Voice of British Muslim Women

Yusra Dahri, Tilford

You’ve awoken early. The sun has risen in clear skies. The air is deep and the light is pure. The very breeze breathes through you. This moment is full of clarity and beauty. All the gifts you’ve been given – you feel them in full force. In this moment, you are intensely alive.

So, you think, this is joy. Or happiness. Whatever you’d like to call it.

You feel that you could carry this feeling with you forever. You could keep it carefully, weave it into the rest of your days. You could. But you don’t.

And the silver thread of joy catches. It will not move any further; it cannot pull you along. Why?

Because you are overwhelmed with grief. Before you have even lost anything, your heart is filled with an ache. The ache coils in on itself, and there is nothing you can do but let it sit there.

You’ve felt love and beauty. You’ve felt the goodness of the created world, the goodness of others, and for a moment, even the goodness in yourself.

And you are overcome with grief, because you know in one moment, one day, one year, or one lifetime from now – you will lose it all. This will all pass. Sooner or later, this breeze will breathe out of you. The sun will beat down hot, or disappear altogether. You will feel weight on your shoulders – for the responsibility you must take, or for the guilt of things you cannot change. The people you love most will irritate you. The state of the world will completely devastate you.

These are little deaths. Your joy, your beautiful moment cannot last forever. What then?

Firstly, you must resist cynicism and disenchantment with the whole of existence. It is simply not worth it, and it will make you blind.

There is an old proverb in the English language: ‘every cloud has a silver lining.’ From early childhood, I hated that saying. I thought it was trite and untrue. I had never seen a cloud with a silver lining.

As it turns out, I am actually short-sighted. The kind of short-sighted that is negligible unless you want to look very far off into the distance. In other words, I had no idea that I couldn’t see as well as I thought. When I wore my glasses and looked at the summer clouds, you can guess what I saw. A thread of joy – the silver lining.

But on its own, this is not very helpful. All I’ve told you is that with your joy there will be grief, and that with your clouds there are silver linings you might not be able to see. What difference does that make to you?

Except, it does make a difference – the slightest shift. You must accept the existence of good things you cannot see. You might never be able to see them, unless you question the worthiness of your own eyes.

You must adopt humility. Neither you nor I can be sure that we will always see things rightly. But when we are humble, we have a better chance. The word ‘humble’ is originally derived from the word ‘humus’ meaning earth or ground. Being able to lower yourself isn’t shameful, but a blessing. When you sit on the ground, your entire perspective changes. Everything feels like a gift.

And here is the throbbing, aching heart of the matter:

The only thing that will sustain you through the grief that follows joy – the thing that sustains joy itself – is gratitude. A deep, enduring gratitude for life itself that accepts the inevitability of pain while putting it into perspective. Gratitude is the balance between joy and grief.

But my words are fragile. I have had to summon all of my energy and limited understanding of life to write this. All I’ve done is looked at with some experience what we’ve already known for thousands of years. The reason why gratitude has meaning and why we do not have to live our lives in state of grief:

We have Allah, and it is Allah who holds us.

The Holy Qur’an repeatedly mentions the Graciousness of God and the gratitude of His servants, who will not be grieved. Gratitude, which is shown through patience and Prayer. Therefore, the beauty and goodness that we have come to love in this world will not end here, but will be multiplied manifold in the Hereafter.

Our growth will continue. Nothing will be wasted and everything will be healed.

And that is the greatest joy of all.