O humankind! Be ever God-fearing, (conscious) of your Lord who created (all of) you from a single soul—and from it created its mate, and from them both spread (abroad) many men and women. So fear God, in whose name you ask (consideration) of one another. And, therefore, (be dutiful to) kindred. For, indeed, ever is God vigilant over (all of) you. [The Surah of Nisaa 4:1]
Indeed, the (real) losers are those who shall lose their souls, and their families, on the Day of Resurrection. Most surely, that is the manifest loss! [The Surah of Az-Zumar, 39:15]
IF THE FAMILY is the natural bedrock of human society, then the foundations of civilization are now breaking up across the planet. Family itself is being fundamentally and forcibly challenged. This is a sure sign that the crisis of our time is upon us. It is coming.
We Muslims may feel that we’ve lived a steady emergency. But a historical period of crisis is something entirely different, with another meaning for our families altogether. The Qur’an speaks directly to this and can guide us with the best examples, provided we take the time to engage it and ponder its case studies. In particular, the Qur’an itself, as a living record of the Prophet’s experience and methodology, affords us priceless guidance through such costly days as seen on the horizon. For it will lead us to direct awareness of how our households are positioned, not only to weather the gathering storm, but to help see society safely through it. Many of us, no doubt, think our community and national institutions have done decades of due diligence and are prepared to guide the Muslim family through the pressures of troubled times. At least since 9-11, they have come of age. That’s an illusion, and one of foreboding consequence. It is true that family is not our be all and end all. But to deny its centrality in our lives (which for 30 years is exactly what we’ve been doing), and to miss the family’s crucial function in our ability to create change, in our condition and the condition of the societies in which we live (something that seems to have totally escaped us), is to fail everything we claim to stand for establishing our community, offering other’s right religious guidance with compassion, and, above all, striving to ensure continuity into the future of belief in the one and only God.
This is a call to open our eyes to the crisis of the Muslim family within the likely advancing larger crisis of our age. It’s not headlining to-do lists and offering 12-step solutions to practical family raising and training. That is certainly needed and should come, God willing. But we’re not even there yet. This rather addresses one of those “first things” you may have just read about: Setting our attitudes right. It’s concerned with wheeling the cart of community back behind the horse of family, after long years of wondering why, though we’ve been flapping the reigns vigorously, we are still going nowhere. It’s a cry to kick start the one thing we seem as Muslims afraid to engage in resolving our own problems: Imagination
