Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim
Okay, so you’ve taken proactive steps to protect yourself from the poisoned arrows of Shaitan. What about your family? We all will be questioned about our efforts in drawing them closer to Allah swt. Before tackling the enemy, it first helps to know the avenues of assault. In this day and age, there are 3 primary streams of filth entering our homes: mail, tv, and the net.
1) The Mail: sale papers, newspapers, and magazines.
Marketing strategists know that scantily clad women will boost sales. That is why those almost- naked fitnas will are employed to incite your nafs. As it comes in a hadith (Razin), “Women are the snares of Satan.” Note that this applies to those women who allow themselves to be used as a tool of the devil.
Unfortunately, there isn’t really a method to stop the delivery of sale papers. If one needs to look for a particular product or special promotion, then all of this can be done online. If there is a necessity with paper, outsource the task to the womenfolk.
As for newspapers and magazines, this is the digital age. By the time you get those delivered, it is old news. If there is a necessity, use the internet as most editions can be found online. However, don’t visit those trashy sites that sensationalize the news for the masses. Most major news networks operate such and their main target is maximum viewers. They have boxes that show that most viewed articles, and usually it tends to be related to some sort of nonsense. Even if a person seeks out relevant articles, there is no way to avoid coming across the invitations.
We don’t want to even know who posed for what and which new boundary of decency was trespassed. Remember one thing, Shaitan gradually misleads people. We know from hadith that one of the signs before the end of times is that people will be openly committing zina in public places and such incidences should not grab our attention. We should have it placed in our minds that people enslaved to their nafs will never stop in their indecencies and there is no need for us to even hear about them. And they call it breaking news.
Much of the news is irrelevant to our daily lives and falls under useless knowledge and it is best to avoid it altogether. It takes one away from the remembrance of Allah and trashes the find with the remembrance of the duniya. For the person that must, it would be recommended to follow academic periodicals and other outlets that might not be as famous. The key is to find those news sources that are not focused on increasing their readership.
2) Television – Trash It
Forget the fiqhi debate about digital and non-digital images. The ulema have long stood against television, but looking at the research put out by the scholars of the duniya alone is enough to convince a sane minded person to throw the box away. Nearly all of television content is utter trash. The statistics on violent and sexual content are appalling. There is no shortage of research that blames television for lower academic performance and a host of developmental problems amongst children.
Parents are so particular about making sure their children do not spend time in the bad company of an unknown friend, yet those same parents have absolutely no problem letting their children waste hours with the bad company of thousands of strangers.
Returning to the issue of chastity, you know there will be insufficiently covered women everywhere…on almost every channel, on almost every program. Lowering one’s gaze while watching television is as fabulous of an idea as a person lowering his gaze at a strip club. It is counterintuitive to expose oneself to that environment from the get go. Gaze guarding is more proactive than it is reactive.
And even if you do restrict yourself to the small islands of good (like the mecca tarawih channel), what about everyone else in your family? The only solution is to junk those TV sets. Don’t even sell it to someone because you don’t want to accumulate a share of their sins. Follow the footsteps of your father Ibrahim AS and hammer that idol to death. That will even prevent the scavengers with the pickup trucks in the alley from reusing your fitna box.
3) The Internet – Routers With Parental Control Options
The internet has resulted in a conglomeration of all the previous media used by Shatian. For those that threw out their music CDs and TV sets, they have all been resurrected in a more virulent form. Unfortunately, you can’t really “throw out” the internet as it is need for email, work, school, and so forth. The related blog post entitled “Protecting Your Eyes With Firefox” discusses several effective and comprehensive methods for safer surfing. It would be pointless to restate all those points here.
Nowadays, many people have their own laptops and many households have gone wireless. While most people are inherently good, it can be quite easy for an innocent young one to get caught in shaitan’s web. In order decrease the probability of that happening, specific routers can be used. Linksys supplies the option of choosing the time interval when the internet is accessible and when it will be denied. It even allows for the schedule to change depending on the day of the week. Obviously, the internet should not be on after bed time. The night is when immorality thrives, both in the real world and virtual. Having set times also allows for more efficient time usage as human beings tend to be more productive under time constraints, be it for work or play.
Another option would be to remove the wireless connection all together and have everything wired at one open and visible location [family room]. That way will be much easier to keep track of whether homework is really getting done [as opposed to facebook or runescape].
These strategies are shown not because there is a lack of trust, but because it is so very easy in this day and age to fall prey to shaitan and our nafs. The situation will be worse in the future as internet equipped cell phones will follow us 24/7.
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May Allah protect us with His special protection and may he send salutations & blessings upon our master Muhammad, his family, and companions
“… there is no help except from Allah…” [Quran 3:126]
