28/05/2024
On Worship & Giving…
Three surahs in sequence, Al-Qalam, Al-Haaqqah and Al Ma’arij beautifully weave together an inextricable connection between one’s relationship with the Divine and one’s relationship with helping others. Starting with Al-Qalam, gardeners who were attempting to collect their harvest unusually early and stealthily. They didn’t want the poor in the neighborhood to get wind of them collecting their spoils and thus wanted to save themselves the discomfort of turning away the extended hands and long faces of crying children desperate mothers and helpless elders. Allah annihilated their produce in the dead of the night and they arrived at it going through all of the stages of grief in sequence. As part of that, one of them denounced the others by saying something like “didn’t I tell you to glorify God, acknowledging His perfection?”. Their response is an immediate glorification followed by their admission of being in the wrong. There’s a lot to unpack here but I will focus on what I started with. Notice how unusual the language is. They were greedy and insensitive to the plight of others. All they could see was their own bottom line and looking back when all of it got taken from them, instead of acknowledging that they had done wrong to others they declare they had violated the tenets of Tasbeeh!
Surat al Haaqqah summarizes this phenomenon with a brief explanation of why a person on judgment day would get their book in their left hand (Allah save us all from that). He says such a person committed two crimes as if the first led to the latter. What are they? He didn’t believe in Allah, the Great (reminds of سبحان ربي العظيم) nor did he encourage or inspire the helpless getting to eat. As if his lack of faith was demonstrated by his lack of sensitivity to human suffering.
Three more quick things to notice thus far between the two surahs;. Firstly , at the end of the gardener story Allah mentions that judgment day will play out just like this but on a much grander scale. And then you have the next Surah quite literally playing this scene out on that grand stage. Secondly, there is an illusion to Tasbeeh in both accounts. In one of them with explicit language and in the other implicitly by using العظيم as the Divine attribute which brings to mind multiple instances like فسبح باسم ربك العظيم. This is significant because, to not meeting the requirements of Tasbih is to not meet the minimum expectation of one’s exaltation of God. In other words, this isn’t just a mistake, it is a great failure. Thirdly and I think most interestingly, both surahs are talking about the “feeling” of not wanting to give more than the actual “not giving”. Just as tasbih is in the heart, so is the giving nature. This is a spiritual problem.
Finally we turn our attention to al-Ma’arij where prayer is a constant for those who are saved on judgment day. And right after prayer, the second quality that saves them is that they know full well that the needy and the deprived have rights on them personally.
So a part of making my tasbih to Allah right is to be sensitive to the needs of others (Al Qalam). My faith in Allah is demonstrated by my concerns of others starving (Al Haaqqah). And when prayer becomes a fixture in my life, so do the rights of the deprived. Wow. Worship of Allah on the one hand and giving out of care for the suffering on the other are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other!
Lastly, the first of these surahs referenced tasbih, the second of them referenced imaan and the third of them references salah. The prayer (salah) is referred to in the Quran as tasbih for instance when the prophet is told to do tasbih in the late hours of the night and early hours of the day. Surat al Baqarah makes reference to the prayer with the word imaan (faith). Surat al Qiyamah describes the prayer as a manifestation of accepting the truth. In other words, the three words used in the three surahs are all about prayer. Prayer is two things. It is external on the tongues and our limbs (standing, ruku, and sajdah) and internal in our hearts. And much the same way giving is external and its spirit is meant to be in our hearts.
May Allah accept our worship, our giving and the spirit behind them both that we carry in our hearts.
Khudafix (my baby sister used to say that and she didn’t realize how profound her mispronounced goodbyes were)
