Immortals of the hereafter
We are immortals
I feel sad =( Kyla and Sorwa has left for Yemen. It felt so strange, so surreal to have Kyla over in London. It was like my precious piece from the States in my Bruneian London, my two familiar worlds coming together. SubhanaAllah, truly Allah is Great. People meet and part for His Sake, inshaAllah, I am able to practice this too.
Hugging each other goodbye, our goodbyes in London before the Heathrow Express, I again feel at loss. My head, my heart seems to have gone somewhere again. I was only standing there, mute and dumb, unable to express anything meaningful, except the wordlessness and sad smile that mean a million other things. Assalamualaikum…I miss you. I couldn’t say it because I was concentrated in feeling it. Goodbye…I’ll miss you, uttered my heart as I walk away. I’ll miss you..why didn’t I say it?..It’s ok, I consoled myself, I’ll say it in the email, when I’m clear headed. InshaAllah, as another consolation, I’ll be able to see you both again in Sanaa, InshaAllah.
* * *
I walked back to Brunei Hall. I think I was actually in a mild state of shock. Saying goodbye is really hard for me. Hmm..I guess I just realized that. I remembered last year when I left Brunei for the States, I cried shamelessly, shamelessly I tell you in the airport, hugging my Babu, not wanting to let her go. It was like the dam of tears had just broken, and I cried and sobbed to my hearts content. My babu is a very patient woman, MashaAllah, so she just held her eldest daughter stoically. I miss my babu now.
Entering the BH lobby, I was greeted by Aunty ‘Minah’ (Ya Allah, she’s Vietnamese I tell you, I can’t recall her name, someone apparently decided to grant her a Malay-Muslim name,I assume for convenience sake, MashaAllah, she is a very friendly, likable women). Aunty Minah serves the foods to the hungry, the eager, the perhaps rarely not so eager diners of Brunei Hall. She is indeed the kind, brave custodian, the fair distributor of the ‘nasi puteh, kari ayam, bak choy dan grilled salmon’ of the day.
So she said to me “Mau makan?”…First thing I entered Brunei Hall. Alas, there I was basking in my little glow of sadness, when a cheery face suddenly and cheerily interjects “mau makan?”..Hilang kali my sad drama look. Hilanng…”Tinggal satu lagi” she continues. My head still very slow, “Huh?”. I was dazed. “Satu lagi” myself automatically replied. In my head I was thinking “Luckyy..and its for me too!”. The only thing was that I wasn’t hungry. I walked again, dazed and absent mindedly to the reception’s counter, where the asst. warden and the other man whose name I have no idea may be, but whose face is familiar, both of them were gazing at me expectantly. “To eat or not to eat…That is the question”.
“I’m not hungry” I intoned
“You sure, satu lagi tu”
“Huh..satu lagi?”
Mana betul my head. (Oh wow…that happened during the last hour, I am actually hungry now!)
Ambled to my room, located on not the 2nd or 4th floor, and was again awashed with a sense of loss, a sense punctuated by my clicking on my I-tunes, and then playing Kareem Salama’s ‘It Came To Be’. Kareem Salama was the American Muslim country singer Kyla introduced to me. And I listened to him a lot during my journeys from Toronto to Houston, and a lot more during J-term when I was back in MHC. His songs primarily have a beautiful spiritual bent to them, for example, if you listen to ‘More Than’, it is a song about Prophet Muhammad sallahualaihissalam, eventhough Salama doesn’t mention the Prophet pbuh explicitly, but you know that it is the beloved Prophet pbuh that he is singing about, because the harrowing and touching events described are unique only to him, the best of mankind =)
Kareem Salama and Kyla seemed to have transported my heart back to the States, back to MHC. I know, I know I haven’t been able to share the many things I would love to share, and my family, my sister particularly must be begrudging me about this, but InshaAllah, I am going to try what best I can, what little I feel I can offer or see fit to be shared here. Perhaps, I was jealously guarding that little piece of world I was living in there, I don’t know. But I really really loved my time there. I met so many amazing people, brothers and sisters. Particularly sisters. Friends, sisters and families that I have come to love and care as my own. Friends, sisters and family whom have come to love and care me as their own…really, who am I, to be taken so kindly into their homes, and treated and fed so well. And Sisters who have found a special place in my heart. It was a wonderful and amazing, blessed experience. Alhamdullilah. I am saying that not to show-off, and May Allah protect me and us all from ostentation. Indeed, this is one of my fears when I come to think of putting my thoughts, my heart on cyberspace.
But I am expressing something here, what is so dear and special to me. Allah swt has granted me my provisions, He has been enormously generous by bestowing upon me opportunities after opportunities to ultimately love others, love Him, and learn, and cry, and laugh, and smile, and hug and kiss…ultimately blessings from Him, ultimately gifts from Him, so that by the end of the day I can think, say and feel “Alhamdullilah”…All praises due to Allah. And only Allah can fairly praise Himself with the names He has for Himself.
But they are all memories now, sweet, some even bittersweet and beautiful memories. My life is largely made of that. Memories. The moment from when I was born till now, as I am typing away this piece…felt, gone, memories. Felt, gone, memories…recalling them all only in memories. Can you believe that? During the Deen Intensive course in Houston, Shaykh Yahya Rhodus said to us “All that you have is now, the moment that you have since you were born until this point right now – is gone, never coming back, that’s it, finished, khalaas”, and he emphasized that by bringing his two hands together and acted out an ala wiping/finished motion (or have I imagined this hand part?? >O<*)
I believe his point is this.
Life is ephemeral. It feels fast and short. You live, and as Montaigne memorably captures it, everyday you live, you are dying. That is, you and I move towards our death with every single breath we take.
What you do in that span between your birth and death is molto molto importante, i.e. very very important.
I think about this when I lie down, I think of my final resting place, my final lying down. I tell myself..I will be in a grave. I will die. I will die. That is the surety of life. Nobody can deny this. Everything, everyone dies. Everyone will return to Allah swt. What will I be like when I die? Will my grave be good or bad, will I be tortured, will I finally rest, will I die Muslim, will I , will I? It is my biggest fear to die anything other than a Muslim. You know what that means right?
That’s it- the ultimate khalaas.
Our earthly remains will be laid to rest, but our human souls are immortal, that is they will live on beyond the grave. They are meant to be immortal. A fact expounded by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his book A Young Muslim’s Guide To the Modern World, a fact that sharply struck me.
I will leave my body in this world. But my soul will remain beyond this world, facing either Allah’s wrath or mercy, entering into the world that is either ‘the paradisal, the purgatorial [or] the infernal’ (43). This is my reality, as is yours.
SubhanaAllah
…And precisely because we are human, our life is not destroyed completely at the moment of death. Rather, the life of the soul and the spirit survive after the body. Because of all these realities we must live our lives on earth according to moral principles. We must shun what is evil or more specifically what the Quran and the Hadith consider to be evil….All of these teachings are based on the very thorough and clear insistence of the Quran upon the immortality of the human soul and the resurrection not only of the soul but also of the body…(43-44)
It sounds cool doesn’t it. Immortals. Even I thought for a second, with visible thought bubble (black outline, background colour white and comic script-font) wowwwh…like Hercules and Zeus, like the Greek legends, stunningly animated by Disney…immortals…
Let’s burst that bubble shall we.
Pop!
Fisrt thing, unlike Hercules and Zeus, I am a human and real,… they aren’t. Myths, them. Real, me.
I was created by Allah for a purpose, and it strongly struck me that MY SOUL will be accounted in the hereafter, that MY SOUL will either be in heaven or hell. That I will live eternally in either heaven or hell, in either Allah’s good grace or His wrath. SubhanaAllah, do I or do I not have a heavy responsibility here. SubhanaAllah. Who am I kidding? Eternal, forever, sounds like more than a long, long, looooooonggg time.
It is for ALL time.
ALL time will I frolic happily in paradise, or roast with regret, sorrow, unimaginable, unspeakable grief and pain in jahannam.
We forget. Oh, we easily forget. Jangantah lagi we. I forget, oh, so many times. It breaks my heart. It makes me so ashame so ashame.
{Edited}
I have written this post about 6 days ago and I just haven’t had the chance to post it up. It isn’t so easy for me to find the net connection in BH, and I have to sortta sponged off my friends connection.
But other than that.
I learned yesterday that Allahyarham Bungsu Timah has passed away. It is said that when someone passes away and we are unable to take a lesson from that, then that generally is a bad sign for our character. We need indeed to remember about the temporal lease we have for our life on this earth.
Please make dua’ for Bungsu Timah and for our brothers and sisters whom have returned to Allah swt. I pray that Allah swt, Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim will have mercy and compassion on their souls, and our souls when it is our time to find our back to Him swt. And truly indeed, Allah is most Compassionate, Most Kind. And may Allah swt bless their souls and make them the dwellers of Jannah. Ameen, Ameen Raabalalameen ~
Ma’salaama
