What is the Meaning of My Life?

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate

Assalaamu alaykum

Dear Friends

I pray that you are well.

We should always go back to this question - what is the meaning of my life?

Life is without meaning unless we have someone to focus to. In this case, the One we should direct our focus to is Allah, the Eternal. If we focus on the dunya (wealth, people, status, career, knowledge, etc), we will be disappointed and sad at some point or another because the dunya will go away (with death, something taken away from us, separation, unemployment, natural disasters, the Hour, etc.). So it is not smart to attach ourselves to other than Allah.

Someone who experiences life as a mere "series of events" doesn't know what the meaning of life is. Someone who experiences life as a small part of a larger story has found meaning, and this will satisfy a deep psychological need. Different stories resonate to different degrees, but the story that will resonate the most powerfully is the story that we are psychologically wired to belief in, which is the true and wonderful story that Allah tells us in the Qur'an. The degree to which the story resonates within us is commensurate to the degree to which we realize our slavehood to our Lord.

The meaning of life is thus found in our slavehood to our Lord, which is what the "Primoridal Covenant" was all about.

The Primoridal Covenant

وَإِذْ أَخَذَ رَ‌بُّكَ مِن بَنِي آدَمَ مِن ظُهُورِ‌هِمْ ذُرِّ‌يَّتَهُمْ وَأَشْهَدَهُمْ عَلَىٰ أَنفُسِهِمْ أَلَسْتُ بِرَ‌بِّكُمْ ۖ قَالُوا بَلَىٰ ۛ شَهِدْنَا ۛ أَن تَقُولُوا يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ إِنَّا كُنَّا عَنْ هَـٰذَا غَافِلِينَ ﴿١٧٢

And [remember] when your Lord took from the children of Adam - from their loins - their descendants and made them testify of themselves, [saying to them], "Am I not your Lord?" They said, "Yes, we have testified." [This] - lest you should say on the day of Resurrection, "Indeed, we were of this unaware." (172) ]Qur'an,Al-A'raf 7:172]

The definitive attribute of man is his ability to forget. The very word used in the Qur'an for "man," insan, is related etymologically to the word nisyan, or forgetfulness. Thus the human as he is initiated into the world progressively loses his awareness of the immediate presence of Allah. It is the function of religion to make us remember.

This is related to the five stages of the lives of man, one of which, is the 'preconceptual life', which took place before we came into this world. This world, known as dunya in Arabic, is derived from the word 'low' and is seen in Islamic cosmology as the lowest world. Indicating that there are worlds above this one, and that man descended from the highest, which is from the presence of Allah. This stage of preconception is when, according to the Qur'an, Allah took all the created souls, and brought them together where He said to them "Am I not your Lord?" and the souls responded in affirmation, "Yes, we testify!"

فَأَيْنَ تَذْهَبُونَ ﴿٢٦﴾

Where then, are you going? [Qur'an, at-Takwir 81:26]

Thus, when the soul is breathed into the womb it has a primordial recording or recollection of this initial contract made with the Creator of the heavens and the earth. When conception takes place, it is the movement from the soul into the lower world and at that point the movement of the primordial recording into the subconscious, no longer being present at the conscious level. A similar theory can be found in Western tradition, which Plato referred to as the primordial memory - in having forgotten, life is a process of remembering. It is for this reason that the first thing the Muslim father does is to read the adhan (Muslim call to Prayer) in the new born babe's ear. Contained within the adhan is the testimony of faith, or Shahadah which professes that 'there is no deity save Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah', reminding them of their origin and indicating their return to that origin through this life, the movement from conception to death, a movement back to our origin, to the Presence of God. The Qur'an, one of its names being 'the reminder', implies rekindling awareness already present. An awareness present in the heart of hearts of every human being in recognizing their Creator. And an awareness that is retrievable in this world, hence the role of the Divine Messengers, one after another, to arouse it from its veiled and dormant state.

"Man is sleep, and when they die they wake up"
- (saying of the Prophet, pbuh)

This offers a clue to the deeper meaning of the term kafir, usually translated as "infidel," "unbeliever," or "denier of the truth." The word kafara means "he covered," and a kafir is 'one who covers' as the night 'covers' the visible world in darkness. In their abstract sense both the verbs and the nouns derived from it have a connotation of "concealing" something that exists or "denying" something that is true. Hence in the usage of the Qur'an, a kafir is "one who denies" (or "refuses to acknowledge") truth in the widest spiritual sense of this latter term; that is irrespective of whether it relates to a cognition of the Supreme Truth - namely the existence of God - or to a doctrine or ordinance enunciated in the Divine Writ, or to a self-evident moral proposition, or to acknowledgement of, and therefore gratitude for, favors received. This should in fact be obvious as soon as one recognizes that the truths in question are inherent in human nature, though 'forgotten', as the Qur'an asserts again and again. It is not a matter of being unable to accept something we are told, but rather of refusing - from self-interested motives to admit something we already know. The act of concealing something even from oneself is an act of will.

"I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known; therefore I created Man"
- Hadith Qudsi

May Allah make us steadfast in our worship of Him and grant us the knowledge of Him. Ameen.

And Allah knows best and He alone grant success.

Allahumma salli 'ala Muhammad wa 'ala aalihi wa sahbihi wassallam.