Escaping the Worst Prison
When Sara met Ahmed, she immediately knew. He was everything she had always dreamed of.
Meeting him was like watching the sun rise in the middle of a snowstorm. His warmth melted the
cold. Soon, however, admiration turned to worship. Before she could understand what had happened,
Sara had become a prisoner. She became a prisoner of her own desire and craving for that which she
adored. Everywhere she looked, Sara saw nothing but him. Her greatest fear in life was displeasing
him. He was all she could feel, and without him, happiness had no meaning. Leaving him made her
feel as though her soul was being peeled from her very being. Her heart was consumed with only his
face, and nothing felt closer to her than him. He became to her like the blood in her veins. The pain of
existing without him was unbearable because there was no happiness outside of being with him.
Sara thought she was in love.
Sara had been through a lot in her life. Her father walked out on her when she was a teenager, she ran
away from home when she was 16, and she battled drug and alcohol addictions. She even spent time
in jail. However, all that pain combined could not compare to the pain she would come to know
inside this new prison of her own making. Sara became a captive inside her own desires. It was this
captivity that Ibn Taymiyyah radi Allahu `anhu (may Allah be pleased with him) spoke of when he
said, “The one who is (truly) imprisoned is the one whose heart is imprisoned from Allah and the
captivated one is the one whose desires have enslaved him.” (Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Wabil, pg 69)
The agony of Sara’s worship of Ahmed was more intense than the agony of all her previous
hardships. It consumed her, but never filled her. Like a parched man in the middle of a desert, Sara
was desperately pursuing a mirage. But what was worse was the torturous result of putting something
in a place only God should be.
Sara’s story is so deep because it demonstrates a profound truth of existence. As human beings, we
are created with a particular nature (fitrah). That fitrah is to recognize the oneness of God and to
actualize this truth in our lives. Therefore, there is no calamity, no loss, no thing that will cause more
pain than putting something equal to God in our lives or our hearts. Shirk on any level breaks the
human spirit like no worldly tragedy could. By making the soul love, revere, or submit to something
as it should only God, you are contorting the soul into a position that it, by its very nature, was never
meant to be in. To see the reality of this truth, one only has to look at what happens to a person when
they lose their object of worship.
On July 22, 2010, the Times of India reported that a 40-year-old woman committed suicide in her
home by pouring kerosene over her body and setting herself on fire. The police said it appeared that
the suicide was an “extreme step because she was unable to conceive a child over 19 years of
marriage”.
Only days earlier on July 16, police reported that a 22-year-old Indian man “committed suicide after
his girlfriend left him”.
Most people could sympathize with the pain of these people, and most would be heartbroken in the
same position. But if having a child or a particular person in our life is our reason for being,
something is terribly wrong. If something finite, temporary and fading becomes the center of our life,
the raison d’etre (reason for existing), we will surely break. The imperfect objects that we place at