Suppose that you have been advised by your doctor to do exercise on daily basis for the sake of your health. You checked your tight schedule and with all the difficulties, spared an hour in the evening for exercise. In order to assure the punctuality, you informed everyone at home not to disturb you in the given time and also arranged the rest of your responsibilities accordingly. Two days passed by and your performance has made you feel quite better and with every passing day, you get more enthusiastic about it. You dream of a day when you would be again in the best of your health and would be able to enjoy every moment of your life.
On the third day, you changed your dress and now you are about to start exercise that a friend of you comes by. He comes in and embraces you with the all the love and enthusiasm. He is very excited to have found you at home and is showing his delight by laughing and smiling. He has held your hand in his hand and is asking about you and your family members with all the sincerity and love.
You are shocked and don’t know what to do. Your routine has greatly been disturbed and you are not feeling well about it. But you cannot show your true inner feelings because of the two reasons; first, the behavior of your friend is too much friendly and secondly, if you did not receive him properly and did not return the same esteemed greetings, your friend might take you to be rude and unfriendly.
So hiding all your inner feelings, you paste an artificial smile on your face and bring him inside. You ask him if he would like to take tea or coffee, for which he gives a loud laughter and asks for both. This untimely joke spills some more petrol on your burning temper but you cannot do anything except to return laughter to him because he is looking at you with much expectation.
Time passes by and first cup of coffee is followed by the second but your friend seems to have a lot many issues to be shared and cherished with you. At times, you make a failed effort to realize him of the shortage of time by looking at your watch or by diverting your attention here and there but the man in front of you is so much busy in his discussions that he doesn’t notice anyone of these and continues with his chattering.
At last, he informs you that he is leaving and as a formality, you thank him for his visit and express your extreme pleasure for it. Hearing this, the man promises to pay a visit to you the next day as well, which leaves you absolutely dumb. Now, you are dead sure that your following day’s routine would also be disturbed and you would not be able to resume your exercise.
Many years back, I made up my mind to study for two to three hours every night after the dinner as it was the time most suitable for studies for there prevailed complete silence, all the works of the day used to come to an end and the weather was always good at that time. Almost after a week, I was very pleased with my performance as I used to study with all the concentration. Then, my friends formed a group and they used to sit and enjoy every night after the dinner. They assembled in one of the friend’s house and would drink tea, listen to music, played cards or just sat and talked on different topics. They invited me many times to join their gathering but every day I used to escape by making different excuses. They also found out that I was not willing to join their company which they felt a bit and gave me a title of “Yakh” which means ‘ice’ or a term meaning ‘non-social’ and more rudely ‘wet blanket’. I was not able to explain to them why I was ‘Yakh’.
Similarly, almost every night I used to offer my prayers in mosque. On my return, our neighbor (let’s call him Haji Sahib) used to offer me to have a cup of tea with him which I politely and in most cases very difficultly used to refuse. Many years passed by and then I felt that Haji Sahib had also stopped offering me the tea. Many years later, Haji Sahib had mentioned me in a gathering in these words, “He is such a strange person. For many years I offered him to have tea with me but he did not accept it and I kept waiting that one day he would also make such an offer to me but he did not do this either.”
Our lives are full of such occasions when our privacies are greatly disturbed. Visiting a person without any prior appointment or information, forcing a guest to stay with us even if he is not willing to stay there, entering other’s room without knocking, staying in someone’s house without looking at their difficulties, making a person eat more even if he is not willing to do so, taking your friend to a picnic even if he has no time for this and has got do something important and many more such instances turn our lives difficult.
No doubt, all these values have passed to us from our forefathers when there was much sincerity in relations and that kept the people more strongly bound to each other, but with the passage of time, we forgot the logic and rationality behind these and now mostly these are used as tools to express our extreme and in most cases, emotional sentiments of sincerity to our friends, relations and loved ones.
I am also against an artificial or a mechanical life which is being in practice in west where people don’t know about the conditions of each other and where people don’t know their neighbors even after passing many years with them. This coldness or rudeness in relations is present even between the members of the same family and the love and affection has almost died out.
The great Muslim Scholar, Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi, has written a book “Adaab-e-Muaashrat” or “Norms of Social Interaction” in which he has presented Islamic orders and teachings about the social processes and one is surprised to discover that Islam had given the orders some 15 centuries ago which are being found in the modern books about social relations.
We need to learn the ethics and norms of social interaction both from the modern books and societies and from the teachings of Islam so that we should not be disturbing each other on the name of love and sincerity.