The Lives of Human Beings
If you've reached the age of 40 and you haven't read and reflected upon 'The Lives of Man - A Guide to the Human States: Before Life, In the World, and After Death' by Imam Abdallah ibn Alawi Al-Haddad, then please make haste to do so.
Imam Al-Haddad, Rahim’Allah, is a revered, respected and brilliant scholar of the Hadramout (Yemeni) tradition who lived in the 11th century after hijra. The scholars say that God sends a revivalist every 100 years to revive the Islamic spirit. Revivers call back to the lost spirituality of the internal, when life becomes all about the external ritualistic religiosity, as opposed to heart-felt spirituality of the inner being. Imam Al-Haddad is considered the revivalist of his time and he was a master of both the inward and outward sciences. His book is a reminder to take ourselves to account, before we are taken to account. It is a short but weighty book which takes the reader on a journey, stage by stage, answering the following questions..
Who am I?
What am I?
Where am I from?
Where am I now?
What is this world?
Why am I here in the world?
What should I be doing in the world?
Where am I going?
What happens to me after I die?
When my own life went through so much upheaval recently and I stepped away from my old life and I lost my old circle, I had to go really deep within myself to revaluate and recalibrate my own being, in order to realign my values and reorganise my priorities.
I realised that when we surround ourselves with the same people like us, we find ourselves in echo chambers, where every conversation has the same substance and follows the same trajectory, each person echoing the other, reinforcing the same long held views and ideas. There's hardly any growth, especially spiritual growth. When you are in it and are part of it, you don't realise how stagnant it is. For growth to happen, there has to be some discomfort and certainly some challenges.
We have to seek those who can provide this challenge for us and be open to learning from them, in order to be better people on a regular basis, in order to grow both inwardly and outwardly. It's the inward growth that fuels the outward growth. Often times, the inward spiritual growth is vastly neglected and we heedlessly careen from one day to the next focusing only on the outward.
It is the custom of the companions of the Prophet, ﷺ, to sit in the company of those who elevate they own ranks. When we find the people of light, we have to hold on to them, so their light may fall upon us and illuminate the dark corners of our own souls, so we can learn, grow and teach.
If we have crossed 40, we are definitely on a return journey to our Lord. Just as we had to learn how to live, so must we learn how to die. Imam Al-Haddad, rahim'Allah, can teach us through his beautiful treatise on the lives of man.
The book, 'The Lives of Man', is divided into 5 main stages:
1. The Pre-worldly Life of the Souls - aalam al-arwah
2. The Worldly Life - hayat al-duniya (containing six sub-stages)
(i) Childhood
(ii) Youth
(iii) Maturity
(iv) Seniority
(v) Decrepitude
(vi) Sickness and Death
3. The Intermediary Life - hayat al-barzakh
4. The Day of Judgement - yawm al-qiyamah
5. The Destination of Heaven or Hell - jannah and jahannam
Reflections upon these stages will be posted during the coming days bi'iznillah.
And Allah and the Messenger know Best
