Seeking Status

Seeking Status - A Ramadan Reflection

Opening

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and blessings and peace be upon the noblest of prophets and messengers, our master, our patron, and our beloved Muhammad, and upon his family and all his companions.

The Spiritual Academy of Ramadan

We're working our way now through the blessed month, this challenging time of year when everything becomes intensified, when sabr is not just necessary but easier when we learn the vital and really rather cheerful lesson that we are capable of restraining ourselves and disciplining the nafs and a time when we recognize that the fast is not just about tarq, abandonment of certain outward actions but is about the tarq or the abandonment of certain inward states as well.

We know that in the month of Ramadan (صُفِّدَتِ الشَّيَاطِينُ - suffidat ash-shayatin) - the shaytans are chained up and one of the meanings of this is that the shaytan is less able to get at us through these inward weaknesses. Shaytan's assails of the outward fiqh of Ramadan is usually not very grave. Inshallah we're not at immediate risk of running to the fridge and getting ourselves a cool drink. This hadith refers to the inward qualities that Ramadan must be cultivating. Ramadan as a moral academy.

The Problem of Pride and Status-Seeking

And one of the things it seems to me that is most dogged in the human soul is the problem of having too grand an opinion of ourselves. Jah, shuhra - there's lots of Arabic words that apply to this and this is particularly a problem it seems in our modern world where everything is about the self: be yourself, experience yourself, indulge yourself, discover yourself without there being much by way of a footnote explaining what exactly the self might be.

But the self which wishes to boast, which wants to strut its stuff and flex its biceps in front of an admiring public, the self that wishes to be the qibla of mankind but which nonetheless turns out, if we look within ourselves and consider what it actually is, to be a rather cobwebby, weedy, ghost-like thing without much substance - it's all show, it's all facade - does seem to love covering up its own sense of weakness and feebleness and its own knowledge of what it's really like if it has that knowledge by producing a facade which it shows to human beings.

So we are a different kind of person with different sorts of people now. There is a way in which that can be morally appropriate and this is why he says (صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ):

(Abu Dawud)

"I've been commanded to deal with people according to their state, according to their level, to what they are."

So necessarily, the way in which we speak to a new Muslim is going to be different to the way in which we speak to a grey bearded sheikh, the way in which we speak to family is going to be different to the way in which we speak to somebody who we happen to meet on the bus and this is kind of obvious and part of the normal sort of common sense and practical wisdom that a human being accumulates.

But the state within us that wishes rather desperately to be admired - this is problematic and this is not from mahasin al-akhlaq, from the goodness of character.

The Modern Epidemic of Seeking Validation

It seems that Ramadan is a time when we're all a little bit broken - the blood sugar level is down, the natural exuberance of the nafs is a little bit less, the devils are chained up - when we can start to be a bit more attentive and mindful to the way in which we present our public image to the world. How do we wish to be thought of?

And this has become something of a modern epidemic because it can be electronically quantified - all of those teenagers and influencers and youtubers who are absolutely desperate to get as many likes as they can and take this to be an affirmation of themselves as human beings. They crave public adulation and this is a very worrying because very transient and invariably wrong way of behaving towards Bani Adam.

The Virtue of Humility and Haya

Humility is one of the most beautiful virtues of the religion and the characteristic virtue of Islam is haya. He says (صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ):

(Ibn Majah)

"Every religion has a particular quality or character trait and that which is particular to Islam is that of modesty."

And modesty in Arabic as in English means those two related things simultaneously - modesty in terms of not being obscene and dressing modestly but also modesty in the sense of not drawing attention to one's real or imagined virtues or achievements.

The precarity of this is evident - all of those young people, those youtubers, those influencers - if they see the number of likes and the number of hits and the number of replays declining sometimes they have to go for counselling they feel that their self has been diminished because their self is only affirmed by the affirmation of others - unknown others, perhaps perverse, strange others, perhaps robotic others - they have no means of knowing whether the esteem of those others is actually something which one would wish for in any case.

The Gravity of Showing Off

So we have in our religion this very drastic way of talking about superbia, pride which is said traditionally to be the greatest of the seven deadly sins and its related issue of jah, hubbal jah, the love of status and the holy prophet when he speaks of this uses quite absolute and intense language.

In a well-known hadith, it's in Ibn Majah but it's a reputed hadith, he says (صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ):

(Ibn Majah)

"That which I fear most for my ummah is showing off and the hidden passion."

That which he fears most - well we know that what is worse, what is unforgivable is shirk but this is precisely the hidden passion because to the extent that one is manifesting virtues that might be religious virtues to others, one is committing some kind of lesser shirk, shirk ashar, because as well as doing things for the lord of the worlds you are hoping for the praise of mortal, fallible, frail, temporary human beings and this is a diversification of the qibla and hence looks like a near neighbour to shirk.

It's a form of polytheism - you might speak of the polytheism of status seeking. We care about God's opinion but we also really care a lot about the world's opinion: how do I look, how is this look, how is my CV, what are the people saying about me, what is on the discussion groups and all of this nonsense which is irrelevant because only the judgement of the Judge, capital J, carries any weight and is worth having and is objective.

Examples from the Salaf

So we find that in the time of the Salaf there was a tremendous anxiety about publicly appearing in connection with religion in particular. So we know that Khalid bin Maadan who was one of the great Imams of early Islam - he was a great Hadith scholar - but when his circle became large and there was a crowd there he would stand up and leave because he was afraid that he might be becoming famous and that might affect his intention. His intention was the preservation of the words of the Holy Prophet and all of these admiring gazes might turn him into a celebrity.

And celebrity culture is the opposite of Tawheed culture because it's the approbation of the many and the fallible rather than the approbation of the one who is infallible.

There's also a story told about Ubay bin Ka'b. Ubay bin Ka'b is walking and his pupils, his companions are walking behind him and Umar Amir al-Mu'mineen comes and raises his famous stick and Ubay says, "O commander of the faithful, what are you doing?" and he says, "This way of walking is a humiliation for those who are following and a danger for the one who is followed."

Everybody loses because they're kind of humbly and are staggering behind you in this demeaning way which is not how the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, walked with his companions - he was in the middle of them - but it's also a fitna, a source of temptation and sedition and subversion for the one who's being followed. In other words, it's a danger for them and it's bad adab towards them but it's a danger for you because you might think well I am not just at the beginning of the caravan but I am actually the most eminent amongst them which you do not know and which you cannot know.

The Fear of Fame Among Early Muslims

So one of the lessons that we can learn from the early Muslims is a real fear, even a terror of being famous, of celebrity culture, of getting lots of likes and approvals for its own sake because they saw this as being a near neighbour to shirk and something that was extremely, extremely subversive.

So some of them used to do quite drastic things in order to reduce the level of fame and some of them would, for instance pretend to be doing things that are not forbidden but a kind of just mubar, not particularly amiable in sharia. Some of them would even colour their water that they would drink in public so that it would look like wine or some other forbidden fluid in order to reduce their celebrity status and this is recorded of a lot of the early Muslims.

The ulama however say that this is only permissible in the case of somebody who is not emulated otherwise if people think sheikh so and so is drinking wine that's going to cause a lot of his faithful disciples to fall into error, that is not permissible. But for the ordinary Muslim who is afraid that perhaps his sincerity is being damaged by this proliferation of followers and by the fact that people regard him as a very respectable and honourable and upright member of the community it is sometimes, according to the mashaykh, a very valuable remedy just to kind of appear not to be anything special.

The Test of Aziz Mahmud Huday

This has to be handled with extreme caution and discretion - usually one spiritual director will be in charge of that process. Remember the great Mufti of Bursa, one of the early capitals of the Ottoman Empire, Aziz Mahmud Huday, the chief qadi and a very magnificent, important person in the state who wished to follow a teacher in the inward path and the teacher saw that he was attached to his celebrity status - the Ottoman Mufti with the enormous turban and the fur kaftan and walking around with the sultan hobnobbing with the so-called great and the good - and the ego is certainly attached to those things.

And in order to break his pride he commanded him saying, "If you wish to become my student you will have to go in your qadi's robes into the bazaar, the marketplace in Bursa selling tripe and call out at the top of your voice Chiyerci, Chiyerci - the tripe seller, the tripe seller!"

And he found this extraordinarily difficult and that was his first lesson in a sense - his first real lesson in the inner akhlaq of Islam having mastered the outward science of ijtihad and fatwa was this overcoming of the ego. But he did it and as a result his teacher took him as a disciple and he became somebody whose khutbas immediately attracted vast crowds of people whose hearts melted because they could see that he was a person of humility.

Modern Corruption of Religious Authority

In our time this fitna of which Sayyidina Omar speaks - the fitna of having admiring disciples and pupils - has become genuinely subversive. The grand mufti of somewhere, the secretary of some Islamic university, the minister of religious affairs with his state limousine and hobnobbing with useless generals and other not inspiring personalities has become a genuine fitna and some of them manage to escape that fitna, others are carried away by it and become inwardly just a kind of feather blown by the wind - nothing there - and this again can be a fitna for those who follow them.

If the mufti is known to be somebody who really cares about which angle the photographer is taking his portrait from, somebody who makes sure that he's in the front line at the state banquet and is served with the best things, that he has a new 500 series Mercedes and gets into that world - well that's real subversion of prophetic religion and people will be disillusioned by that person.

The Hadith on Good and Bad Sunnah

So this is to do finally with the hadith:

(Sahih Muslim)

"Whoever does a good thing, a good sunnah in Islam or introduces a good practice into Islam shall have its reward and the reward of those who acted with it until the day of judgment."

But conversely also the sunnah sayy'a - the bad thing that that person represents. One is if the shepherd is corrupt then the flock are likely to be in danger.

The Evil of Being Pointed At

So to conclude this issue of status of seeking to be a celebrity:

(various collections)

"Sufficient evil for somebody that people should be pointing at him because of something he has in deen or in dunya."

And we need to be constantly vigilant of this and it doesn't just apply to scholars and billionaires and YouTube influencers and other celebs and there is a very dangerous celebrity culture amongst Muslims unfortunately which comes in from the outside world and people collecting prizes of various kinds and going to Islam piety awards and this kind of nonsense as if it was a sort of the voice or a beauty competition of some profane kind - it is very alien to our tradition.

Where True Honour Lies

And we need to be looking out for those who are not pointed to - the people who nobody attributes much status to - the poor, the weak, the disabled, the marginalized little old lady who sits in the corner of the mosque and nobody really wants to talk to her. Those are the people where the divine favour is likely to be found. It is amongst them that we are likely to find Allah's friends, the Awliya.

So religion really inverts the normal hierarchy of the world and this is part of its indispensability. So yeah, it's better to be in a state of khumul - to be obscure, not to be known particularly in a time such as ours of ridiculous celebrity culture, fitna, distraction, superficiality of all kinds where unqualified people are ranking the ulama and even the Awliya and this is part of the absurdity and part of the fitna of the age.

Islam is not democratic in that sense - only God's judgment is true and matters.

Ramadan Self-Examination

So in this month of Ramadan Insha'Allah one of the things that we will be considering is the front that we put up in public: are we showing off to people? Are we consciously strutting our stuff and making sure that we look like really good Muslims? Are we very happy when we are quoting a hadith that the other person perhaps doesn't know? Are we very happy when we correct somebody's religious mistake?

All of this is min ra'a or natin nafs - from the roughnesses of the lower self and is profoundly subversive and may not formally break the fast but is a dishonourable and an inappropriate state to be in particularly in this month which is the month of purity and the month of iqbal al Allah - of turning back to Allah.

Closing Prayer

So may Allah insha'Allah just as He purifies our outward from certain passions and desires purify our inward state from certain other passions and desires and keep us away from this shirk khafi - this hidden idolatry of longing to be a celebrity.