Surviving is Thriving (2)

How Ancient Wisdom Becomes Modern Medicine

Today I’m sharing part two of “Surviving is Thriving.” (Part one posted last week.)

Islam’s Ancient Wisdom is Modern Medicine

I remember years ago driving with my dad. It was a hot day and we passed a neighbor out jogging, profusely sweating, clearly struggling. My father was genuinely bewildered. He’d grown up in hardship. Struggled to open up a different life. He expended every resource to get us to a place where he believed we would have better prospects and more possibilities.

On that note, he couldn’t for the life of him understand why a well-to-do American, who held all this privilege and power, would voluntarily go out in the heat and tax his body to the point of such evident distress. When my father was growing up, exercise wasn’t something you had to carve out time for. Every day life meant physical and manual labor, from morning to night. Who would add more of that in their free time?

What a difference a generation makes. These days, we often beat ourselves up for not being more active. We worry about the time we spend sedentary.

We wish our kids had more chances to be outdoors with friends.

So ask yourself: Why are we, individually and socially, pushing so hard to emphasize what many of our recent ancestors would have loved to have less of?

Because while many of us don’t need to physically exert ourselves to survive—at least, not in the way most people did a hundred years ago—that hardly means we don’t need to physically exert ourselves to thrive. We have to put back into our lives what modernity took out. Don’t forget that when you’re trying to understand Islam, which you need to do to live Islam.

Which we all need to do if we’re going to teach Islam. Like I said in last week’s post: What we need to survive is what we need to thrive. Without what we need, we can’t succeed. We often fail to make sense of this because modern, secular lifestyles can’t work if we aren’t convinced that we, as people, have fundamentally changed. So that’s what we internalize. Because our circumstances have changed, we have.

But did you ever ask how? Did we become a new species? We can go to the moon, or develop vaccines, so we’ve transcended our fitra?

Even if you don’t believe God is behind and beyond everything, if it’s just materialism all the way we down (or, well, up)—it’s the same: we haven’t fundamentally or essentially changed. What I find especially beautiful about Islam is how our faith validates what we would’ve needed to do anyway to stay alive. We got and get rewarded for doing things we would have had to anyway.

Like eating properly. Sleeping properly. Even exercising. Living in extended families. For the right reasons, of course, but you get my meaning.

What’s even more beautiful is that Islam balances our foundational dynamism—as a species, we’ve always been curious and creative—with our unchanging personhood. In short, Islam is open to inventiveness (recall the Prophet [S] telling us every disease has a cure, except death, and so seek those cures!) while also grounding us with an eternal core—the Qur’an, prayer, fasting, rules of living together, eating, even dressing.

Even when circumstances change, a lot about Islam can’t and won’t change; Islam’s daily practice is meant to go to the end of time. But what is that daily practice? Why does it take the forms it does?

Where in the past many of us had no choice but to be in community, Islam told us we got rewards from God for doing what we had to. That’s a nice deal, and much more practical, relatable, and humane than dividing communities into hierarchies. But here’s the thing: Islam still mandates we be in community even when circumstances might make that optional, as hard as that would’ve been to imagine in 7th century Arabia.

Or, for that matter, 19th century Senegal.

No adult man can skip jumu‘ah except in limited circumstances.

Even now, when many of us are tempted away from community, Islam pushes us back together, literally on a daily basis. That Islam does this suggests that what helped us survive is now required for us to thrive.

Is that a surprise?

Not so long ago, the struggle to survive literally kept us leaner and hungrier. Life was harder, sure. But on the other side of prosperity are different tests. Despite globalization, industrialization, and digitization, we aren’t changed. We harm ourselves when we live through screens, shut down houses of worship, disconnect from families, eat processed nonsense, and erase the sacred from ordinary life.

In the rush to the new, modern societies hardly bothered to ask how we could know for sure what is and isn’t good for us.

Let me give you some examples.

“Your Lord is on a Watchtower.” Our Vision, Not So Much

Islam doesn’t command marriage—you’re not necessarily sinning if you’re not married—but Islam strongly encourages marriage and kids. Once upon a time, people had to get married and have kids just to survive. Now that we have the wealth and technology such that we don’t have to (or at least we can live in denial for a while), we have turned vital social relationships and commitments into options.

One lifestyle choice among many. That might not work out the way we expect it to.

I can’t tell you how many men I know wandered and stumbled through their 20s and 30s, broken Peter Pans fumbling through life. We were—and I’m totally including myself in this—hardly the kinds of capable, confident, courageous and community-oriented men many of our dads were or were told to be. Because we didn’t challenge and grow ourselves, we became sad, lonely, distressed, and depressed.

If young men failed at that, that’s not entirely on us. Who was articulating what we needed to do? Who studied changing circumstances and asked how we live in and between these? Because while we suffered, others did, too. If our young men and young women today likewise don’t grow up with a view to their part in building human futures, they are doing themselves, each other, and our societies a disservice.

We need families and communities and these don’t exist without a commitment to continuity among men (and women!) Continuity, in turn, requires humility—I’m not enough. I cannot live forever. How do I leave the world better for having me? By making sure there are people strong enough to keep going after me. Continuity, in other words, requires family and community.

We should be in relationships with each other beyond what we can choose and forsake with relative convenience. I’m not crudely arguing marriage is the panacea to all our problems. I’m not claiming that the same outcome pertains for everyone. (That would exclude me!) And I’m hardly absolving institutions and politics for their huge part; if something is good for us individually, we should facilitate it communally.

And if community is so valuable, we should be collectively working towards better outcomes, from economic policies to how we run masjids, build communities, and teach in and through families. Not to mention what we do with our lives.

And that means a consciousness of where America—and American Islam—comes up short must be part of not just how we teach, but what we teach. That’s not because we should ever look down on the country that is our country—it’s because we should feel a responsibility to where we live, what we belong to, and who our neighbors, friends, and colleagues are. Selfish ways of living are hardly religious. Or patriotic.

That underscores what inspires the halaqas I teach, the ways in which I am building this curriculum.

One day, I will be gone. All my students’ parents will be gone. Will they be able to make life choices that are good for them? (And if so, what are those choices—e.g., surviving as thriving.) Will they be able to form, teach, lead, and grow communities? A halaqa shouldn’t be about facts, figures, and rituals in isolation, but about helping them understand how these combine to sustain and nourish and protect them.

I’ll go back to marriage again only because I keep hearing from parents with kids—“kids”—well past college, who aren’t getting married, don’t seem suited for marriage, or are (in the parents’ opinion) marrying the wrong person. In some of the instances, that person might be the wrong person. But then it turns out the parents only even brought up marriage when their kid was already an independent adult.

This is like telling a twenty-three year old that he needs to go to medical school and then toss an AP Biology textbook their way the next day.

If you want your kids to marry Muslims, are you helping them internalize why?

Are you building in them the maturity that will develop in time for them to pick a good spouse? Do you have a community that can help facilitate that? We can’t deny people need guidelines, ambitions, guardrails and directions. Yes, it’s nice for a ten year-old to develop his interests. But he needs goals to work towards beyond what he knows.

Because, by definition, there’s a lot he can’t know.

What is the alternative otherwise? What becomes of the world we leave behind? I can give you another example, which speaks to me personally, the majority of my students (boys or young men), and another crisis facing not just fellow Americans, but the wider West, even the world. Because men are struggling. Many of our communities are hardly ready for the consequences.

But maybe we can’t see the crises because some of the assumptions we have (which, to be fair, we might communicate in heavy-handed ways) mitigate against these. Had I told my dad I didn’t want to get married, he would have responded with some choice words; I’m not saying that’s a way to communicate that resonates now, but I still believe his heart was in the right place. Here’s a thought to add to that, too.

His head was in the right place, too.

Head, Heart, Halaqa

As it turns out, surviving is thriving also speaks directly to the crisis of men, with Islam’s modes of masculinity offering men a way forward through a very uncertain and frankly dangerous social landscape, including a way forward out of a binary that pretends men can choose only between unsatisfying visions of masculinity, neither relevant to who we are—or the world we live in.

In fact, Islam addresses some of the root causes of the crisis in masculinity in huge ways, which we—to our discredit—sometimes disparage, overlook, or dismiss. But that’s the value of a tradition from God. Yeah, maybe a ten year-old can only see so much. But a healthy, mature, well-educated, well-compensated adult can still only see so much. That’s why we follow God and His Prophet, peace be upon him.

Want your kids to thrive? Want your sons to thrive?

Pretend it isn’t 2024. Spend less time on what’s new and exciting. Spend a little more time on what they would have needed to survive. And let faith guide those insights.

Part 3 in Surviving is Thriving drops next week, inshallah. Please consider subscribing—Sunday Schooled is a resource for Muslim parents, educators, and community leaders, where we can think on, reflect about, and learn from the responsibility and opportunity that is teaching our Muslim kids.