A sentence worth a lifetime

There are sentences a man hears once and forgets, and there are sentences that quietly rearrange everything he thought he knew. This book is built around one of the second kind. In Urdu it runs:

حال کے امر کو پہنچانا اصل دین ہے

Haal ke amr ko pahunchana asl deen hai.

To recognise the command of the present state, to fulfil it, and to convey it, is the essence of deen.

Expressed more fully in English: the essence of living deen is to understand what Allah requires from us in the particular situation and moment in which He has placed us, to fulfil that requirement, and, where we carry a responsibility towards others, to convey it with wisdom. Both verbs matter. Recognise, and convey. We will return to the second verb near the end of this book, because it is the half of the sentence most easily forgotten.

Read carelessly, the sentence sounds like a pleasant generality. Read carefully, it turns the ordinary picture of religion on its head. Most of us carry deen in our minds as a fixed catalogue. Prayer is here, fasting is there, charity has its column, pilgrimage has its season. The catalogue is true, and nothing in these pages questions it. But a catalogue tells you what the commands are. It does not tell you which command is addressed to you right now, in this room, with this person in front of you, with this debt unpaid, with this parent ageing, with this hour of the day passing. That second knowledge is a different faculty altogether. The Qur’an has a name for it. It calls it fiqh.

Let one clarification stand at the door of the whole discussion, because everything depends on it. There is not a different deen for every moment. There is one deen of Allah, fixed in His Book and the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ, and it does not bend to our circumstances. What changes constantly is us: our situations, our obligations falling due, the rights of people entering and leaving our day, the hours themselves. Tafaqquh fid-deen, deep understanding of deen, is the faculty by which Allah’s unchanging guidance is correctly applied to our endlessly changing circumstances, so that the servant can recognise which command, which obligation, which right, which form of worship has the strongest claim upon him at this particular moment. Not a new deen for every hour. The same deen, correctly understood in every hour.

So at one moment the demand upon a believer is sabr, and an hour later it is shukr. Sometimes the hour asks him to speak the truth, and sometimes the same truth spoken at the wrong table becomes fitnah, and the hour asks him to remain silent. Sometimes deen requires him to give, and sometimes, harder still, to accept help with grace. Sometimes it commands action and sometimes waiting, sometimes advising and sometimes only listening. In the language of the people of the path this has been called amr al-hal, the command of the present state. It is a useful phrase so long as we hold it firmly inside its frame: the obligations and priorities are determined by the Qur’an, the Sunnah and the Shari’ah, never by what we personally feel is appropriate. The moment feeling replaces revelation as the judge, this principle dies and something dangerous is born in its place.