Rabi al-Awwal • Uswa
Allah could have sent us a book and left it there. A list of commands, a set of rules, and the rest for us to work out on our own. He did not. He sent a man to walk it first.
Rabi al-Awwal is the month most tied to his coming into the world. So it is the natural place to turn our attention fully to him: to know him a little better, to love him a little more, and to follow him a little more closely than we did last month.
A Confession
For years, when I was younger, I felt guilty.
Guilty that I did not love this man I had never seen or met. Yes, I was told to love him. But if I am honest, I loved him the way a child loves the uncle they see once a year at Eid, the one who presses a crisp ten pound note into their hand. I know he loves me. He gives me gifts. He is kind. I am told to love him. It is the same thing, surely?
It wasn’t.
I have written before about how studying the seerah changed my whole perspective on Islam. What I did not say is that it changed my whole perspective on him ﷺ, too. I finally understood.
This volume is a testament to that understanding. And it is a hope, that you, dear reader, might gain it, or deepen it, or finally act on it, wherever you happen to be standing on your own journey.
An Example, Not An Impossibility
Here is the whisper that stops most of us before we start. I could never live like that. Those days are gone. I love him, but my life looks nothing like his.
And in one narrow sense, the whisper is right. You will not match him. Nobody does. But following was never matching. You are not asked to arrive where he arrived. You are asked to face the way he faced, and take a step.
That moves him out from behind the glass. We have a habit of treating him as a museum piece: revered, admired, wept over, and kept at a safe distance where he cannot make demands on a Tuesday afternoon. But he was not sent to be admired. He was sent to be followed. Mercy lives in the direction, not the distance covered.
Why So Much For This One Man?
The demands are not small. Love him more than your own parents, your children, yourself. Trace your days over his. Send blessings upon him until his name is never far from the tongue.
Why? Why give so much of a heart to one man who lived fourteen centuries ago?
And if the love does not yet burn in you the way you hear it described in others, do not panic, and please do not pretend. Love that is performed is thinner than love that is built. And love is built the way it always has been: by coming to know someone. So the real question is not why do I not feel it? It is how well do I actually know him?
Because when you begin to look, the answer arrives on its own. A man stoned until his sandals filled with blood, who prayed for the people who did it. Who carried the weight of an entire ummah, people he would never meet, us, on his heart. And on the Day of Judgement, when every soul is consumed with its own account, it is related that he will fall in prostration and plead not for himself, but ummati, ummati. My ummah, my ummah.
That is the man we are asked to love. Once you truly see him, the instruction reverses. It stops feeling like a duty and starts feeling like the most natural thing in the world.
What This Volume Holds
Uswa moves through all of this: what the Shama’il says we can still inherit from him, not his features, but his manner, his full attention, his modesty that was never weakness. What it means to follow him inside your own home, where it is hardest. What salawat really does. And what to actually reach for on the days he feels out of reach.
You are not asked to become him. You are asked to face the way he faced, and take one step. He is not out of reach. He is one small sunnah away.
Uswa. The finest of examples.
May Allah let us know him, love him, and follow him, and gather us in his company in the Garden.
Bismillah. Let us begin, together.
- Masuma Abdul-Muhit
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