Tweeting Your Life Away!

Twitter gives you a sort of window through which you can scream all day at the world saying whatever you want, and with time, screaming turns into a compulsion. The compulsion of screaming and the pressure to say something original, witty, funny and daring all the time gets some people to cross certain lines to fit in or appeal more to the audience. I've had a Twitter account since 2010 that I hardly ever used. I've hated it because every time I logged into it, it literally made me fear people! Public figures and random people I knew in real life and respected where completely different on Twitter regarding thoughts, opinions on different events and even the sort of language they use. It was like they transformed on Twitter into talkative, ill mannered people so unlike the people I liked and respected from real life.  Many of the accounts I came across with very high number of followers and high rates of getting re-tweeted, had nothing to say all day but a series of word play tweets which seemed witty but had no actual meaning or use at all except trying to impress the world by how cool, tough or daringly arrogantly confident they are. The rates by which the owners of these accounts tweet tells you that their faces and fingers are stuck to their phones or computer screens all day, which makes you wonder if they are living out their awesomeness only virtually, contradicting any possibility of time to get a real "that awesome" life at all.

So my final impression of Twitter was it being a thing that gets people to say too much until they start saying things they probably shouldn't be saying and get used to seeing nothing wrong with it. Or gets them to say too much until the "real them" appeared, and I disliked the real them enough to make me not want to know about it.

Then it was exams time! It's common knowledge how any thing can seem adorable during exam times and Twitter is definitely not the worse thing on the list. So as it was my duty to study, it became equally my duty to give Twitter another shot!! This time I came across a few very interesting accounts, and browsing through the accounts they followed I came across more and more interesting ones. I got to find amazing talented inspiring dedicated people who I never imagined could exist that abundantly at all. Respectable people from a diversity of political views with striking reasonableness and tolerance without a trace of extremism or blinding enthusiasm. People committed to social causes. People of culture and knowledge. Religious people who take da'wa to Islam to a whole different level of commitment, originality and still keep it funny and interesting all the time. I've learnt a lot from them all specially the last group, including recent followers of Islam who impressed as well as pained me with how they had a lot better knowledge and understanding of Islam along with a sincere degree of attachment to its ideas and obligations that many of us born as Muslims sadly don't have.

It was inspiring and refreshing to get to meet these people even if only virtually, and I've tried to keep my Twitter timeline mostly composed of them so that may be it would become a little daily reminder of how much one could still find space for self improvement on both spiritual, intellectual and achievements level.

I am not saying that having fun on a social network is wrong. I am saying that time spent on social networks, specially if you spend so much of it, is not time outside of real life but time cut off  real life. And words said still count as words held against you or for you. And it's always up to us how we choose to spend this time and these words. So if you're spending your whole day reading nonsense people say or talking to people about nonsense, then may be you might want to consider squeezing in some meaningfulness.

To Change, To Accept & To Know The Difference

Muslims are required to see life through Islam. That's why on every personal encounter in the life of a Muslim, whenever a joyful or tearful event occurs unexpectedly against all his calculations that would require meditating on why and how such a thing has happened, which may not seem very much relevant to religion to a non-Muslim, you would find that a Muslim philosophizes, or sees, what has happened to him from Islam's point of view referring his philosophy mainly to these Islamic principles: Everything in God's universe happens for a good reason. Nothing ever happens except if God wills. God is all fair and justness. God inflicts no harm upon His creation.
According to these principles one would think that it means that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, a deduction that is obviously contradicted by what we know of life; how then do we explain sadness, pain, injustice and sorrow? That would be attributed to another principle which states that the human view of things is deficient. We can't see how the event that we are living part of it at this moment would continue in the future. We are completely oblivious to what other people do and how their lives cross and intersect with the path of ours. God has an incomparably wider and wiser view through place and time of how this universe is to be run, so whatever happens and doesn't seem like just or logic to us we explain it by telling ourselves that there is some unknown, definitely for our own good, reason that explains it all but our deficient minds can't realize.

Going more deeply into this algorithm of thinking, you would see that's not an easy job as it sounds for everyone at all. It entails that you have to do good, do your best, and detach yourself completely from the results of your work, block yourself completely from reacting with sorrow that you sometimes reap of a good thing that you have pushed yourself so hard to do. Accept series of disappointments and try and retry and retry again never giving up on attempts of opening doors of goodness no matter what comes in through these doors.  It means you are going to depersonalize yourself from your own life. Watch things happen to you and patiently calmly wait for the future to show you, or not, the good reason behind them as long as you are confident that you have done all the goodness you possibly can. It entails a very high degree of spirituality, self-control and deep faith in God that the above stated principles are above questioning, they are definitely undoubtedly true.

That's where the mix up comes in.

The only reason why these principles make sense although they rely only on faith is that God has built up this world as a complex system of fair reward and punishment. We obey God and believe in His principles because we trust Him, we have faith in Him, we aspire to his rewarding jannah, and we have mortifying fear for His hell-fire. That complicated way is what renders us loving and obedient for God, that's if we commit ourselves to His system as He orders us.

All absurdity lies in building up a human Earthly system that demands hard work of you and gives you nothing in return. That looks away every time you do something good and punishes you very strictly for your mistakes while easily allowing those who are more powerful than you to get away with theirs. The powerful members of this system also have the face to demand order, hard perfect work, patience, loyalty to the system from the less powerful members who they imperil. Have the face to rob you off your rights and talk to you of "patience" and "faith in the goodness of God" as an attempt to confuse your belief in the above stated principles with silencing you to endure their injustice.

Apart from the foolishness of believing that every member of the community has that deep sincere faith in God to be able to constantly live virtuously having nothing to support him but his faith, and foolishly expecting a healthy balanced happy community based on "the kind heartedness" of the people who the system robs off everything and gives nothing in return. Apart from that, the atrocity of the confusion in itself between faith in God and submission to injustice is the most heavily promoted confusion in our culture. You wouldn't only submit, you would also do it happily. And not only would you do it happily, but also rebelling would be considered immoral or an indication of weakness of faith.

These systems in themselves as a whole with every imperilling detail about them are the trial of God (That's if you can call a system in which you have no trust, aspiration, fear or faith a "system" in the first place). Goodness and faith are in forcefully attempting to change these systems. Patience is when asking God to give you the force and power to change them. Persistence is in never giving up on these attempts. And if you are absolutely positive there is nothing you can do to bring about this change, then wait on the first chance to walk out and turn your back forever on such a chaos that wastes all your goodness over the undeserving, before you watch your whole life thrown away.

The way I see it, there is no virtue or heroism in submitting timidly to injustice, a supposition that's basically against the homoeostasis of this world.