Oops! Sheryf’s Birthday: Calculation not Celebration

Back in the day, [I dare say in our days of Jaahiliyah] we celebrated our birthday. So much that I remember how mom got us toffees to share with our colleagues in schools. Birthdays were special for all it is and was worth.

We [as siblings] kept each other’s birthday and if I remotely remember even exchanged gifts sometimes.

Today, social media is the perfect reminder of our birthdays. The template is simple; you get as many friends as possible to shower best wishes on you from the crisp ‘HBD’ to the lengthy notes of ‘blessings and grace’ and of course all that lies in between these extremes.

Today happens to be my junior brother Sherif Haiman Shaban’s birthday, I looked at the date and it dawned on me. I cheekily sent him a text message to that effect, knowing very well that he did not care less.

Wondering why, facebook did not notify you, well it could be that he had disabled that setting and or keeps flipping his dob.

That’s not the thrust of this piece anyway. Here is what; we had both concluded that aside the Islamic injunctions of not celebrating birthdays, there was an opposite side of birthdays that people failed to see. I put that in a poem below

Our Beginning, Our End!

As the chronometer ticks, by passes time;

The irreclaimable asset, once lost

A total of sixty ticks, adds up to a minute,

Sixty minutes is equal to an hour

A sum of 24 hours amounting to a day,

An addition of one towards our graves

A subtraction of same of our lives on earth

Simple mathematics of every single DAY

Key point:

Allah may have given us another year of life, but that certainly is past. SO how many more years lie ahead of us, how well did we live the year we seek to celebrate or is it the ‘year’ [unknown] ahead of us that we celebrate.

On days like that, it should be a time to reflect on how far we have come and what potentially lies ahead of us. If as a Muslim we make it a point to pray for others on a constant basis, we don’t need one day to pray and to wish a brother well.

It is this one day celebration that avers Muslims towards accepting illicitly aberrant kaafuric celebrations like ‘Mother’s Day, Valentine Day even Christmas’ and other ‘neither-here-nor-there’ fitnavities [as in festivities]

I love my brother and all Muslims for the sake of Allah and may Allah unite us in jannah-tul Firdaws after allowing us entry through his rahmah. Ameen.