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More Fish Please!

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shapeimage_2.jpgAn American businessman was once standing on the jetty of a Mexican coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complemented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it had taken to catch them. The Mexican replied, ‘Only a little while.’ The American then inquired why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish. The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, ‘But what do you do with the rest of your time?’ The Mexican said, ‘I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll in the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, Señor.’

The American scoffed, ‘I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York, where you would run your expanding enterprise.’

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The Mexican fisherman asked, ‘But Señor, how long would this all take?’ To which the American replied, ‘Fifteen to twenty years.’

‘But what then, Señor?’

The American laughed and said that was the best part. ‘When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.’

‘Millions, Señor? Then what?’

The American said, ‘Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.’1

More Fish Please, We’re British!

In his book Happiness, Richard Layard argues that, “once subsistence income is guaranteed, making people happier is not easy.”2 His central argument is that as Western societies have got richer, their citizens have not got any happier. In fact, all the indicators suggest that, despite the increase in living standards and material comforts, we are no happier today than we were fifty years ago.

Britain is only now waking up to the social ills that its “buy now, pay later” culture has brought about. Easy credit and borrowing beyond our means has plunged this country into a huge debt crisis. This, in turn, has caused untold angst and misery for the nation: what with mortgage arrears escalating, more homes being repossessed, bankruptcies increasing, and peoples’ personal debts spiraling out of control. Simple wisdoms such as ‘if you haven’t got the money, don’t spend it’ or ‘do you need to spend’ have, for the past decade or so, been sidelined and even bulldozed out of our collective sensibilities. Our culture of unbridled consumerism, rather than being a path to fulfillment, has become a national addiction. ‘Crack-consumerism’ is the collective substance abuse that we as a nation now indulge in.

How Britain moved from being a nation where thrift was a virtue and debt a vice, to owing a staggering trillion pounds (£1,000,000,000,000) on mortgages, credit cards and other loans, is the subject of some debate. It was less than a generation ago that borrowing money carried with it a severe social stigma. To borrow was to admit to living beyond one’s means. But that was then. Today’s Britain is one where the moral principles of thrift, foresight and responsibility have been substituted by greed and the cult of instant gratification. Today’s Britain is one where the social pressures and economic attitudes that surround us urge us to want more than we need; cajole us to mistake wants for needs. Our culture’s current measure of success make us crave for more possessions, more money, more status … more ‘fish’.

Yet the very happiness we are promised by buying those designer jeans, that mobile phone or this latest car, is what the next product assures us we do not have until we buy something else. As consumers, then, we end up anxious; unfulfilled; and unhappy – yet consumers nonetheless! “The endless spiral of material acquisition,” says Stephan Law, “cannot in fact make us more content. Like a drug addict, we simply get accustomed to whatever we’re getting, cease to derive much pleasure from it, and so start demanding even more. As a result, explains the philosopher Peter Singer, ‘once we have satisfied our basic needs, there is no level of material comfort at which we are likely to find significantly greater long-term fulfillment than any other level.’”3

More Fish Please, We’re Modern!

It was Gandhi who once said: “The world caters for everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed.” Although it has become something of a cliche, I’ll say it regardless: If everyone on this earth were to live and consume like the average Briton, we would need three more earths to service this consumerist lifestyle; six more if we all wanted to live like the average American. In his latest book Affluenza, Oliver James speaks of an ‘affluenza virus’ that is sweeping through the English-speaking world. This virus, he says, is a set of values which make us extremely prone to anxiety, depression and emotional stress, because of placing to high a value on consumerism and wanting to look good in the eyes of others. Whatsmore, he insists, we are now infecting the rest of the world with this virulent virus.4

A consumer-addicted society demands the quick and careless use of materials, and is built on the myth that human happiness can be found on the material plane alone. It also relies on its citizens being detached from, and blind to, the global havoc such a worldview spawns. Here, then, is a gentle reminder of just what we are currently doing to our planet, let alone its people, so as to keep the ‘fish’ coming in:

Half the world’s natural forests are being destroyed, whilst the remainder is being lost by an area half the size of Norway every year. Nearly a third of all the world’s cultivable land for growing food has been degraded because of intensive and unsustainable agricultural practices. Although still somewhat contentious, most scientists believe that greenhouse gases and the resultant climate changes have increased weather-related disasters such as droughts, floods and storms, and threatens to raise sea levels, submerge low-lying lands and reduce the world’s habitable areas. Seventy per-cent of the world’s fresh water is now being used for agriculture; in fact, one in five people around the globe survive on less water per day than is used to flush a toilet. And then, of course, there are the fish. Half of the world’s fisheries are now depleted, while another quarter is currently being over-fished. The human tragedy of all this modern greed and consumption is even more grotesque.

“And of course,” says Law, “ever-rising levels of consumption are impossible to maintain, for the resources we are drawing are finite. Not only are we damaging ourselves by pursuing our addiction to acquisitive materialism, we are also damaging the environment, eventually to the point where it will be beyond repair. Singer argues that we need fundamentally to rethink our attitudes to contentment, and to reject the consumerist model of happiness that is dragging us all to our doom.”5

More Fish Please, We’re Muslims!

Islam too has many significant things to say to us about our modern dilemma of consumerism – though this may not immediately be apparent if one were to look at Muslim attitudes toward consumption. Even those outside our faith tradition are starting to point out that we Muslims consume more food during the month of fasting, than we do outside of it! Our craving for more fish, it would appear, is little different than anyone else’s.

Yet for a faith that has as one of its cardinal virtues zuhd – asceticism; a worldly detachment where luxury and opulence is shunned in favour of a simple and pious life – one would expect Muslims to be among the least afflicted by what is essentially an atheistic, materialistic, consumerist ideology. Sad, then, that many of us seem only to want to live the migrant’s dream and to sit back on our leather sofas; our four or five remote controls at hand for the plasma TV and home-entertainment system; Mercedes parked outside the door; mulling over what improvements to make to our homes next, and to feel pleased with ourselves because we’ve made it.

Such attitudes don’t quite square with the teachings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, who said: “Successful is he who accepts Islam, whose provisions are sufficient for him, and who is content with what God has bestowed on him.”6 Nor does it accord with the spirit of the prayer he would make: “O God, make the provisions of Muhammad’s family suffice their basic needs.”7 As for zuhd, he once remarked: “Renounce the world, and God will love you; renounce what others possess, and people will love you.”8 In fact, “Whoever loves this worldly life,” asserts one prophetic saying, “does damage to his Afterlife; and whoever loves the Afterlife, does damage to his present life. So prefer what is eternal to what is ephemeral.”9

Less there be some confusion here, Islam does not ask its adherents to forsake the material world and to live a monastic life. It does, however, stricture that the material world not become of greater concern to a believer than God and the Afterlife. Such an attitude is culled from the following verse of the Qur’an: “But seek the abode of the Afterlife in that which God has given you, and forget not your portion of the world, and be kind even as God has been kind to you, and seek not corruption in the earth; for God loves not the corrupters.”10

Islam is the great dissident force in today’s world. If we are all being dragged to our environmental doom, we need to be the ones applying the brakes. But this is not the place for mere pious sentiments, or being an armchair critic. We need to live the change we want to see in others and in society. This involves sacrifice; of instating the prophetic virtue of zuhd in our lives. We must show, as individuals and as communities, that Muslims have a real alternative to today’s consumer madness and the suffering it causes. As Muslims, we must live for the poor and with the poor. We must emancipate ourselves from being enslaved to this deceptive consumerist ideology. In essence, we need nothing short of what Abdul Hakim Murad calls “a prophetic uprising”.

One place to start would be with rethinking our attitudes towards wealth and consumerism. Layard explains in his book how social comparisons; the desire to keep up with the Smiths and the Jones, is an interminable source of stress for most people. He says that studies show that people are concerned about their income and wealth relative to that of others, and how “they would be willing to accept a significant fall in living standards if they could move up compared to other people.”11 “So one secret of happiness,” he unveils to the reader, “is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are: always compare downwards, not upwards.”12

Informed Muslims will, no doubt, be quick to recall the Prophet’s words, peace be upon him: “Look at those who are below you [in wealth and status], do not look at those who are above you, so as not to belittle the favours that God has conferred on you.”13 And that’s precisely the point. Our happiness and our being content depend profoundly on our attitudes. For believers, the Prophet’s life is the finest example of how to live simply and be content, even when the world is thrown at your feet. His teachings are a treasure-trove of practical wisdoms on how to educate the spirit, yet live functionally in today’s material world. And the guidance he brought can help to distinguish between the ‘fish’ we need and those we merely want. It has the power to direct us towards a life of being content and sufficed, instead of being selfish.

SURKHEEL (ABU AALIYAH) SHARIF

Notes

  1. Cited in Zohar & Marshal, Spiritual Intelligence (London & New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001), p.282.
  2. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (England: Penguin Books, 2006), 4.
  3. The Xmas Files (Great Britain: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 68.
  4. Affluenza (Great Britain: Vermilion, 2007).
  5. The Xmas Files, 68-9.
  6. Muslim, Sahih, no.1054.
  7. Al-Bukhari, Sahih, no.6460; Muslim, no.1055.
  8. Ibn Majah, Sunan, no.4102.
  9. Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 4:412.
  10. Qur’an 28:77.
  11. Happiness, 42.
  12. ibid., 47.
  13. Al-Bukhari, no.6490; Muslim, no.2963.

(originally posted here)

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Abu Aaliyah is the founder of The Jawziyyah Institute, a leading institute for Islamic moderation and contemporary thought in the United Kingdom. Sidi Abu Aaliyah has been in involved in Dawah and Islamic teachings since 1986. He has translated a number of books from the Arabic language into English such as "The Exquisite Pearls". Abu Aaliyah's written works and audio lectures can be found online.

13 Comments

13 Comments

  1. Nafees

    May 20, 2008 at 2:46 AM

    MashaAllah, beautiful, I needed this reminder

  2. islam blog

    May 20, 2008 at 6:54 AM

    Brilliant post! I needed a reminder too. If only we can internalize this way of thinking, we’d never be sick of worry. Jazakallah for writing this. I am going have my whole family read this.

  3. AlphaCentauri

    May 20, 2008 at 10:46 AM

    Jazaak Allaah khayr for such a moving and powerful reminder.
    Striving for Zuhd while living in modern western society is something I found very difficult personally. Especially after marriage. I feel women in general have a stronger desire for material objects, and a shaykh once told me that this should not be denied because Allaah swt has called women an adornment of this world.
    When I was single, I had tried hard to be as simple as possible, getting rid of all my furniture, sleeping on the floor, not even wearing coats or using heating in winter. I did that for many months and then I got married and after a few months of honeymooning, felt guilty about my changed lifestyle and tried to reimpose on myself and my family the strict regime I had going. The resulting stress almost caused my marriage to break up. Now I’ve kind of given up hope on ever achieving a high level of Zuhd, but at times I feel guilty and depressed about it. I may be idealistic but I believe one should be able to strive to live the same simple life that our pious predecessors had lived.
    What did I do wrong and how do you go about attaining Zuhd while not isolating yourself from society and becoming a monk?
    Jazaak Allah khayr.

  4. SaqibSaab

    May 20, 2008 at 11:58 AM

    JazakAllah khair, excellent read. Now let’s implement this in our actions! Now about that Palm Centro PDA phone with unlimited internet that I will be the first to admit that I absolutely do not need…. 8)

  5. ibn fellah

    May 20, 2008 at 12:09 PM

    Masha Allah I enjoy reading your insightful pieces.

  6. Nauman

    May 20, 2008 at 12:38 PM

    wow REALLY AMAZING POST !!! =) loved it…

  7. MR

    May 20, 2008 at 12:52 PM

    The American laughed and said that was the best part. ‘When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.’

    ‘Millions, Señor? Then what?’

    The American said, ‘Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.’1

    MR’s remix to the ending

    ‘Señor, I’m sorry, but I can do that right now until I die. I don’t need millions to enjoy life. I just need God, faith, belief and my family.’

    ‘Well then you can enjoy our life while I’ll go make millions’

    20 years later, the American is bankrupt after the housing market collapses. He loses all his millions to the falling American dollar. He jumps of a 20-story building and kills himself leaving his family with nothing.

    The Mexican is still doing the same thing.

    Adios!

  8. Taqwa_Ash

    May 20, 2008 at 3:04 PM

    Subhanallah I have heard the story of the business man and fisherman by one of my professors in the past. What I loved the most was what was added to it.

    Great reminder. Jazza kallahu khairin!

  9. Sharif

    May 20, 2008 at 4:45 PM

    “Less there be some confusion here, Islam does not ask its adherents to forsake the material world and to live a monastic life. It does, however, stricture that the material world not become of greater concern to a believer than God and the Afterlife.

    I know we hear it so often that we forget the value of this statement, but for those Muslims who are less committed and less willing to sacrifice (and of course, for all Muslims), I think that is a great principle for them to keep in mind. It’s also a great rule when making da’wah to them.

  10. Asad S.

    May 20, 2008 at 8:19 PM

    MashaAllah! One of my Favourite posts YET! This one is hitting the bookmarks! JazakAllah Khair!

  11. Arif Kabir

    May 21, 2008 at 4:45 PM

    Beautiful Article! I shared it immediately with everyone near me. This is one of the most useful articles I have ever read! Masha’ Allah

  12. Faiez

    May 27, 2008 at 10:46 PM

    This blog post is not a blog post or an article. It is a masterpiece that must be read by everyone.

    JazakAllahu khayr

  13. Hena Zuberi

    March 26, 2011 at 4:49 AM

    I absolutely love this article- the pursuit of happiness an American ideal so dear- but in the pursuit we forget the happiness.

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