The next time you throw down your carpet in a parking lot, remember that you, as person about to fall prostrate in Sujud are part of that universal, harmonious symphony of creation the Creator intended…
How often do we struggle to find a convenient place to pray? In today’s world of irreligiosity, often, no private spaces are offered in airports, restaurants or workplaces. The modern, secularised world, by design, scorns or overlooks maybe the only practice and facility that was common to all past civilisations.
Where such facilities are provided, they are considered a ‘privilege’ rather than enabling an imperative norm, inherited across cultures and boundaries since the dawn of man. Man has always built and attended monasteries devoted to the Creator. Only today, such a timelessly etched value and tradition is seen as no longer necessary and as such, many typically shy away when they pray, looking for the furthest place from people’s eyes.
Maybe out of all of its actions, it is placing our faces on the floor, the ‘Sujud’ that catches the most attention. Lowering oneself, though the instinctive condition of the created being beneath the Creator, is seen by the secularised man, deluded in thinking that he is beyond needing his Creator, as something ‘pliant’ and submissive if not at least strange.
After all, every man inescapably submits to their inevitable demise, even if to its run up, some pretend that no such submission exists or convince others to submit to these fantasies. Sujud, marks the exclusive submission to the Almighty. Far from being an expression of weakness, it demonstrates man’s refusal to submit to the ephemeral, which is everything beneath the Almighty, and is thus instead, the greatest ennoblement of man. Significantly, it is consistent with the whole universe. Read what Allah says carefully:
“Do you not see that everyone in the heavens and everyone on the earth prostrates to Allah, and the sun and moon and stars and the mountains, trees and beasts and many of mankind?”[1]
“And many of mankind?” The next time you throw down your carpet in a parking lot, remember that you, as person about to fall prostrate in Sujud are part of that universal, harmonious symphony of creation the Creator intended, joining the heavens, earth, sun and moon who also accede to this normality and realising the ultimate dependence on their Creator, prostrate willingly. This means you are part of the norm, majority and totality, not of the trivial minority who form the real exception:
“And many (not all) of mankind…”[2]
References:
[1] Al-Qur’ān 22:18
[2] Ibid
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