“The material world as it appears to our senses is not the real world but only an image or copy of the real world that often deceives.” Plato

Andy Warhol famously said that the nature of the future is that everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. One need not look beyond programmes like Big Brother to see evidence of this trend. Long gone are the days where one becomes well-known because of their scholarly credentials; we are truly witnessing the triumph of spectacle over literacy. We live in a society where greed is the norm, where the ego, or lower nafs, is nurtured to its detriment and where consumerism is rampant. Indeed, pride and arrogance are sheer ignorance, according to Islamic teachings.

The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said: “The thing that I fear most for my Ummah is showing off and hidden desire.” Indeed, such is the danger posed by the puffed up chest that it is attributive to shirk – the association of partners with Allah, Most High. This type of shirk is not the blatant bowing down to Venus, Mars or Jupiter; it is much more subtle and thus almost inconspicuous. In another authentic hadith narrated by ibn Abbas, The Prophet (PBUH) said that “shirk is more hidden in my community than a black ant creeping on a black stone in the middle of a moonless night.” Scholars are generally in agreement that what is being spoken about here is the idol within. As Rumi says; “the idol of your self is the mother of all idols. To regard the self as easy to subdue is a mistake.” Living in the West, we have begun to divide our Qibla (in the words of Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad). We have become obsessive about our bodies, females especially, starving ourselves and yearning to look like the models on television. How superficial we have become. “There is our spiritual body and our material body: which one are we feeding? which one is stronger?” Shaykh Hasan Ali.

The London riots of last summer laid bare what evil the nafs is capable of; “snatch and grab, get anything you want, anything you ever desired,” said a 19-year-old rioter from Battersea (as reported by The Guardian’s ‘Reading the Riots’ series in December last year). Although many rioters were motivated by entirely materialistic accumulation, some saw the riots as an attempt to voice their outrage at a (slightly) different type of greed: corporate greed. Such uproar was also evident in the sweeping “Occupy” anti-capitalist protests that spread from New York to London, Frankfurt, Madrid, Rome, Sydney and Hong Kong. Indeed consumerism and rampant capitalism are very worthy culprits for the world’s economic woes. The more we have, the less we are (Abdal Haim Murad). The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, questions the very foundations contemporary society is built on, especially in regards to the financial sector; “Have we not begun to create a kind of human being, whose default setting is really profoundly selfish, profoundly introverted? And how on earth do we build a society on that kind of basis?”

As I begin to write the conclusion for this article, I negotiate with myself about whether I should post this onto my facebook first or onto my twitter. Would it get more ‘likes’ on the former or more ‘retweets’ on the latter? Indeed, this inner battle we sometimes have with ourselves is characteristic of a much wider phenomenon; a highly dangerous disease, more accurately, that devours us from within. Our ego, or lower nafs; feeds our animalistic tendencies and seeks to attain hedonism at the expense of everything else. Is this our reality? As Rumi points out, “What the material world values does not shine the same in the truth of the soul. You have been interested in your shadow. Look instead directly at the sun.” As Muslims, we should learn to shield ourselves from the deceptions of this material world, because only then can we begin to purify our hearts, nurture our souls and free our minds. In the words of the Punjabi poet, Baba Bulleh Shah: “Throw away your pride, Let go of your ego, Forget yourself for once, Then only you will find Him!”