Series: Resuscitating the Heart
Part 1 — When Hearts No Longer Reflect What We Once Wore
As-Salaam Alaykum wa RahmatuLlahi wa Barakaatuh, dear Ikhwah,
The basking is over. I believe you enjoyed every moment of the Eid days. May Almighty Allah spare our lives to witness more of it in our lifetime. Aameen.
A few days ago, I shared some bothersome thoughts on my status regarding the state of our Eemān after our undergraduate years. It was a humble attempt to retrace our journey, reflect on how we arrived at where we are today, and explore how we can begin reviving hearts that may be nearing spiritual death.
As I began sharing, one of my honoured brothers challenged me to compile those thoughts into an article that could serve a wider benefit—a nudge I received from multiple others, seeing how deeply these reflections resonated.
So here we are.
I've taken that challenge and transformed it into this post through my blog, Aleem’s Compendium. I ask Allah to accept it as a sincere act of worship and to place benefit in it for every heart that reads. Aameen.
This reflection will likely unfold in two parts, in shā’Allāh:
Part 1 focuses on retracing our journey to those formative undergraduate years.
Part 2 will reflect on how we got here and what steps we must take to resuscitate our hearts.
So, let’s begin…
Part 1 — When Our Looks Held More Faith Than Our Hearts
There’s something that lingers in the mind — a stark comparison between who we once were and who we are today.
Our eeman during our undergraduate years is more profound in our appearance than in our hearts. But when our hearts now meet the reality of the external world, our looks align with what our hearts truly harbour. It is what it is; may it not be watered down to zero.
When Proof Used to Be Enough
The sacrosanct nature of evidence we once held onto so firmly has now been challenged, not through authentic scholarship, but through a new kind of subconscious, born from a hyper-influenced digital world.
There was a time when a single ḥadīth was enough for you to affirm that taking pictures was impermissible. You didn’t argue, twist, or counter-explain. It was enough that the Prophet ﷺ said so.
But today? You carry a zillion counter-arguments — not from deep study or qualified learning, but from a digital arsenal of khurāfāt (falsehoods), memes, influencer-fatwas, and opinionated threads — just to justify a change in your stance, or to argue that it's no longer commonsensical to say picture-taking is impermissible.
The Little from the Signs of a Big Shift
There are many ways the rain of weakness has been soaking through our once starched hearts of faith. One such sign is how close our trousers now fall to the earth, whereas in the past, they would hang high above the ankles, out of reverence and adherence to prophetic guidance.
Likewise, our sisters now adorn branded and decorated jilbābs, far removed from the plain black cloak once worn purely as a garment of faith and submission, not of fashion or recognition.
One such sign is how we once couldn't look directly into the face of the opposite sex out of bashfulness and the duty to lower our gaze — yet today, we watch and admire them on our screens and status updates without the slightest sense of ḥayāʾ (modesty).
And yes, the noble act of enjoining good and forbidding evil — a quality that once distinguished this Ummah — has faded into silence. We are afraid to correct, afraid to be labelled, or perhaps… simply uninterested.
Returning to our old filths
The rekindled obsession some of us now have with the very old filths we once left behind: die-hard love for football, cinemas, Music, Celebrity gossip and the like. These were once the distractions our strong, undergraduate Eeman helped us overcome. Yet today, many indulge in them with even greater passion, as if nothing was ever wrong with them. Have we forgotten, or have our hearts gone numb?
The Supplication of Our Souls
May Allah revive our hearts, return us to the Sunnah in its clarity, and make us sincere in adorning our faith, not just our bodies. Aameen.
Let’s not wait for a tragedy to wake us up.
Let’s not normalise decline as if nothing has happened.
Let’s begin the journey back — step by step, reminder by reminder, sunnah by sunnah.
To be continued later, in shā’Allāh, as we retrace our journey, reflect on how we got here, and explore what we must do to resuscitate our hearts from spiritual death.