What Is Your Role In The Story Of Islam? : On Hajj, Eid, And Surat Ibrahim

Eid hasn’t felt like Eid of late. I’ve worn my best clothes, put on my best fragrance, recited my takbīrāt, sent a wave of messages, connected with family and friends – but my heart has been weighed by a continuous sense of overwhelming grief as this scripted play of celebration takes place against a backdrop of genocide. Here, we embrace one another in the joy of celebration; there, they embrace one another to seek any morsel of relief from the anguish of continuous loss at the hands of merciless slaughter. Here, we gather with loved ones over food and drink; there, they gather around trucks that should be transporting the little food they have only to find it to be a Trojan horse carrying their murderers. What is Eid to a bystander of mass murder, a powerless onlooker made to watch the endless massacres of his own brothers?

What is Eid but a reminder of my own uselessness? What is happiness but a burden to a heart heavy with the grief of helplessness?

It is in these moments that the eye wanders over to the embellished covers of a small book tucked away in a corner of the topmost shelf of a bookshelf. When the world stops making sense; when the grief begins to overwhelm; when the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in our very being are no longer avoidable; when we can no longer procrastinate from pondering over the incoherence of our existence; that is when our hearts, then our eyes, then our hands reach out to the Quran. O, light emanating from the uncreated speech of God! Come, illuminate the darkness that creeps ever closer to the edges of our souls.

As I contemplate this mix of joy and grief, my mind has been continuously pondering over the story of Ibrahim , but particularly his duʿā in the surah named after him. How strange that this is where I find myself – mixed with joy and grief – when that is exactly where Ibrahim found himself so many millennia ago. This a story that brings hope to the hopeless, power to the powerless, and purpose to the purposeless. This is the story of Ibrahim, Ismāʿīl, and Hājar .

The Story

There are three principal characters in this story: Ibrahim , Ismāʿīl , and Hājar . Each plays a distinct and important role in the final outcome, each is the main character in the act particular to them, and each confronts a kind of grief that is particular to them in order to fulfill their purpose.

The story itself is a perplexing one, something entirely unintelligible to a secular ethos. Ibrahim and his wife Sarah were childless for decades until he was given the gift of a child in his old age with Hājar . Upon his miraculous fatherhood, Ibrahim was ordered by Allah to leave his son and his mother in the middle of the desert; the land he himself describes in the Quran as “a valley devoid of vegetation.” While the tafsīr tradition is rife with spurious details about the story, the Quran itself offers very little except for a single passage in Surat Ibrahim 35 – 41. Almost all the details in the story are entirely unnecessary to the moral instruction inherent in it, and many of them cast the kind of aspersions on a prophet and his pious wife that are characteristic of other religions that have little respect for their divinely guided figures and are entirely alien to the reverence for prophets and their righteous followers that is necessitated by Islam. What is known is that Ibrahim fathered Ismāʿīl with Hājar and was commanded to leave them in the valley of Makkah.

According to traditions, as he leaves Hājar in a completely empty desert valley, she calls out to and questions him. He is silent until she asks him, “Has Allah ordered you to do this?” When he responds in the affirmative, she replies to him saying, “Then Allah will not abandon us.”

Both Ibrahim and Hājar are certain that Allah will not abandon them, but each is also animated by a grief that is particular to them.

Abandoned in the desert [PC: Josh Gordon (unsplash)]

Here is Hājar , a noblewoman given as a servant to Ibrahim and Sarah , who leaves her native Egypt only to be abandoned in a desert with her son at the command of a god she can neither see nor hear. Her absolute certainty in Allah , however, is not decoupled from desperation for her son. This fear is manifested in her famous running between the hills of al-Ṣafā and al-Marwah looking for nourishment until the well of Zam-Zam bursts forth from under the feet of her son.

And here is Ibrahim , who has suffered countless times following the command of his close Friend to proclaim the message of His divine Oneness: thrown to the fire by his own family, exiled by his people, wandering the earth childless and without a home – until he at long last miraculously sires a son at his old age only to be told to abandon that son and his mother in a desert valley. As he leaves his family in such a terrible state, he knows that his Divine Friend is his only vessel for his grief; that the only refuge from Allah is to Him.

The Duʿā

While the duʿā is long and with significant consequence, I want to focus on two ayahs specifically. In ayah thirty-seven, Ibrahim says the following:

“Our Lord! I have settled some of my offspring in a barren valley, near Your Sacred House, our Lord, so that they may establish prayer. So make the hearts of ˹believing˺ people incline towards them and provide them with fruits, so perhaps they will be thankful.”

There is rhyme and reason behind the commands of Allah – they are not pointless instructions without wisdom. Ibrahim knows that the wisdom behind His command is to build the Kaʿbah and establish Makkah as a center of worship – that the physical water which flows from beneath the feet of Ismāʿīl will turn to spiritual waters and flood the world in iman. Ibrahim knows that he stands at the head of a story of Islam, and it is that understanding that gives him comfort when he is asked to abandon his family in a lifeless desert. His role is to relinquish; Hājar’s role is to nourish; his son’s role is to establish.

But understanding the wisdom behind a command does not mean a heart is not grieved. He, alayhi al-salām, still has a human heart that beats inside his human chest. And so, before continuing with his duʿā, he turns his grief to Allah :

“Our Lord! You certainly know what we conceal (from grief) and what we reveal. And nothing on earth or in heaven is hidden from Allah.” [Surah Ibrahim: 14;38]

Imam al-Ṭabarī states that the first statement is that of Ibrahim , and that the second statement is Allah’s response to His Friend. Ibrahim , overcome by the grief of separation from the son he wished so long for only to sacrifice him for a greater purpose, calls out in grief to Allah . And his Lord, his Master, his Divine Friend answers him, telling him that no grief is hidden from Allah .

In this way, Ibrahim is one in a long tradition of prophets turning their grief to Allah . His grandson, Yaʿqūb calls out to Allah similarly when he says, “I complain of my anguish and sorrow only to Allah, and I know from Allah what you do not know.” [Surah Yusuf: 12;86]. And Allah  responds to him by returning his Yusuf to him. Yūnus calls out to his Lord and Master, proclaiming, “There is no god ˹worthy of worship˺ except You. Glory be to You! I have certainly done wrong.” [Surah Al-Anbiya: 21;87]. And Allah responds to his immense grief: “So We answered his prayer and rescued him from anguish. And so do We save the ˹true˺ believers.” [Surah Yusuf: 12;88]

And when the final Messenger of Allah, the Rasūl sits beneath a tree outside Ṭāʿif and calls out to Allah : “O Allah! I complain to you of my weakness, the deficiency of my resources, and my humiliation before people!” And Allah responded to him by calling him past the seven heavens into his direct presence.

So, too, did Allah respond to Ibrahim . His response was the establishment of Makkah al-Mukarramah and the birth of the final prophet from the progeny of his sacrificed son. His response was the story of Islam, which includes you and me.

The Sacrifice of Palestinians Will Not Go Unheeded

One of the most powerful motifs in this story is that of mere presence as sacrifice for the sake of Allah . Both Ibrahim and Ismāʿīl sacrifice life as father and son in order to establish Makkah as the epicenter of spirituality on earth. The mere presence of the son is sacrifice. Ismāʿīl sacrifices the comforts of the Levant, a life lived with his father, and the safety of civilization in exchange for establishing and maintaining a sacred sanctuary. His sacrifice establishes his place in the story of Islam.

So, too, is the mere unrelenting presence of the Palestinian people a sacrifice to maintain the sanctity of the sanctuary of al-Aqṣā. Under occupation by a regime with designs on the land, on the people, on the ḥaram itself, the valiant sentries born in the land of prophets and saints give their very breath and blood to protect sanctified land, the first qiblah, the site of the isrāʾ and miʿrāj. And for the crime of that mere presence, they are slaughtered mercilessly and treated with utter indignity.

But like Ibrahim, Yaʿqūb, and Yūnus before them – like the Messenger of Allah – they turn their grief, their anguish, their suffering to the One Who sees all, knows all, and has power over all. They know that they are in obedience to His divine Command to protect the sanctuary; and so, like Ismāʿīl before them, they know that the water that wells up below their feet will turn into a flood of Divine Truth that engulfs the world. They know, as Hājar knew before them, that if Allah has commanded them, then He will not abandon them. The Lord of the ḥaram of al-Aqṣā will not abandon its people, and their sacrifice will become part of the story of Islam.

What Is Our Place in the Story of Islam?

While we take some solace in the knowledge that Allah will not allow the sacrifice of the people of al-Aqṣā to go in vain, their story must force us to question ourselves. We have blamed the murderous regime that perpetrates their genocide; we have blamed the allies of that regime for facilitating the brutality of slaughter and occupation; we have blamed the collaborators amongst Muslim leaders around the world for failing to act in defense of our brothers. But how often have we blamed ourselves?

Where is our place in the story of Islam? [Etienne Girardet (unsplash)]

The truth is that we have all collectively failed the people of Palestine, just like we have failed the people of Sudan, Syria, Kashmir, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya – and the list goes on. We did not fail them in 2023, or even 2003. We have failed them for generations, and that failure is only now being manifested in the grossest way possible. We failed them because we have traded cheap comforts for civilizational purposes. We failed them because we abandoned the project of rebuilding Islamic civilization. We failed them because we stopped believing in the story of Islam.

We have forgotten that we are born a people with a divine mission on this earth. Other people can think that they are born on this earth to experience its pleasures and joys and to expire as painlessly as possible, but we are born the heirs of Ibrahim and Ismāʿīl as the best community brought about for humanity:

“You are the best community ever raised for humanity—you encourage good, forbid evil, and believe in Allah. If only the People of the Scripture had believed, it would have been better for them. Among them are believers, but most of them are defiantly disobedient.” [Surah ‘Ali-Imran: 3;110]

Just like Ismāʿīl before us, we are born with a God-given purpose to establish the sanctuary of Islam in a profane world, to uphold the banner of lā Ilāha illā Allah in a world where all others uphold the banner of their own desires as their gods. This is not done by simply praying and fasting on our own. It is a civilizational project, one which requires the collective effort of an entire ummah to be pointed spear-like at its objective.

Instead, we have traded our civilizational purpose for the capitalist dream: a car, a house, a small family, and vacations in the summer. We build nothing. We create nothing. We aspire to nothing. We are prepared to sacrifice nothing. And, yet, we are surprised when we achieve nothing and are treated like we are nothing.

What is our role in the story of Islam? This story requires characters who will build its economic, artistic, educational, spiritual, intellectual, and political foundations. What part of its foundation are we going to be a part of building? Are we ready to sacrifice what is necessary to revive an entire civilization? Or are we going to simply be those who complain incessantly but do little and sacrifice less? Because, in the end, this story belongs to Allah . And if we refuse to play our part in it, He will simply replace us with those who don’t turn away so easily:

“Here you are – those invited to spend in the cause of Allah – but among you are those who withhold [out of greed]. And whoever withholds only withholds [benefit] from himself; and Allah is the Free of need, while you are the needy. And if you turn away, He will replace you with another people; then they will not be the likes of you.” [Surah Muhammad: 47;38]

Related:

– Optimism in Times of Adversity: How The Prophet Did It

– Think Like Ibrahim | The Essence of Surah Baqarah | Shaykh Akram Nadwi