If one is ready to dishonour their parents, who are the selfless providers, the care-takers, the protectors and the obeyed authority in one’s life, he is correspondingly ready to dishonour the Creator, Who is the Ultimate Provider (al Razāq), the Ultimate Care-Taker (al Raqīb), the Ultimate Protector (al Muhaymin) and the Ultimate Authority (al Waliy).
Some look at the older generation as those who are passed their time, ready to be replaced by another. Others experience them as a moment in a past, when the ever-descending man was a generation closer to his first, heavenly origin. Allāh created our father, Ādam, in the heavens, and man will continue to further remove himself, descending from that pure, Adamic beginning until Allāh inherits the earth and everything within it.
The older generations occupy one higher step than us, squinting less when looking towards the unblemished, divine truth above them, better heeding and grasping the virtuous, archaic traditions and more fully absorbing timeless wisdoms. Modernity, in the most part, has convinced man that he is pursuing a path of unending moral and physical advancement.
Modernity tells us that the ways of those who preceded are outdated, naïve and misinformed. To embrace the morally insolvent modern world, ‘rebirthed’, ‘progressed’ and morally and biologically evolved by the survival of the fittest order of ‘natural selection’ requires the implicit scorning of those before us. Despite us knowing that by the passage of time, everything tends towards disorder, modernity systematically reduces the past and extols the diminished future.
Our parents are the physical presence of that past glimpse, expressing a remaining Adamic tradition that will soon perish with their demise. Their actions contain the selfless hallmarks of that heavenly origin, and reflect the qualities of the divine in our lives as children. They provide, without anticipating remuneration from their children, clothe, without being clothed by them, feed, without being fed by them and selflessly and instinctively love, without considering reciprocation or utility.
Dishonouring the parents is an unrivalled sin in both gravity and consequence. Not only does such behaviour demonstrate ingratitude for their extraordinary sacrifice through carrying, weaning and raising, but scorns those who most closely express the Creator’s qualities in our lives:
“And We have commanded people to ˹honour˺ their parents. Their mothers bore them through hardship upon hardship, and their weaning takes two years. So be grateful to Me and your parents. To Me is the final return.”[1]
In a way, it is to dishonour the reflection of the Creator’s qualities on earth, which is tantamount to dishonouring the Creator. If one is ready to dishonour their parents, who are the selfless providers, the care-takers, the protectors and the obeyed authority in one’s life, he is correspondingly ready to dishonour the Creator, Who is the Ultimate Provider (al Razāq), the Ultimate Care-Taker (al Raqīb), the Ultimate Protector (al Muhaymin) and the Ultimate Authority (al Waliy).
The chaotic dogmas of modernism, including the denial of the Creator, the Source altogether could not have rooted without first, belittling the effect, the parents. This may be why honouring the parents is inseparably connected with honouring Allah:
“For your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him. And honour your parents…”[2]
With their assuming such an eminent position, it stands to reason that no level of dishonouring them, since it extends to dishonouring of the Creator can conceivably be ‘minor’. For the magnitude of disrespect is not only through the magnitude of the disrespectful action, but the magnitude of its subject. Emphasising this, the Qur’ān commands that no word of contempt, even if it be a two-letter sound, a short expression of dissatisfaction or an audible breath; as little as the word (or sound of) ‘Uff’, be uttered to them.
“…Whether one or both of them reach old age with you, do not say ‘Uff!’ to them out of irritation and do not be harsh with them but speak to them with gentleness and generosity.”[3]
Although it has roots in Arabic, it is used almost universally, and is probably the shortest possible way one can articulate their irritation. Maybe if there was a shorter word or vowel that expressed frustration or that caused the upset of the parents, the Qur’ān would have expressed it, side by side with the command to worship Allāh alone.
It also raises the question that if a two-letter word; ‘Uff’, ought not to be said to the parents, how about what is louder than ‘Uff’ or the agonising forms of disrespect and abuse towards the parents we see today, born out of the modern world?
References:
[1] Al-Qur’ān 31:14
[2] Al-Qur’ān 17:23
[3] Ibid
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