How many times have you heard someone say practising Islam or being a ‘religious’ Muslim is difficult? Reflect on the following. Imam al-Bukhari in his Sahih relates the following hadith (record of the words of the Prophet ﷺ, peace be upon him) in the chapter On The Deen Being Ease.

It is related from Abu Hurayra that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “The deen is ease. Whoever makes the deen too hard for himself will be overpowered, so direct yourselves to what is right, follow a middle course, accept the good news of the reward for right action, and seek help [to reach your goal by being constant in worshipping] in the morning, evening and some of the night.” (Hadith no. 39)

“The deen is ease.”

Word Analysis:

deen = Obedience, a state of abasement and submissiveness.

In the hadith, al-deen is referring to Islam as the means or the vehicle by which one is obedient and in a state of humble submission to Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala (exalted is He). It is synonymous with shari`ah (law) and includes both Islam (i.e. practice) and Iman (faith).

yusr (ease / easy) = ease, facilitation without constriction.

Commentary:

Ibn Abi Jamrah in his commentary of the abridged Sahih of al-Bukhari, Bahjat al-Nufus, highlights a number of ways the statement ‘The deen is ease’ can be understood and demonstrated. Some of them are as follows.

1. Deen here can be understood as both Iman and Islam together. Iman (faith) is ‘easy’ in the sense that it is straightforward without any complexities. This is demonstrated in the hadith where the Prophet ﷺ tests the slave girl to see whether or not she is a Muslim. He was satisfied by her action of simply pointing to the sky to indicate that Allah (swt) is above his creation and by her attesting to the fact that he was the Messenger of Allah. As for the ease in Islam, the practice, this is demonstrated by the famous hadith where a person asks the Prophet ﷺ about the obligations of Islam and the Prophet ﷺ  tells him about the five obligatory prayers, the obligatory fast of Ramadan and the obligatory zakat (charity). Each time the person asked if there was anything more than the obligatory prayer, fasting and zakat the Prophet ﷺ  replied that there wasn’t unless he wanted to do something extra voluntarily. While the person was leaving he said to himself, by Allah I will not increase nor decrease from that. The Prophet ﷺ said he has succeeded if he is truthful.
2. The ease here could be referring to what you have been given as a deen compared to the previous nations and the fact that you have only been obligated with that which you have the capacity to do. Allah (swt) has removed the burdens that were in the shari`ah of the previous nations from this ummah (community). For instance, the process of repentance for this ummah is made by regret, giving up the sin and seeking forgiveness whereas for some previous nations repentance was through capital punishment (for some sins). Another example is that unlawful things for us have been made lawful in times of necessity whereas this was not the case for previous nations.  Also the fact that Allah (swt) has only burdened us with obligations that we have the physical and intellectual capacity to fulfil, for if he did burden us with something beyond our capacity, it still would have been acceptable as He is all Wise and the Omnipotent whose decisions none can overturn. Therefore it is from His favour and bounty that He has forgiven us and only made us responsible according to our capacity. As He says in the Qur’an: Allah does not burden the soul beyond its capacity (2:286). Therefore the one who is made responsible for that which one had the capacity to bear then that is from ease and not from hardship.
3. The ease here could be that deen is easy for the one who has knowledge of the deen and it is difficult for the one that is ignorant of the deen.
4. The ease referred to here could be the fact that the legal texts that imply an obligation without any room for other interpretations are few in number. The vast majority of legal texts are open to different interpretations (that lead to more than one valid legal option) and therefore this is ease and flexibility from the Master to His servants.
5. The ease referred to here could be to shorten one’s hopes, because shortening one’s hopes is amongst the causes that assist one in the deen so that the deen becomes easy. This is due to the fact that when one’s hopes are shortened covetousness is reduced, zuhd (detachment from unnecessary things) becomes easy and performing good deeds becomes light. This is similar to what the Prophet ﷺ mentioned: “When one of you wakes up in the morning, do not expect (to live) till the evening and when one of you goes to sleep in the evening do not expect (to live) till the morning.”
6. The ease referred to here could be to perform good deeds in reverence to the rights due to Allah (swt) since the deen belongs completely to Allah. When one does this the deen becomes easy due to the sweetness of obedience, performing deeds become effortless, and in fact, one is nourished by the deeds performed for the sake of Allah (swt).

Ease. What a harmonious onomatopoeia – such a short, simple, relaxation-inducing… well …easy word! I have often had a recurring daydream as a child, that when things would go wrong, when life just wasn’t on my side, I would be able to curl up in a cave of goose-feathers and watch Spongebob Squarepants, all the while eating popcorn and sitting amidst a pile of Calvin and Hobbes comic books. But I now clearly know that that kind of ease is not tangible. I learned quickly that when life is hard, you just have to deal with it, right? At least, that’s what I thought, until I opened up the Quran one day and came upon this intriguing ayah: “God intends for you ease, and does not intend for you hardship” (2:185). And suddenly, just as I read that verse from Allah’s book, I became utterly confused.

Yusr (ease) seems perhaps too difficult a concept to think about. If you think about it, even thinking is hard to begin with! Thinking usually means reading a lot – books, Quran, and ahadith. Thinking means listening to the wise ones before us, watching the good and the bad from those who have experienced our plights beforehand. Thinking means restructuring our absorbed blips and bloops of knowledge into categorical data. And finally, thinking means exercising your mind to the highest epitome of performance, to systematically reflect upon those sacred (and non-sacred) texts themselves and critique the perceptions of others to arrive at our own conclusions. That is what thinking is, as Allah described: “Will they not, then, reflect on the Quran…” (4:82).

You can see from this philosophical rollercoaster that the thought of thought is crazy in itself. So how then can we think about ease? It seems that there is a contradiction; that it is so much easier not to try so hard to understand the concept of yusr, to relax our mind and literally settle in a pile of goose-feathers. So I ask you what I have asked myself, what those before me, with me, and after me question all the time – if the Creator himself wants us to live easily, why then is life so painfully, universally difficult for all of us, Muslims and non-Muslims, female and male, east and west, old and young, animal and human?

But wait, let’s stop for a minute. That can’t be all there is. Ease can’t be that hard. Call up the courage of an honest analysis. Could it be that life is so catastrophically tooth-pulling for the inhabitants of this Earth because we are doing something wrong? Did we ever obey Allah all the time, or better yet, do we even think about what He asked us to do and why? Do you?

I’m not here to preach to you how we must obey Allah and execute that obedience by performing mechanical acts that harbor no thoughts. I’m here to ask you to think with me, to try to find an answer.

Faith-communities before us confused faithfulness to the will of God with hardship. I always remember meeting two types of people that had this notion mixed up. You had the first kind of people that passionately, vehemently, zealously believed that the harder an action was, the more reward you got in the eyes of Allah, even if both actions got the same amount of good deeds! Their idea of ease was reserved in the Hereafter, and as for this life, they lived in it like Opposite-Land. And then, you had the second type of people. These people eliminated all “inconvenient” worship and severed all compulsory good deeds, reducing the pillars and consequences of belief to an airy feeling in the heart: “Love.” Basically all talk, no action. They pushed faith to the personal, banished the public soul, and lowered life to the purely sensory and egotistical level. Forget action then, if you just love Allah, right? Follow only your feelings. They really understand ease, but only for this life.…yippee! With that logic than, do these two “implementations” of ease really fill these two types of people with love and accomplishment? Did their lives grow easier? No, not really. I believe that these two compartmentalized ethics of yusr have exhaled the world of all remnants of compassion. Truly, we have idolized materialism and the cult of the “self” as the natural religion of ease for man, thus justifying all manner of viciousness and harm of the vulnerable. Do you see what I mean? Think about this: how many times a day have you thought of a sentence using the word “I?” What about the word “we?”

I looked up the definition of ease in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and to be frank, I didn’t like what I got – the state of being comfortable, freedom from pain or discomfort. It seems like those guys have the same viewpoint on ease as the people I have described above. However, in the primordial understanding of man, ease always meant one thing – subduing selfishness because it destroys the self and others. Ease is accepting the responsibility of the spiritual AND worldly aspects of Islam that have been created, not evolved, by a single eternal God. If we go by that definition, things become so simple! Think about the prophets of Allah. The way they understood yusr was by executing their worshipful responsibilities in order for us to be blessed and disciplined for the benefit of the weak and the human community. It makes sense then that we learn in Surat al-Inshirah (94) that when the revelation of Islam seemingly brought the Prophet (ﷺ) from a state of ease in life to one of hardship, the reverse is actually true.

Hardship, in reality, is when you think you know and you don’t. It’s when your heart is constricted by recognition of evil and injustice plaguing the society around you. It’s when you finally realize the problems and not have the capacity or comprehension to train that heart to grow and love. It’s when you finally find the key, the true and wholesome Islam, to help that heart, but push it to sacrifice the mere things and immediate comfort. It’s when you forget yourself for the sake of others, and for the sake of seeking the Face of Allah. And finally, finally, when you get past all of that, your heart and soul are free, along with the countless human souls. Your true brothers and sisters. That is yusr.

This is why Allah twice stresses that only “with hardship comes ease.” We have to endure two types of difficulty to get two types of ease. First, we have to strive to deliver the message of truth, that God is One, so that we can depict this as an end to the inequality that gives unfair advantage to a few. Second, we ourselves must undergo privations in our strive to perform the ritual worship He has made obligatory upon the believers, so that we may prepare our hearts and souls to withstand the great pressure if they uphold Allah’s message and establish it in the world.

Ease is not easy. Hardship is not hard. It seems then that opposites attract. Yusr, the ethics of ease in Islam, is one of our religions’ greatest objectives. Allah has placed so much goodness and guidance for all, provided us Muslims own up to the apparent hardship. We can’t resort to our feelings or actions only. If we want to get somewhere in this world, we have to use both. Alhamdulillah (all praise be to Allah), we are at a stage in our lives where we can do so much. Let’s go beyond ourselves and our personal problems to help those around us. Let’s strive in our obedience to Allah and take the Prophets as an example. The time is up – forget goose-feathers. I pray that insha ‘Allah all of you  will push yourselves beyond the apparent limits of thought and really, just think dynamically and act. It won’t be easy to consider new ways to give back to your community and methods to enrich yourself, but it sure will pay off in this life and the next. Embrace then, this time to strive…for herein lies all the world’s ease.