You Might Be Dajjal If...

Christmas Vacation for People Who Don't Celebrate Christmas

Christmas staycation and thank God for that. We needed time off—the wife and I often travel for work, but we were all pretty exhausted and ground down. We needed time for ourselves and each other; the less time we spent getting places, the more time we could spend enjoying. I devoted a lot of time to reading; most of my books are of interest only to me, but Reports on the Dajjal raised many eyebrows.

Everyone, it seems, wants to know about The End Times. Now some people might think it’s weird to talk about this with kids, but I don’t. Because it’s our responsibility to share all our religion (in age-appropriate ways), especially the harder stuff. Because our beloved and blessed Messenger urged us too. I’ve become a big believer in the idea of giving kids challenges while they’re still at home.

Not in painful or pejorative ways, but to give them some self-confidence, to push them to do more and learn more, to expose them to the wider world when they still have us at home, and to make them more capable. If we don’t teach the religion, after all, who will? Will those people have good intentions? And what happens to a person’s faith when they confront what is unexpected but undeniable?

So, anyway, back to the world ending.

I tried to indulge the topic responsibly, with context, perspective, and wisdom—leading all the same to some unexpectedly memorable exchanges. By far my favorite was when our youngest (R, he’s 11, and on his way to middle school) referred to “signs of the end times” as “red flags.” As in, “if the sun rises in the West, that’s definitely a red flag.” That’s so much better than anything I could come up with.

Of course, that’s not all we did on staycation. Before watching Leave the World Behind on Netflix—the next movie I mention proves there isn’t a dystopian obsession here—we watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, making judicious use of the occasional fast forward. Towards the end, protagonist Clark Griswold describes his cousin-in-law Eddie with a clearly backhanded compliment.

The relatively cosmopolitan Clark looks down on the decidedly unsophisticated Eddie by noting “his heart is bigger than his brain.” Of course Eddie takes this as high praise, but while for Clark that might not be a red flag, it’s still a yellow light. (At the same time, I’m reading Freddie DeBoer’s Cult of Smart—and I’d strongly recommend his Substack too). But consider that psuedo-compliment for a moment.

In the circles I travel in, we give a lot of attention to things like

What kind of car someone drives. Where they go on vacation. What college they graduated from.

What I mean is, we spend a lot of time on wealth, and even more time pushing virtues like intelligence, ambition, and accomplishment. That’s all well and good, at least in measured amounts, except that how often in our tradition do we value these? There is of course a remarkably sophisticated Islamic scholarly tradition, and our religion definitely rewards deep investigation, reflection, and exertion.

There have been brilliant, intellectual Muslims. There have been accomplished, professional Muslims. There are. There will be. Nothing wrong with that. But our religion values virtues like honesty, decency, courage, modesty, temperance, asceticism, and the like, all the more. We’re not judged for SAT scores, college essays, GPAs, salaries, let alone vehicles, home square footage, or the like.

But we are taken to account for the moral potential God gives us. So here’s a track I’m mooting for future halaqas, though I have to think on how.

See, I’ve been pushing the older kids to ask hard questions. A lot of Muslim institutions seem afraid of questions, of rigorous debate, and we should have room for the heavy stuff because confidence (in faith) builds resilience (in faith). But is the heavy stuff just in our heads? It’s easier, I think, to ask hard questions than to live out hard answers. Or look at it this way.

How many of us would be willing to give away some of the money we planned to spend on ourselves? To buy less, to eat less, to travel less, to splurge less, and to give more in time, treasure, or gesture?

That’s the ultimate lesson I’m trying to get at. Islam is not just what we believe, abstractly, but what we do, and what we do in order to become better people. With the middle school boys, we’ll spend the spring getting further into prayer, starting next week inshallah. With the high schoolers, I’m so happy we got to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (and watch the 1992 Spike Lee film.)

But this spring, and in time for Ramadan, the high schoolers and I are going somewhere harder for modern culture to acknowledge—to abstemiousness and denial, to trust in God, to accepting fate, hardship, and difficulty. Because that’s what matters in the end. Not that we thrive in material ways (although that’s no doubt nice), because we are responsible for the means. God for the end.

And isn’t that the lesson of the end times literature? Even in the End Times, the Means still matter most. Intention and action. Not outcome. It’s easy to say we’ll be on the right side when things are hard. Until we ask ourselves how we are when things are just ordinary hard. When we’re tired, do we wake up to pray? When we’re angry, do we abandon our compass?

And trials don’t have to be hard in the obvious way. Wealth can make us soft. Enjoyment can make us weak. (Hence temperance.)

I have to face these truths just as everyone else does. I am often deeply disappointed by the answers I find in myself. I’ve tried to reflect on and build through that. Teaching, you see, is about learning with your students. That’s why parents who don’t feel comfortable teaching for lack of grounding should take heart: Teaching is also your chance to learn.

For us to practice as we preach. To grow ourselves. To model adulthood.

To take the world seriously. To take ourselves seriously. But to admit we’re all works in progress. Which is why, starting next week, we’ll begin on the Fons Vitae edition of the third book of Imam al-Ghazali’s Ihyā ‘Ulūm ad-Din, Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence. Join us on the journey. It is not an easy text and I fully expect groans, disbelief, and frustration. Because Ghazali was really smart.

But he also saw how intelligence only took you so far. For what is capability without commitment? Indeed, some people are very big brains, but very small hearts, which means they might just end up causing even more harm. I’m looking forward to the challenge, to learning, and to sharing. As always, Sunday Schooled is free—please encourage your friends and institutions to subscribe too!