Editorial
Observing Shab-e-Barat
It is a time to rediscover ourselves
Tonight will be a time when Muslims all across the world remember the Creator in all the humility of submission to Him. Shab-e-Barat, in that very broad sense of the meaning, is but a reassertion of the belief that our fortunes, indeed the course life takes at every given point, is what Allah wills it to be. And Allah is all-forgiving and all-knowing. Because he is, it is for every Muslim, wherever he might be, to seek His forgiveness for all the sins that have been committed and in equal measure seek to know the path to truth in light of the Islamic faith.
Against this background of forgiveness comes the knowledge that Shab-e-Barat is also a night when believers seek the Lord's blessings for the year that is to be. These blessings are of a spiritual sort and therefore far removed from the materialistic conceptions some of us might mistakenly have as we ask Allah to fulfill our needs. It follows, therefore, that our needs are those that strive toward a more concrete understanding of our place in the universal scheme of things. And they essentially relate, fallible as we are, to thoughts of the good deeds that we do or are supposed to do in the course of our life. We seek the Almighty's blessings in a number of ways, but those ways again converge around the thought that what we seek is centred around religiosity. Tonight we set aside the banal and the worldly and simply recall the fundamental nature of belief in God and His universe.
On this night of forgiveness and blessings, it is not false celebrations that we indulge in through a misuse of resources. It is a night of happiness, but happiness of the kind which takes us a little closer to the Almighty. As the twilight approaches, we ready ourselves for a night of prayer, of self-examination as it were, all directed at a scaling of the heights of belief. Let tonight be one of a rediscovery of the self, of the thought that while this life matters, there is too the hereafter that must not be lost sight of.
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