The Price of True Morality is Heavy, But Totally Worth It!

Our goal as Muslims should be to internalize the values of the Quran and Sunnah so deeply and holistically that we see everything and understand everything through that lens. The way to understand the Quran and Sunnah is not by simply reading the translations of these texts or listening to a lecture or two about them, it is by spending years upon years of extensive, specialized study in these disciplines. It is unfortunate that people have forgotten that true understanding of the Quran or Sunnah does not come from their own opinions and feelings about certain topics, but from informed, educated opinions formed by scholars and students of knowledge who have spent years specializing in these disciplines. 

The first price of true morality is to sacrifice one’s ego and to open oneself up to learning the truth from an authentic Quran and Sunnah-based perspective. Perhaps you were shamed into wearing the hijab because you were made to believe “your curves are sinful and shameful and you should not be seen.” Maybe you were told to pray because “if you do not pray, Allah will be angry with you and you will go to hell” or maybe you were never taught about anything related to Islam and never really developed a connection with Allah and Islam. It is up to you to realize your responsibility to seek authentic Islamic knowledge and learn the truth from experienced and learned scholars of the religion.    

Once you have learned the Quran and Sunnah from authentic sources and finally embraced it as the truth after overcoming your own ego, you will face the second price of true morality: overcoming familial and cultural pressures to conform to cultural interpretations of Islamic concepts or societal pressures to comply to an entirely different understanding of morality. This is where the price of morality starts to feel a little more burdensome. 

While you may have embraced the Quran and Sunnah and are actively trying to work to become a better Muslim, your family and society seem to have turned against you. When well-wishing family members try to correct you and tell you not to be so strict about your beard or hijab, when you are faced with questions about the LGBTQ+ community at school or the workplace and forced to take sides, it will definitely be hard to be firm on the truth. It will hurt to feel like the odd one out. It will most certainly make you feel like a weirdo, but take solace in the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH):

“Islam began as something strange and will revert to being strange [as it began], so give glad tidings to the strangers [a.k.a: weirdos].” [Muslim]  

The third price of true morality is embracing being a weirdo and seeing life through the lens of a practising, God-fearing Muslim. Once you have tasted the sweetness of Islamic ideals, once you have understood the Quran properly and actively implement it in your life, and once you have come to realize how great the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) really was after studying his Sunnah, you will be able to look at society’s ideas of morality and realize how wrong and perverted they can be, while the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah are always beautiful and pure. Your lens changes completely and you experience a Gestalt switch that will broaden your perspective so that you never see things the same way again. 

Maybe this seems like an impossible feat, and maybe you feel like you are so terrible that – forget about being a Muslim – you feel like you are just a hopelessly terrible person. My only advice to you would be to take it one day at a time. One day your lens will change inshaAllah. I remember once hearing in a lecture, “The further away you are from something, the more unreal it seems, but the closer you are to it, the more you are able to accept it and believe it.” That made me think back to my first time attending an Islamic conference when I was in grade 7. I remember seeing the Shaykh standing on stage and speaking about angels and thinking how funny it was that this chubby, middle-aged man was lying to himself and everyone else about these creatures and how amazing they are. To me, angels did not even exist back then. I look back to that Areej now, and alhamdulillah I know I am far from where I used to be – and I used to be really, really far. 

You can do it, just take it one day at a time. 

“Allah says: ‘I am just as My slave thinks of Me when he remembers Me.’ […] ‘If he comes to Me walking, I come to him running”. [Bukhari & Muslim]