The previous sequence of six posts was about “How to become a Great Teacher“. I would like to follow up by providing advice on “How to become a great student”! The methods of education currently in use all over the world are extremely harmful to our hearts and souls – As the Prophet Mohammad SAW taught us, people are born on the Deen of nature (Islam) and then trained away from it by the educational process. A western education teaches physicists how to build bombs, but does not provide any moral training regarding how it is wrong to kill innocents. Islam teaches us that even taking one life is like killing all of humanity! However, if you listen to the first lecture on “The Moral Side of Murder” at Harvard by Michael Sandel, you will come away believing that it may be OK to murder innocents, in pursuit of a higher cause. It is not just that a Western education does not teach us about morality – rather, exactly the WRONG lessons are taught, which poison our minds, and teach us to think, act, and feel in the wrong ways. With TV games teaching children to enjoy killing and bloodshed from young age, it is no surprise that there is a mass shooting nearly every day in the US, on the average. It is a copy of this same education that we receive here in Pakistan, which is designed to turn us into feelingless robots and money-making machines. We will get soul-killing jobs which will involve denying loans to the poor who desperately need money, and denying essential medicines to the poor who cannot pay for them, or selling products like baby milk-powder in order to make profits by killing babies.

Because we have travelled thousands of miles away from the pure Deen given to us by our Prophet Mohammad SAW, God’s Mercy to all Mankind, we have to take a large number of steps to get back to the original message of Islam. One of the first steps is to realize the value of our lives, as the best of the creations (see The Value of Human Lives). But, much more than philosophy, we need to take practical steps to put our lives back on track. A good place to start is by recognizing the tremendous gifts and blessings of God that have been given to us:

Ubaydullah ibn Mihsan reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Whoever among you wakes up secure in his property, healthy in his body, and he has his food for the day, it is as if he were given the entire world.”  Source: Sunan al-Tirmidhī 2346

Training of the heart starts here — when we wake up in the morning, praise Allah for giving us a new life, after the small death that is sleep. Today is the first day of my life. Today I have been given the entire world as a gift from God. Feel as happy as you would if you were granted everything that you have every wanted — these blessings that we have been given are better than what has been given to the greatest kings and the wealthiest and all those whom we are used to envying. Billions of people living on this planet do not know who created them. Billions do not know the purpose of our life on this planet, they do not know what will happen after we die, they do not know what actions are beloved to God and will be weighed heavily in the scales, and they do not know what God does not like. So the knowledge of Islam that we have been given is much more valuable than all the Economics,Physics, Chemistry, Maths, and Biology that we have struggled so hard for so long to learn.

First let us fill our hearts with gratitude towards our Creator for not only giving us this great gift of life, but also of giving us the knowledge about His own existence, and even more – asking us to take Him as our friend! Just imagine: God the Lord of the Entire Universe, has given us an opportunity for friendship!

Q2:257-Allah is the Protecting Friend of those who believe. He bringeth them out of darkness into light.

Not only has Allah T’aala promised to be our friend, and to protect us, but also to guide us out of the darkness into the light. That is, out of ignorance into knowledge. Allaa T’aala is the source of ALL knowledge, and HE gives portions of this knowledge to whomsoever HE desires.

To fill our hearts with gratitude, reflect on all the millions of blessings we have been given. Think about the poor, unfortunate, deprived, people — millions of them – who do not have enough to eat, fear for their lives, have uncertain futures, or live in poor health, and cannot enjoy life. Reflect on your own body. Feel the regular pumping of your own heart, the blood rushing through the veins, the tingling of the skin, and the thousands of pleasant sensations the body produces — each sensation is a witness and a testimony to a well-functioning system for our well-being — even if a single nail of our hand grows in the wrong direction, or our tooth aches, or some small portion of the body is disturbed, our whole life experience becomes unpleasant. Even one instant of the joy of living that is granted to us is such a tremendous blessing of God that we can never pay back for the gift that has been given to us.

Gratitude for the blessings a great first step, because Allah T’aala has promised to increase his blessing to those who give thanks. Next, given that we have been granted one more day of life, let us use it in the best possible way. Think about what we can do that would be pleasing to Allah. Plan to make this day valuable. Allah T’aala created life and death as a competition to see who among us would do the best of deeds. How can I win TODAY? What is the best that I can do for my God today, in recognition of the great gift that He has given to me?  AGAIN to answer this question, we need GUIDANCE from our Lord – we need guidance at EVERY STEP, to ensure that this step is going towards Allah, and not towards His anger, nor towards ignorance and darkness. So pray to Allah that I devote this day to you and please guide my footsteps towards your Noor, and increase me in knowledge and protect me from sins, from ignorance, from the tricks of the Shaitan, from the evils in my own Nafs, and from your anger. These are first steps on the path to knowledge.

POSTSCRIPT: After I wrote this up, I found the following quote from Imam Abu Hanifa which confirms and strengthens the message above:

یں نے علم حمد اور شکر سے پایا کہ جب بھی کوئی علمی نکتہ سمجھ آتا یا فقہ و حکمت کی کوئی بات ہاتھ آتی تو میں کہتا: الحمدللّٰہ، یوں میرا علم بڑھتا گیا۔ (سیدی امام ابوحنیفہ رحمہ اللّٰہ)
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‏قال أبو حنيفة رحمه الله: إنما أدركت العلم بالحمد والشكر، فكلما فهمت شيئًا من العلوم ووقفت على فقهٍ وحكمةٍ، قلت: الحمد لله، فازداد علمي.
[تعليم المتعلم للزرنوجي: صـ٣٨]

For related materials, see: Farewell to IIIE Students, Similarly my video on “Secrets of Success, Lessons from my Life Experiences”, which was my farewell talk at PIDE, is linked in the following post: Important Message for Students. Both of these talks contain a lot of advice for students. I will try to unpack these messages and present them in a step by step and simplified way for implementation by students who would like to learn  How to become human beings instead of human resource. To summarize and recap – try to develop feelings of intense gratitude towards Allah for all the great Gifts that we have been given. This requires looking inside our bodies and souls, looking outside at the wonderful world which supports our lives, and looking at great knowledge provided to us by the greatest teacher. Next, in recognition of this gift, try to use THIS day in the best possible way, to do the best possible deeds, and to take a few steps towards Allah, after asking HIM for guidance on how best we can do this TODAY – not sometime in the future.