By Abdullahi Jamaa
What the hell are we going through these days, the hyped individualistic western lifestyle is taking over our homes and other social institutions. Entering into a marriage doesn’t mean eternal enmity. It’s just that no one is an angel.
We can always replace hate with love, cruelty with compassion, misconception with understanding and vengeance with forgiveness. Preserve and build relationship with your in-laws and achieve a blessed life of satisfaction.
The kindness you can offer to your lovely children in return to your sincere connection with your ageing in-laws will invite all the life’s blessings you are yearning for and minimize your unabated emotional disturbance.
Of course our blessed religion provides us with the freedom to live our lives as we desire, as long as we adhere to the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah. We also have the permission to protect our families and guard them against evil influence and attack from envious quarters.
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But look at it from another angle. Your father or mother in-law is an authentic grandparent to your children. There is blood, bone and bond connection that can never be broken by any power of separation. Whatever happens, your children will forever have an unbreakable bond with their grandparents.
Interrupting this bond means a hard-nosed separation between your children and their grandparents. There is always an unceasing appetite for ageing parents to connect with their children’s children, an insatiable urge that can only be satiated through warm connection and relations.
When there is no connection between you and your mother or father in-law, your own progeny will bear the brunt. They may miss lots and lots of barakah in the form of abundant and sincere duas that may somehow change their destiny by the grace, mercy and power of Allah.
This connection is celestial in nature, missing it means absconding both the rights of your children and that of your in-laws. That is why spouses must develop a collected charisma coupled with powerful patience to contain and maintain ageing in-laws through appropriate communication, courtesy, gifts, show of love and respect.
In Islamic sociology, senior citizens and the people with gray hair are held with great admiration and veneration whether they are ordinary ageing people, your own parents or ageing in-laws. Their age and their social hierarchy within the Islamic society has given them a status above all others.
Based on our religious tenets, old age people in our family and society, have been regarded as “source of blessings”. And surely, there is a double reward when they combine old age and relations emanating from a pristine Islamic marriage.
Did not the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) say: “The grace and goodness is because of our elderly people”
Again in another authentic narration, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said: “He who is not kind towards our youngsters and infants, and does not respect our elderly and senior people, is not from us”
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In the presence of barakah from our ageing in-laws our homes and families will produce the best progeny since that mutual connection that have them in high esteem will motive them to send an unceasing stream of silent duas.
And may be who knows, the magic barakah resulting from one simple good action done for your mother or father in-law will transform your family in producing a family of good and righteous children who demonstrate good morals, good manners and sympathy in their attitudes.
Next time when you think about mother and father in-law, think about them as a source of abundant blessings. Send them gifts, greet them often, ask them to make dua for you, forgive their shortcomings and pray for them endlessly.
