Losing Īmān Between Morning and Evening

There is a hadith that took years to understand properly: the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says that a person may leave home a Muslim in the morning and return in the evening no longer one, or enter his house a Muslim at night and rise a kāfir by morning. This was once put to his shaykh, himself a muḥaddith, who smiled and said it was entirely possible, quite common even. A person prays ʿishāʾ, eats a good dinner, and sits down in front of the television; a debate is showing between a communist and a capitalist, for example, two opposing systems for running human society — neither one is the sharīʿah, neither one is Islam. They argue over which formula runs human society best, and as the argument goes on, a person finds himself agreeing, without quite noticing: hmm, communism is best, or, capitalism is best. At that moment, something has already happened: a man-made system, the sharīʿah's rival, has been preferred over what Allah made, without even realising it, simply by agreeing, without a second thought, with one of two rival ḥarāms — or with something habitually watched, an Oprah Winfrey programme, say, the exact name of the host hardly mattering to the point.

The same thing happens with other pairings put forward as opposites on television — the television itself being one ḥarām, and the debate concerning another, such as one person claiming to have been born with same-sex attraction and another claiming to have been born into the wrong sex; both are, in every respect, despicable acts, ḥarām, in Islam. In a country such as this, where everyone is free to hold and argue any view — this concerns a Muslim specifically, not the country's freedoms generally — a Muslim who begins agreeing with one such claim over the other, saying, sure, no problem, has, without noticing, already lost something of his īmān: it is gone, out the window, and he does not even know it. Great care is needed, then, over who is one's enemy and who is one's friend, who is the foe and who is the friend: Shayṭān is not to be loved, nor followed, nor are those who follow him or who call others to follow him; the whispering of Shayṭān is powerful, and it must be learned how to stand against it, how to combat it.