By Abdullahi jamaa
You live in an exclusive neighborhood and behind your jumbo main-gate is a huge mansion, a kind of a palace with an uncountable number of bedrooms where your wife and two children relish great moments of life.
You wear the latest Brioni suite, a matching Rolex Oyster wrist watch, punctuating your stylish outfit with a vogue sleek shoes while you step on the rails to drive the latest model of Porsche Cayenne.
Away from your world of fantasy, your neighbour lives in a crumbling third-worldliness. From your high end home you can view the desolate poor neighbourhood. Here there are no homes but a beeline of cold open hearths, no walls but stinking oodles of leftovers thrown from your home, no clothes but rags. Your neighbour feeds ten mouths with hard-earned meagre meals, a times sleeping on an empty belly.
Sometimes that neighbour is your own brother from same mother and father who is struggling in life, living from hand to mouth, paying his family bills in drips and drabs. Your brother’s kids are out of school unable to pay fees. Yet, after accumulating wealth you have cut relations with him. You decided to neglect his devastation.
Much worse, you traumatise him psychologically. A times you post photos of your expensive dinners on social media while you quote Maya Angelou “I work very hard, and I play very hard. I’m grateful for life. And I live it – I believe life loves the lover of it. I live it.”
Are you chasing a mirage, the desert mirage?
So I ask, what is the meaning your richness? What is the purpose your wealth and life? You have fallen into a dangerous abyss of inhumanity. You have grown too proud, boasting about wealth openly yet your obsession with affluence made you to abscond your family and social duties.
In the world of today, the poor has been abandoned in the pall of poverty while the rich enjoys life extravagantly. The gap between the haves and haves-not is on the rise every passing year.
Communities are increasingly consumed into life of abject poverty, courtesy of home-grown capitalists who castigate their own poor families. The rich have mastered the art of neglect and the bane of life has never been worse.
Martin Luther king Jr. once said “the richer we have become materially, the poorer we become morally and spiritually”. This is indeed a reality if the world we live in today is anything to go by. With wealth euphoria, it is easy to lose track of the important things in life such as connecting with the less fortunate in the community.
The trials of wealth cascade into the wellbeing of the society, everybody has been affected by irregular distribution of wealth. The possessor of wealth bears the brunt of them all in the form of mounting worldly problems and depressions.
Life is simple for the spiritually upright, it is easy to live with people if one removes the social tag and class discrimination that comes with vast resources.
The cost of our insensitive life is huge, it has created a worldly environment where the pursuit for success overwhelms the boggling mind-set of wealthy individuals.
We no longer see the beauty of being part of the people, we no longer hear the cries of the poor and we no longer smell the aroma of simple and quality life. With the pursuit of richness we have complicated our own life, our time has become so elusive and our homes have gotten so empty.
And so Allah has scattered the world of wealth making it a harrowing experience to accumulate it. Today in all economies of the world it is not easy to earn a coin because we believe that money is everything. We chose money over human values.
The consequences of making the world and wealth a primary thing in your life is not only destructive to your physical wellbeing but also erodes your spiritual connection with Allah. Prophet Muhammad (SAW) explained the impact of chasing after this elusive world in a hadith narrated by Anas bin Malik.
The Messenger of Allah (SAW) said: “……… whoever makes the world his goal, Allah puts his poverty right before his eyes, and disorganizes his affairs, and the world does not come to him, except what has been decreed for him.”
Poverty is put between the eyes of the one whose focus is only about the glamour and gifts of the world. Whenever he wakes up in the morning he sees poverty even if he is wealthy. He sees hunger and starvation even if his kitchen is full of food and fruits. He always feels poor and believes that he didn’t have enough. He is dissatisfied, lacking contentment and gratitude.
When a person becomes so ingrained in this life rather than the next, Allah scatters his matters. Nothing of his comes into a perfect fix. Something is always a miss, simple issues get complicated and hard to resolve while complex issues compound and transform into monumental problems.
No matter how hard one works, the person whose focal point is the world and wealth appears to chase a mirage. Remember this is a person who has accumulated a halal wealth, his only problem is focussing on the world. What if the wealth is stolen or earned through other unlawful or corrupt dealings, it will be a double tragedy that will haunt the owner for good.
Islam encourages its followers to balance life for success both in this world and the next. If a person puts into action the reality of having a great focus in the next life while living in the current, Allah will ease his life and makes it enjoyable.
The good hard hardworking Muslim will have his wealth and money on hand but not in his heart. His matters will be enjoined and he will experience a great state of zuhud. He will enjoy a great deal of contentment and satisfaction.
Allah says in the holy Quran: “Your wealth and your children are but a trial, and Allah has with Him a great reward” (64:15).
The choice that allows wealth either to make or break you is yours and only yours.
