Muharram's Pledge

My heart is set ablaze again
Relighted by the name of Hussain (ع)
Life's focus, lacking shape and edge,
Remade again by Muharram’s pledge.

As I wrote in Rajab, if I have anything close to a tradition in my blog, it is a post previewing that holy month. There is something similar that I do in Muharram, and have done for the past 3 years - my own 40 day challenge.

Except this year. It's not working for me anymore, and the fault, I think lies with me. Only the first was something approaching a success, whilst the other two (2, 3) can in my opinion only be called failures.

It is time to do something different. As life becomes ever more dreary for me, that I feel trapped by routine and custom, beginning to feel that life has just become some amorphous blob, just days following each other, so Muharram comes, and I both see a different way, and am inspired to follow it.

The message of Muharram is the most polarising force I know of. We live in a world that is designed to confuse us by offering us myriads of shades of grey, and Muharram is like a filter that sharply splits everything into simple black and white.

Should I feel the temptation to listen to music, for example, I need only think that, on the eve of the 10th of Muharram, from one camp one could hear music, and from the other camp one could only hear the buzz of Dhikr. And so on and so forth. All the tough choices that I have to make, (including a few at this moment in time, and a few more in the near future), I need only extrapolate forward, look at the  (probable) consequences, and see which camp I would most likely end up in.

Of course, it is not as simple as that, and stuff like intention has to be factored in as well. But just by doing this for a few hours in the past couple of days, I feel my soul getting sharper (I don't know how else to put it), and the dying embers of my heart glowing brightly again, and I know now what I was missing.

Alhamdulillah for the message and sacrifice of Imam Hussain (ع), for without it I would surely be lost.

Ya Hussain