been sentenced to death.

The prison guard recounts how he had seen so many others age 30 years the night before their execution, unable to sleep, ridden with anxiety. He says that the mawlana fell asleep by 10pm. Very much like me, he started snoring soon after.

An hour before his execution, his execution was commuted. He didn’t even show any outward sign of elation or excitement, and just said Alhamdulillah.

That’s complete reliance on Allah in action.

I have been reading a thinking person’s guide to our times lately, and it’s a banger book, y’all should def pick it up, but in it, the author makes a point that hollywood and at large, the US cultural export convinced people around the world that they should live this middle-class suburban lifestyle that the americans on TV are living. Except these countries don’t have the same resources as america. But the societal expectations are there.

But that got me thinking how so much of life is just seeing what other people do and doing the same thing.

Belief it or not, some big time philosopher, Rene Girard, talked a bunch about this and his philosophy around Mimetic desire – that people only want things because other people want it.

But there is no hollywood for iman and taqwa.

Imam Ghazali has a book called marvels of the heart where he talks about how a donkey can carry a load and a horse can also carry a load. But a horse is aesthetically much more pleasing and can gallop at faster speeds and can be used in battle and so on and so forth. And how these specially qualities should be brought out from the horse instead of just using it as a load carrying animal.

He then goes on to explain how a humans eat like animals do and walk around as animals do. But the unique quality of the human being is it’s ability to gain experiential knowledge of Allah. To gain an experience of Allah that’s complete eye-witnessing and doesn’t rely at all on any amount of blind faith.

That was so crazy to read. First time I read it, I was like (1) what am I even doing (2) why aren’t people talking about this.

A related tangent:

This Eid I met Z’s grandma and she was telling me how she recently learned about a hadith and was trying to put it to practice. There was just something so powerful about this. This woman has been muslim her whole life. She lived in atleast 2 continents that I know of, grew up probably when the internet hadn’t reached pakistan, to now where AI is becoming ubiquitous. But at her old age her focus was still on following the sunnah.

Experiences like this really have an effect on you. But how do u make a tv show around this?

The fruits of faith are almost never legible from the outside, never quite something you can make a move about. But I wonder if this means that these meanings get lost, and prayer is just going up and down, and the acts of worship become a hollow shell for the secrets it once used to carry.