A Mercy Case

The Qur’an is about change. It is a testimony of the myriad changes that the prophetic community went through from 610-632. I have been thinking a lot recently about one line:

وَمَا كَانَ اللَّهُ لِيُضِيعَ إِيمَانَكُمْ

This is translated by Taqi Usmani as “Allah will not allow your faith go to waste.” This comes in the context of the change of qibla (direction of prayer) from Jerusalem to Makkah. God is letting the faithful know that their old ritual prayers facing north (from Madinah) are not invalidated, even though now they have to face south towards the Ka’ba for their prayers to count.

For we don’t only change from one religion to another, as I did. We also change within a single religion. Individuals who once promoted the exoteric delve into the esoteric. Communities that once adhered to one school of thought switch to another. Orthodoxies become heterodoxies and vice versa. In short, maybe you pray north for awhile, but then you realize you have to pray south from now on.

I myself have gone through numerous changes in the almost 18 years I have been a Muslim. Some have been very personal and intimate, others have been related to my sense of connection to the global Ummah. Some have been doctrinal and others have been practical. But along the way I have been guided by a feeling at the heart of my faith:

God is fair and understands I’m trying

If what I am doing now is different from what I was doing 10 years ago, that is okay because God was watching me then and God is still watching me today. I am not the same, nor is the world the same. If I change what I think, it is (hopefully) because I am trying to get closer to the Truth. In that regard, each day is a new adventure.

Many years ago I had a choice to make and didn’t know which one was the right one. But I knew that it wasn’t the choice that mattered; rather, it was the change I was hoping to bring forth in my life that was foremost in my mind. I looked for something to help me find clarity, and stumbled serendipitously across the following page:

It said everything I wanted to say, and I have been saying it ever since.

This prayer is all about change. But why do we usually change? For material success? For a lover? For fun? As far as I can tell, the greatest changes of our lives are the ones we make on the road back home to God, and this prayer points the way. Change in our religious life is most central, but so is having a sound material life through which we can live religiously. Death ultimately is the greatest change, and each change we make while we are still alive is movement towards embracing that final end.

I highlight this prayer because we don’t just face life’s challenges by ourselves and for ourselves. We are not alone, so we do it with God in our corner. It is a shared process where we recognize the human condition and the necessity of choosing, but we simultaneously ask God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Only God can “make my life a source of increase in all good, and make my death a refuge from every evil.”

Ultimately, there is no guarantee we get it right most of the time, and we still live between hope and fear. But at the end of the day, the God to whom we are praying for help is the Most Merciful of those who show mercy (arham al-rahimin).

I don’t know anything else in this universe that I can rely upon more than that.