- in the name of Allah -


On Faith

What is faith? In and of itself, is it a need? a drug? a passion? an emotion? a trump card? a final solution? a convenience? a necessity? a catharsis? a mode of logic? What category, exactly, does our personal relationship to 'faith' fall under? How have we defined it for ourselves?

To me, in my youth, faith was a pill to swallow every night before I went to bed, to keep the bedbugs at bay and my conscience in solace. As I've aged, and I ascertain where I am in life, I am finding that now it has become a candlelight in the darkness of human cognizance. Outside of my deen, my religion, my choice, I can sense only darkness, seeping around every corner of indecision and doubt, waiting to make its way into me or those around me. So, still I hold on to the candle, waiting, for the breeze to lead and push the flame where it should go, to where I inevitably belong.

It has never been easy, even when I was blissful and ignorant in my younger years. There were many traps around me I'd only realize after I'd passed by them, amazed that I'd come so close to them at all. The path has often not been to the best of my liking, often I've questioned the grand design and purpose of it all, especially the role in it I was to play. For life we did not ask, yet life it is we are given. So what is to be done with this choice? There is only 1 path, despite the many ways in which we may want to put things. The choice is ours, to believe or not to believe. One cannot hold either choice in hand, yet avoid its responsibility. If you choose to declare that god is but one God, that His final messenger existed and that this messenger was His servant, then the only path is to submit. Desire will always persist, but it is in the battles that we can lay claim to winning, hand in hand with our superego, that we might keep the beast within at bay, and find the best and better parts of ourselves.

The naysayers and skeptics and atheists, have all given up hope. Their flaw, were I to point at just one common among them all, would be the same as Satan/Iblees/the Fallen One (literally and figuratively): they despair, and in this state, seek only to lead others into despair along with themselves. I must say that sometimes, emotion must be disregarded, for the better sake of one's self. Many times I have felt this way or that, and it would lead me to an invariably dissatisfying result. I knew it, yet I chose the easier path nonetheless. In order for the potential damage of emotion to be minimal, logic should supplant it. If I looked in many directions and did not see, for my own lack of wisdom, providence in the many things around me, in myself, then it should be a fault only of mine, not one that I should lay claim as being of my Creator's. As humans, we may 'feel' undeniably justified in how our train of thought leads to rebellion, dissent, and general disharmony...but we should also remember we are human. Upon reflection, if being human has taught us anything over the past millenia, it is that to err is human. Our fallibility should always humble our insatiable ambitions to be rulers of our own fate, and remind us that the end worth everything we can give it, is often that end which is most difficult to see. Just because there is mist and fog, does not mean the path is not there. It is only that we should wish to forever be led upon it.