locked out

interesting day today.

Came home to find out that the door to our prayer room has stopped working. The... [don't even know what it's called] latching mechanism (?) no longer works, so when you turn the handle, it doesn't open the door. The upshot of this is that we are locked out of our prayer room. Talk about a sign - Mrs Habib with great hilarity wonders what we have done that Allah would do such a thing to us. To even greater (one-sided) hilarity she expects me (the man in the house) to 'kick the door down.' Hmm... I reply that this is contrary to my Jedi training.

All the musalla's, tasbih's, Qurans, and burqas are on the other side of the door. So we're reduced to reading salat on the carpet, counting on fingers, and so forth. A minor inconvenience, no doubt. But it leads to us wondering about other scenarios. What if the door had given up with one of the kids inside, and they had wanted to go to the toilet. An unpleasant thought. What if it had broken with Mrs Habib inside, me at work, and the kids at school. Trapped in a room, unable to open the door, with no mobile phone or way of contacting the outside world, and a four and six year old waiting outside school for a mum who is just not appearing. A chilling and dangerous thought. Instead of having a laugh about 'using the force,' we could have been in a very different position.

There are so many mercies that Allah bestows on us that we are totally unaware of. We may, if we are thankful and perceptive, be able to understand some of what might be called 'bounties of commission' - material or spiritual favours that Allah actually gives us. But what about the equally important bounty of the calamities that He averts from us? One of the verses from the Salat al-Badriyya reads:

And oh! what mercies we have accquired
How many misfortunes we're made to avoid
How great the blessings that have entered our lives
Through your love of the people of Badr, ya Allah.

That I did not have an accident coming home today, that my mum or dad did not have a heart attack, that my kids did not mess the carpet with paint, that my eyes blink and my kidneys function... the list of such 'bounties of omission' is endless. My shaykh once told us about a lady who asked him for a wazifa to help relieve the pain of a failing kidney. 'Do you think,' he asked us, 'if it had ever crossed that lady's mind to ask for a wazifa to thank Allah for her kidneys when they were healthy?'

Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqubi mentioned that ibn Abbas (ra) said, 'whenever a calamity befalls me, I give thanks for three mercies:

1. That it was not a worse calamity
2. That it happened in this world and not the next
3. That it concerned by material welfare and not my spiritual.'

And Allah says, 'if you were to [try to] count the bounties of Allah, you would never be able to enumerate them.' Indeed, the mere fact of remembering one of Allah's bounties is a bounty in itself, for had Allah not inspired us with the taufiq to remember him and his blessings, we would have remained in a state of heedlessness. The mind boggles (as is its wont).

May Allah keep us in a state of thankfulness and reflection.