The day before yesterday, Pakistan lost a cricket match against West Indies. I was going through my FB home page with the posts by many of my friends. I thought of commenting, but then I realized that there are so many people putting up these statuses and I cant comment on all of them and it is useless or a Q3 activity. But after seeing some of the comments, I decided to share my views that some of our friends may be missing. It was just a cricket match, not a war. There are far more important things happening in this country and the world overall, but majority of us do not even bother to take any notice of that! One of the status was something like this: Why all of these players were not on the Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370? It is better if their flight can crash in Indian Ocean on way back. Now, this is extremely harsh and showing the mindset that we are developing. There were 40+ comments on this status by that persons friends and almost 75% of them were agreeing in different words. Remaining were hahahaha or lol.... extremely disappointing! Have you ever realized what youre talking about. What if one of the cricketer is your own brother or cousin or a very close friend? Or what if they read your posts or their old parents read them? What about rest of the passengers on borad? Would you still be happy? What about someone else say something same for you, your family members or parents? Would you like it? I bet you wont. This is not the way people who call themselves Muslims should think like! Look at the Quran where Allah (swt) is instructing Hazrat Musa (AS) and his brother Harun (AS) that they should talk to Pharaoh in soft words. I am sure none of these brothers in the cricket team are not even closer to one we know as Pharaoh. Are they? How can we be so harch on just a defeat in one game of cricket? I have seen posts where people were cursing the cricketers even calling names in some posts. Would you like yourself to be called a name by someone. What if same comments be given on you, your family members or parents? Would you still love it? I bet you wont! Some of my friends have posted that the match was fixed and all the team was involved in it. Again, this is something serious. Why? because youre putting a serious allegation and I am sure none of these people have any evidence against the players took money and fixed the game. There could be a possibility of such thing, but since you do not have proofs or concrete evidences, it is better to keep the mouth shut because by saying this you have already put yourself in a deep deep trouble. The trouble is if this is not true then this is called Bohtan, which is a serious issue in Islam, a gunah-e-kabeerah and taubah (repentance) is must, but since you put an allegation on a person (a Muslim brother), you have to seek forgiveness from him. So technically, contact all the team members and seek forgiveness from them before you die or they die. Otherwise, youll be meeting them on the day of judgment when your good deeds will be transferred to them and you may have to carry some of their bad deeds. This may change the whole equation for some people! May Allah save all of us from that time. The last thing is something called benefit of doubt. I mean cant we give them the benefit of doubt? Imam Ghazali (ra) mentioned 70 benefits of doubt on someone who is not offering Salah and even if after that youre not satisfied then this is almost sure that you have a serious issue with your heart and the disease has made its ground in your heart and softening of heart has gone away. May Allah help us. This is just a game of cricket friends, just a game! England lost the game against Netherlands, Australia only managed to win against Bangladesh, South Africa hardly managed to win against Netherlands, Australia all out for I believe for 88 runs against India, but I have not seen such insult by their fans like we always see in Pakistan. We as a nation forgets the lesson of patience and compassion, we somehow become people with extreme views, which is not healthy at all. We can criticize them on their performance, but Islam is a beautiful deen that sets up very clean rules even for criticism. And the rule number one is we should not hit the other party personally. We can say that it was a very poor performance and the competence of our players has so many question marks. You can share your advises on how can they improve in the future, but the way we criticize them and generally people whom we disagree with is not criticism, but extreme insulting in true words and we expect some sort of behavior then! Lastly, this shows that we as a nation and community do not have worthwhile things to pursue and think of. We do not have same anger over other very big issues we as a nation facing for many years. I would have not written this if I didnt see posts from some of the very senior people whom I dont expect such posts. But the purpose of this is just to divert your attention to the serious issues associated with such comments / posts. And Allah knows better.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 19:52:31 +0000