The Art of Living

Takeaways

1. 01

   Showing up for Jumu'ah is already the day's success.

   Everyone in the room left something to be here: work for most, family or school for others. We left it because Allah called us to this prayer. O you who believe, be conscious of Allah as He deserves, and do not die except in a state of submission.Q 3:102 If nothing else comes out of today except obedience and the remembrance of Allah, a break in our normal attachment to the dunya, that is already a great success.

2. 02

   The whole religion was summed up in one visit.

   Near the end of the Prophet's life, by some reckonings about 90 days before he passed, a stranger walked into the gathering in exceedingly white clothes with exceedingly black hair and no trace of travel on him, which was strange for someone nobody recognised. Back then you arrived dusty; you did not step out of an air-conditioned car. He put his knees against the Prophet's knees and said "Ya Muhammad", which is not how the companions addressed him, and asked about Islam, then iman, then ihsan, confirming each answer with "you have spoken the truth" until Umar and the others were baffled: who is the teacher here?Nawawi 2 Then he left, and the Prophet said that was Jibril, who came to teach you your deen. Twenty-three years of calling people to Islam, summarised in one short exchange.

3. 03

   Three dimensions, three sciences, and you need all three running.

   Islam is what the body does, the rituals, and the rituals are the easy part even if they feel hard, because even the hypocrites perform them. Iman is when it penetrates the mind and the heart and you actually believe. Ihsan is what gives the whole thing life: recognising in everything you do that Allah is watching. Islam grew into the science of sharia, iman into aqida, and ihsan into the sciences of ethics and spirituality. Some people live on the rituals at the expense of belief and character; some guard their creed and neglect their actions; some just say be a good person and ignore the other two. The Prophet held all three in perfect balance; we sway between them by season, but all three are supposed to be live at once. As a kid I thought Islam was three things: no pork, no alcohol, no dating. Not very appetising.

4. 04

   Iman is your birth certificate, Islam is your driver's licence, ihsan is you.

   Everyone has a birth certificate and nobody carries it around, but once in a while something forces you to produce it and prove where you were born. Iman is like that: rarely tested out loud, and decisive when it is, which is why Imam Abu Hanifa called it al-fiqh al-akbar. Your licence you carry every day, and that is Islam, in daily practice. Ihsan is not a card at all; it is your very being, every single interaction, whether you are with people or alone. Listed third, practised most. Where the rappers said get rich or die trying, for the Muslim it is get ihsan or die trying.

5. 05

   It is not enough to do what is right. We have to do what is beautiful.

   Ihsan literally means to make beautiful, and like Islam and iman it is an active verb. Fiqh is about minimums; ihsan is about maximums. A jurist can find a loophole, a hila, for almost anything, and stay technically correct while being no good to the people around him. Do we enjoy being around people like that? If our reputation is that we fulfilled the contract and nothing more, we may be free of sin and still nowhere near the moral conduct this religion teaches. Dr Sherman Jackson's The Islamic Secular makes the related point: most of what we do all day is simply mubah, permissible, tacos or burritos, but that does not mean the religion has nothing to say about it. Is one more dessert good? Eat and drink, but be not excessive.Q 7:31

6. 06

   Work hard, play hard, pray hard is still somebody else's framework.

   The zeitgeist here is the air we breathe: work hard, play hard, and in the Bay Area if you are not hustling you are not surviving. People of the dunya do work hard, and we should be working hard too, except that even when we are working for the dunya we should be working for the akhirah. At a young professionals gathering last night I asked what was missing from work hard, play hard; they said prayer. But bolting prayer onto their equation does not solve it. We have our own framework, and it is Islam, iman and ihsan: body, mind and soul.

7. 07

   Knowledge first, and enough of it to stand still in the wind.

   Not the degree you already have, the knowledge of the religion. There is fard ayn, what each of us personally must know to practise, and fard kifaya, what the community must cover. The individual minimum can be learned with a real teacher in under six months, and if that has never been done it deserves to be taken seriously. The point is confidence: when someone tells you that you are doing it wrong, you are not blown around by every wind, because you studied with a teacher who studied with a teacher, back to the Sahaba, to the Prophet, to Jibril, to Allah. Sit with a person of knowledge at least once a week if you can, online or in person, and absorb their character along with their knowledge. And notice the degrees of certainty: if I tell you I own a car, you have my report; if we look out the window and the lights flash, you have sight; if you drive it yourself, you have experiential certainty, haqq al-yaqin. That is a trivial example. The goal is for our knowledge of Allah to climb like that, until we believe in Allah more surely than in our own existence, because He is the only real existence and we are all contingent.

8. 08

   Family, especially when it is inconvenient.

   The obligation runs to parents first, then siblings, then extended family, then the community. For those who are single and working here, young and successful, marriage is part of the obligation too, however hard it has become to arrange. And some of us are now the sandwich generation, with young children and ageing parents at the same time, without the family and support structures that existed in the countries we came from. My khala is ten years older than my mother and has severe dementia; I cannot sit with her for more than a few minutes before I have to step away and cry, because I see my mother in her. Ihsan here is simple to state and hard to do: you take care of your family even when it is inconvenient, and most of the time it will be inconvenient, to your career and to your own household.

9. 09

   At work, your religion is being read by people who will never ask about it.

   You are not a balanced Muslim merely because you take a break for Jumu'ah and Dhuhr and Asr and take Eid off. Every interaction at work is a representation of this religion, whether we like it or not. There are communities in this valley that built an extraordinary reputation for hard work and then watched it get questioned once people started crossing lines on ethics. That cannot happen to the Muslims. A hiring manager should not be thinking: Muslim, so Fridays off, head covering, rules, cannot take the client to a bar. It should be: go to your Friday prayer, because you are the best and you will come back and kill it. One of my teachers put the inverse sharply: technically it would be haram to read Quran on the clock, because that time belongs to your employer by right. And do not assume only scholars serve the ummah. A group of scholars founded an organisation decades ago and realised what they actually needed were middle managers, people who knew how to get things done. Every one of us has a skill the community needs.

10. 10

    Community means suhba and khidma, and a portion of all four at all times.

    At work it is dunya, dunya, dunya, and you become part of it, so you need gatherings that reset you and remind you of Allah, which is also why a person follows the religion of his friend, so look carefully at who your friends are.Abu Dawud 4833 And community is not only benefiting; it is serving. One brother I take as a model, just from watching him: 20-plus years a student of knowledge, still attending classes; two children who have memorised the Quran and are doing well in their studies; married to the same woman for 20-plus years; a good career that is now a startup he is running, and he wants to do good with the money; 20-plus years teaching at the same Sunday school and sitting on the same board. Seasons change which of these takes the most hours, but knowledge, family, career and community each need a portion of you at all times.