The Road to Heaven is paved with Good Intentions

I’m a strong believer in the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. In Islam however, everything is about intentions, what’s in your heart is what will make you do good or do bad. In Islam, the road to heaven is paved with good intentions.

I sound like I’m contradicting myself, don’t I? well I’m not, not really. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions. People do what they think is right, I cannot stress enough on the word right because it is such a tricky little thing, and we’ve been living with its tricks in everything we do or say. it’s in our culture, our fiction, in the stories we tell to our children. Doing the right thing is a very subjective act. In the fairytales we tell our kids, it was right for Cinderella to sneak out of the house to attend the prince’s ball, Snow White to live with seven strangers, and Ali Baba to be a thief (the above are borrowed), and we must also never forget Robin Hood; the king of thieves and good intentions. It is noble to fight injustice but not quite so when you play dirty. USA dropped atomic bombs on innocent people in Japan, not only killing them, but maiming generations and generations to come with the aftereffects of those weapons. The atomic bombs ended the war, which is a very good intention, but at what price! Was it right to use them to get to that noble outcome? God only knows, but I don’t believe it is. How many decisions do we make every single day with the purest of intentions that end up hurting people deeply? Worse yet, how many actions do we take thinking they are the right thing to do under the circumstances while we would condemn them when we see other people doing them? The road to hell really is paved with our own good intentions.

But that is not right! In Islam, everything we do in life should be done with a certain intention, the most noble and most important of which is to serve God and do good. Yes, that was what the church was doing in the middle ages when they were burning scientists, but that’s not how it works in Islam. Islam sets the rules on how to live your life as an honest human being. The rules of Islam are the rules that govern humanity; justice, equality, compassion. In Islam, we can’t do bad things with good intentions. We can’t kill a man because he might possibly murder someone. We can’t lie to someone so that they would make a decision that is right but based on wrong information. In Islam, we cannot do an act that is abstractly wrong like stealing with the intention of doing good. It just doesn’t work that way because Islam’s guidelines give us a moral compass to lead our lives with, and when we stray from the right path, there is always redemption and forgiveness, which is also the way to heaven.

There is however something more interesting to the intention in Islam. The intention of serving and pleasing God can be set in every little detail in our lives, and they add to the score too. Something as simple as smiling in the face of someone is rewarded as charity. Working against one’s temptations counts as Jihad, and is actually stronger than Jihad at war. Saying a nice word, washing the dishes, helping someone out, all of these actions, little as they may seem count as long as they are done with good intentions. Even the failed attempt to do something with the correct intention counts. And the best part, it doesn’t necessarily count as one point. So maybe writing this, and you reading it counts too because I made you remember God, think about Him, and maybe I was of some help, so thanks for the score… May we all keep going with good intentions at heart and meet in heaven.

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The Discipline of Islam

Islam is full of rules. We have to pray five times a day and fast for a whole month every year. We have a long list of things that we should do and a long list of things that we shouldn’t. As far as I know, we don’t have as many rules as in Judaism and our rules are not dictated by an entity like the church in Christianity. Our rules come from two very specific sources; Quran and Sunnah.

I’m sure everyone wondered at some point; why so many rules? Some have obvious reasoning like not drinking because getting drunk makes you lose control of coherent thought. The reasoning of others may not be as clear to us mortals. Any explanations are attempts to understand that which is divine. Those attempts are welcomed because we have always been required to think, meditate, and contemplate the world around us; that’s the way to strengthen our faith. I am not a religious scholar or a philosopher, but if it helps me reach a certain point where I feel my faith is stronger, why not share it?

Our faith is the most important thing to us. It sets our moral compass, tells us what’s right and what’s wrong, and eventually, takes us to heaven. Islam specifically is a way of life; it’s a set of morals that define human rights and ethical behavior. When we say we’re practicing Islam, we don’t mean praying and fasting, we mean living by it in everything to the extent that work is considered an act of worship. Higher states of faith in Islam are not growing beards and praying in mosques, they are applying Islam in every act of a Muslim’s life with the intention of worshiping God. For example, if I wash a dish to spare my mother the trouble would mean that I would get rewarded for it because it is an act that pleases God.

So why is it we have all those rules? Because to be able to live by Islam in everything in our lives, we need to be disciplined. To be disciplined, we need to learn discipline. So when we commit to praying five times a day at specific times, we pay attention to the time, we try to be punctual, we learn how to manage our time so that we don’t end up missing a prayer or missing a meeting to pray. When we fast from daybreak till sunset, we learn how to control our urges to eat and drink even though we get hungry and thirsty so that we learn how to get what we want at the right time, we learn patience, we learn how to not follow every whim and instinct like animals, we learn how to resist trouble and temptation. When we pay Zakah, we give money to God. We give it willingly to those less fortunate to learn that our livelihood is in the hands of our Creator, we learn how to consider others, that we live in a community, and we learn sharing. Every action that is required of us, every ritual that we absolutely have to do teaches us above all to commit to something. In this case it is our faith and our God, in addition to the other lessons. We are taught to perform these rituals as children in order to grow up with them as habits that we stick to and can never drop. The commitment to these rituals fluctuates and oscillates. It goes up at times and goes down at times. My personal observation is that when it goes up, it is at the time when we are the most disciplined in our lives, when we are in control of everything we do and are fully capable of handling the world around us. When it goes down, when I miss a prayer or break the habits of reading Quran regularly, it is when I seem to “lose it” in other points in my life as well like work and other activities.

To be disciplined is to be focused, to be in control of our lives and to handle the outside world. To be disciplined is to know when to accept that some things are beyond our control because they are the wish of God. To be disciplined is to live life to the fullest and to be the best of humanity.

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