Comments on: To Thine Own Self be True

By: Soad

Soad — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 09:23:25 +0000

Mashallah what an enlightening way of looking at things. Thanks for the great article, may Allah(swt) reward you and may He make it easy for us all to be true to ourselves, ameen.

By: UmmZakariyya

UmmZakariyya — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 06:36:31 +0000

Brilliant article. I think as mothers especially we struggle with being true to ourselves. We are put under a lot of pressure by others to devote ourselves to raising our children, so finding time to nurture or develop our own interests and talents can be difficult and sometimes not supported. I constantly feel conflicted about whether I’m making the right decisions either for myself or my children. My perception is that it is more acceptable in the community for men to be more ruthless in their pursuit of their own dreams and self development than women. Does anyone else feel that women are encouraged much more by society to be selfless and put others first than men? Sometimes I wonder if it is better to put ourselves first and be dedicated to our own development both in terms of dunya and akhira after all we will be standing on our own in front of our Lord on the last day and will justify our actions and how we spent our time on our own. We cant hide behind our children or partners. Anyway just a few thoughts I wanted to throw out there.

By: Kirana

Kirana — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 06:43:29 +0000

Sometimes we think poorly of a particular value or principle because the examples we see for it to date have shown it badly. An example I offer is ‘optimism’. Now my natural bias is pessimism – or maybe, realism. I know optimism is a positive trait, especially for Muslims, and the Prophet Muhammad had it.

But I couldn’t appreciate it in my heart, because I associated optimistic people as being also heedless and irresponsible, taking people along on unrealistic ventures, and then when it doesn’t pan out, it’s the responsible, less optimistic people like me who sticks around to clean up while the optimistic people go off on some other ambitious new thing.

Then I met someone who had a quiet, grounded kind of optimism, who bore the brunt of consequences of overly-confident decisions patiently instead of the people he had taken along with him, but otherwise the optimism sustained him through a lot of difficulty. It was frankly among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and I suddenly understood why our Prophet’s optimism was so charismatic. I changed my mind about ‘optimism’ immediately, with just a single example overturning all the poor examples I’d seen before. Sometimes we think a trait is selfish, but that’s only because we don’t know how to do it properly. 🙂