IWA Non-Fiction Nook...

Click here to read more IWA
member-authored works of non-fiction.

February-March 2008

Belief Comes, even to the Hearts of Children
By Sabah Negash

My mom (may Allah (swt) have mercy on her soul) instilled in us at an early age that Allah (swt) listened and answered the prayer of His servants. Of course, as children, we simply believed because our mother believed and we always knew her to be a truthful woman. But our faith in what she said would one day be tested. 

My mom raised us in the high desert of California.  She wanted us to be raised in as near an Islamic environment as possible; since living in a Muslim country was out of her reach, she chose an isolated place (desert) where we could be raised Islamically. 

I can remember spending hours and hours exploring our "desert land" with my younger sisters, something we could have never done in the city. The highlight of any day would be to find "desert treasures" which ranged from beautiful stones, lizards, desert flowers, and the occasional lost items of desert travelers. 

Near our home there was a huge hole that had been dug to build a masjid.  While the masjid was never built in that spot, the hole served as a recreational center for my sisters and I. We would ride our bikes up and down the slopes wishing we could be like the boys with their bike flips, trips and flies. We would also have little tea parties, play hide and seek.  It was our wonderland. It was also a spot to take our spoils from our scavenger hunts. 

On one particular day, we found what looked like ordinary stones but once cracked open, turned out to be beautiful on the inside. They had somehow crystallized on the inside of the stone.  We had hit the jack pot! Now, we had only one problem, remembering the stories of the gold rush, we had to protect our new treasures, especially if we were going to get rich off of it.  So, we decided to hide our precious stones. 

Our mother always told us the power of dua, so we decided to put it to the test, after all, this was important. We found a nice spot in the big hole to bury our treasures. We put our stones in the hole and made dua, "Oh Allah, please protect our treasure and don't let anyone ever find our stones.  Ameen." 

After a couple of rained in days, we went back to check on our treasure and could not find it in the spot we put it. We knew it could not have be stolen as one, no one lived out there except us, two, it had been raining, and three, the place had not been touch since we left it. Then it suddenly dawned on us, we forgot to exclude ourselves from that dua, Allah (swt) was answering our dua, no one was going to find our treasures, not even us! 

Well, from that day, we learned to coin our duas to say exactly what we mean :) But we also learned that Allah (swt) does indeed answer the dua of His servants.  From that day on, we truly believed in the power of dua, not just because my mom said so, but because it had truly worked for us.  That was not the last time we made a dua that came to pass. 

Years later, Alhamdulillah, He continues to answer our prayers and somewhere in that big hole lies protected our beautiful stones.