The Muslim Operating System: A 5-Step Framework to Succeed in Life and the Hereafter
We live in a world where some of the most essential tools in our lives have become sources of distraction—our phones, laptops, etc.
But they only distract those clueless about controlling their lives, one second at a time. The Prophet (SAW) gave us five broad guidelines on how to take charge of the five areas of our lives that constitute the core of our existence. This is especially useful for Muslims who have been saddled with the responsibility of perpetuating the message of Islam till the end of time. What you will learn in this series of articles is what I call practical Islam.
The Prophet (SAW) advised:
Take care of five things before five others:
Your youth before your old age,
Your health before your sickness,
Your wealth before your poverty,
Your free time before your busyness, and
Your life before your death.
This is one of the most essential pieces of advice for you as a Muslim that will help you navigate the world successfully.
So, as a khalifa of Allah, you need systems and structural integrity to perform your duty consistently. The integrity of your structure relies on the design of your system. You can’t brush through life with the responsibilities Allah puts on your shoulders without deliberately creating a plan to help you effectively and efficiently carry out those responsibilities.
This is what the Muslim Operating System (MOS) framework provides you.
You can build your own Muslim Operating System by using this framework to support your dawah and every aspect of your life. The Muslim OS helps you to responsibly take care of those five areas of life the Prophet (SAW) advised you and me to take care of: youth, health, wealth, free time, and life. But before I show you the Muslim OS tool…
Let's dive deep into each element the Prophet (SAW) encourages us to adopt in our lives, starting with…
Your Life Before Your Death - The First Step to Practical Islam
Life is one of the most valuable trusts Allah gave to man.
Your life is like the capital Allah invested in the business of “YOU.”
By how much are you going to grow it? Or are you going to run it into bankruptcy?
To grow and multiply Allah's investment in you, you need to invest the following in the life He gave you:
A Sense of Mission
To take good care of your life, you must develop a sense of mission—the mission to establish Allah's will on earth for the good of the universe.
This is why Allah created you in the first place. He clearly stated to the angels that He would create man and give him the responsibility to carry out His will on earth, explicitly giving him the title of Khalifa.
Your mission as a Khalifa is to establish a civilisation based on Allah's will and preserve and promote that civilisation.
Establishing God’s order in the world is your primary assignment. That is the essence of your life. That is your mission. This mission is called Dawah. It is the khalifa’s way of building, protecting, promoting, and enhancing a God-focused civilisation. This is how you help humanity make good use of their own lives, too.
This is certainly not an easy responsibility. That is why Allah asks in the Qur’an, in the chapter of the Spider (Surat al-Ankabut):
“Do people think they will be allowed to say they believe in Allah without being tested?” —Q: 29: 2.
Of course, tests will come in one form or another.
Sticking to the mission is the ultimate goal for you, the Khalifa. Some of the tests may come in the form of distractions, so much so that you won’t consider them tests from Allah. People always look at difficulties as tests. Ease and comfort can also be forms of trial.
If your job keeps you from your duty as a khalifa, that might be another test. And you need to do something about it. Allah didn’t give you your life just for the sake of eating, drinking, and paying rent. The life He gave you is much more valuable than that.
But Allah also knows you need to take care of feeding and shelter. So He made the necessary arrangements for that for you. But He will not come down to get all those things for you. You will have to figure out how to take care of those and get them out of the way so that you can discharge your duties towards Allah.
That is what education does for you.
The chapter of the Qur’an, Al-Ankabut, mentioned above, opens with the quoted question. Interestingly, though, the same chapter ends with a powerful statement that seems to answer the question:
“As for those who struggle in Our cause, We will surely guide them along Our Way. And Allah is certainly with the good-doers.” — Q: 29: 67
These are the ones Allah says the following about:
“They are those who, if established in the land by Us, would perform the prayer, pay the zakat, encourage what is good, and forbid what is evil. And with Allah rests the outcome of all affairs. — Q: 22:41.
“Allah has promised those of you who believe and do good that He will certainly make them successors in the land, as He did with those before them; and will surely establish for them their faith which He has chosen for them; and will indeed change their fear into security—provided that they worship Me, associating nothing with Me. But whoever disbelieves after this promise, it is they who will be the rebellious.” — Q: 24: 55.
This is a rough overview of your mission as a Khalifa of Allah. And a way by which you can improve the value of the life Allah gave you as gratitude to Allah. I will dive deeper into the subject of dawah in a later message.
Another way you can add value to the life Allah gave you is through…
The Family
Civilisation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists as a bundle of messages written in the collective consciousness of many people who subconsciously live these messages every day of their lives.
This bundle of messages is written over a long period of time in the minds of these people, and they pass it down from one generation to another. The people who carry this bundle of messages in their consciousness exhibit common socio-psychological traits in their outlook and social structure.
They see things the same way and understand things the same way almost automatically. Many things about this collective are predictable—daily life, seasonal events, etc.
This remains true for these people, generation after generation. It is the ability of individuals within that collective to “self-multiply” that makes this truth possible. This self-multiplication of individuals with the same bundle of messages in their collective consciousness is what perpetuates a civilisation.
Since your primary responsibility is to represent Allah as His Khalifa and to ensure others also maintain the trust Allah gave them, self-multiplication through the family is one of the investments you can commit to in the discharge of your service as a khalifa of Allah.
Starting your own family allows you to raise new khalifas of Allah and nurture them to become the vanguards of the civilisation you have been assigned to build, protect, enhance, and, more importantly, perpetuate. This is how you imbue the practice of Islam in the future generation.
The family is the nucleus of civilisation and the basic social unit of society. Aristotle wrote that the “family is nature's established association for the supply of mankind's everyday wants.” William Bennet
As a Khalifa, starting your family has to be intentional, with the understanding and readiness to protect and promote the established order Allah has given us through the family. Taking on this assignment requires skills that will ensure you get the needed outcome from your efforts.
The family is essential in your journey as a Khalifa because it is the first form of community, government, and the best Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Islam has strong recommendations for each of these aspects of human life, reinforcing the idea of the practical aspect of Islam in the human experience.
The family is also your primary port of influence. The Prophet (SAW) taught us that every child is born on the fitra. It is his parents who influence him to become a Christian or a Jew. The fitra here means the natural spiritual state of man.
That spiritual state is immature and needs nurturing and guidance—the jobs assigned to parents. It is through the family that the foundations of civilisation are laid and passed on from generation to generation. It is through the family that the message of Islam is written onto the collective consciousness of a community and thus shapes the outlook and practices of that community for a very long time.
When the family collapses or drifts away from its origin due to external influences in the form of novel messages and realities, its outlook drastically changes.
As you can see, the family is many institutions in one.
The family is the target of some unprecedented onslaughts of decadence today. Unfortunately, these attacks come from secular governments and institutions that promote secular liberalism, the root of the social destruction of today.
Modernists and post-modernists create movements that eat away at the roots of family and social morality. They gave birth to the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements as well as the secularist onslaughts on religions.
The skill you need to masterfully run and do well in leading your family is…
Parenting
In the following letter, within the course of the next few weeks, I’ll dive deep into this virtuous topic, taking them one at a time as follows:
1. Start a Muslim Community Parenting Network
And remember, we are just treating one of the five recommendations of the Prophet (s.a.w.) for your success in this world and the akhira—taking care of your life before your death.
I will gradually cover these topics in an actionable manner so that you can benefit immensely from the concept of practical Islam and improve your life for the sake of Allah. I will ensure this is not just the theory you read about and nothing that can be done.
Events in the world compel every Muslim not just to wake up but to take every right step that will contribute to the victory of Allah’s way.
I will finally end this first part of the series with the topic of religion, how it is crucial to your life, and how the “system” is trying to fade its importance away from your life tactfully.
Be on the lookout next week for the topic of parenting.
In the meantime…
I built a free 7-day course on how to use Dawah to:
Create social impacts
Solve your own life problems
Build a legacy that earns you continuous rewards in akhira
You will learn the exact 4-step framework that helps Muslims create impact with dawah.
BONUS: Get my free e-book: How to Do Dawah without Preaching. Download the book, and you'll receive the course in your email every day for seven days.
Talk to you soon, insha Allah.
Ma Salama,
Teslim
The Muslimchangemaker
Assalam Alaykun. Benefited from this...very thought provoking and insightful. Looking forward to the next article inshaAllah.
BarakAllahu feekum