I Found Patience in the Islamic Belief of Qadr
Tags: Spirituality, Patience, Religion, Peace, Islam

Grief for the past and worry for the future are the single two destroyers of the momentary peace and happiness of the present now

Just press the pause button in your day. Be still. Close your eyes. Shut off all your sensory input. And focus on your internal world. Your breathing and heartbeat. And feel your feelings. Are they empty? Are they positive? Or are they negative?

Chances are if you’re thoughtless then you would be feelingless too. Thoughts are the generators of feelings — positive thoughts beget positive feelings and negative thoughts beget negative feelings. Feelings of the internal self are never ever derived from sensations, but by thoughts alone. Thoughts of the future or of the past, or of the present moment. Memories, anticipated memories, or momentary ones.

happiness is peace in motion. peace is happiness at rest (Photo by Sunyu on Unsplash)

To feel happy and positive, you have to think of happy and positive thoughts. To be happy, you have to feel happy. To be always happy, you have to always feel happy and you have to always think positively.

Is this possible?

Is this possible in a world full of suffering and injustice? In a life full of mistakes and sinning, of ignorance and immorality, of bad people out to cause you grief? How could you always be happy, at peace with yourself, when you know there will be disappointments and bad experiences in the future? And forget the future, what about the past? What about the mistakes and lost opportunities?

There is indeed a way. A way of being at peace with yourself, with all your faults and weaknesses, and with the world, with all its cruelty and injustice. A way that would instill in you an appreciation of the temporal nature of this world and all its happenings, and of your life and all your experiences. A way that would give you patience to fight against the pain, and gratitude to accept the blessings of life. A way that would give you humility and dignity. And that is the way of the believer.

“Amazing is the affair of the believer, verily all of his affair is good and this is not for no one except the believer. If something of good/happiness befalls him he is grateful and that is good for him. If something of harm befalls him he is patient and that is good for him” (Saheeh Muslim #2999)

The question obviously is: why is the believer patient in the face of calamities? How could their patience be so strong as to extinguish any grief or worry? The answer is because of their belief in God and His Attributes, especially His ability to script the life of each and one of us, the way he wants and for the believer’s own good. The calamities that befall us, should not undo us and it would never destroy us if we believe that each and one of those is for our good. We live in only one page at a time, but God knows the entire book and He wrote it for us in the first place.

Photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash

We are allowed to be sorrowful due to separation of us from the states we yearn for or the souls of whose presence we seek, but we shouldn’t deny that these states (of happiness, peace and prosperity) exist or that the soul of a loved one lives on even after death

Any suffering we may face — let it be the death of a loved one or hunger, poverty, war — are all limited to only a few pages of the book of our life. They are never permanent, and life carries on even after death. We are allowed to be sorrowful due to separation of us from the states we yearn for or the souls of whose presence we seek, but we shouldn’t deny that these states (of happiness, peace and prosperity) exist or that the soul of a loved one lives on even after death. The Prophet Ya’qub (as) (Jacob) knew of the dream, and that his son Yusuf (Joseph) would eventually return healthy and in a lofty position, but he was indeed sorrowful and allowed himself to cry in silence because his beloved son was separated from him.

In the belief in the eventual reunion of you with your loved one or with the state of bliss that you yearn for is the negation of any thought, word, and deed that would tarnish your patience.

Matters of your sustenance, let it be exams or job interviews or the profits of your company — anything — have all been pre-written for you. It’s none from yourself, you don’t deserve any of it. If you are successful at some exam, that doesn’t mean you deserve it because of your hard work and/or ability. It means God gave you the love for hard work and the ability, and so God gave you success. Your true worth lies ONLY in matters of faith, in your level of faith in Him, and how you live that faith in your life. It does not lie in the “success” of this life — because those have been pre-written for you and are actually means of testing your faith. We are all at different levels in this world purely because God chose to test us differently. At the end of the day, life for a believer is a test of faith.