Last week, as my family and I patiently dug ourselves out of mounds and mounds of snow during Snowmageddon 2016, I kept thinking of how white the world was around us. Everywhere we turned, there was snow – and not the dirty, been-on-the-road-too-long-kind, but rather the fluffy-want-to-make-an-igloo-and-snowman-kind of snow.
But there was one thing that stood out for me in those early days after the storm – there was hardly a sign of life around us. No one was out in the streets, no animals were in the neighborhood and even the greenery from our suburban Virginia homes was gone – all around us, there was just a lot of cold and a lot of white. Deny it as we may, we missed the variety of colors that come with Spring.
In many ways, the world around us reminded me of a beautiful dua of the Prophet ﷺ. The Dua is not specifically about Winter, but rather the life of Springtime that the Quran should bring to our hearts. It’s related to us in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad that Abdullah ibn Masud said that the Prophet [made the dua and] said:
“…I am invoking You [Allah] by all the names that You call Yourself, that You have taught to anyone in Your creation, that You have mentioned in Your Book, or that You have kept unknown. Let the Qur’an be Springtime of my heart, the light of my chest, the remover of my sadness and the pacifier of my worries.”[full text of dua below]
Quite simply, the Prophet ﷺ was asking for a Springtime – but not just any Springtime, but a Springtime of our Hearts, a Spiritual Springtime facilitated by the Words of Allah in the Quran.
What is Spring? It comes after winter – a time of bitterness, cold – a time in which all of the plants and grass are dead, and the crops are barren. As I learned during this past snowstorm, it’s hard to cultivate anything new in Winter – even animals go to hibernate in the Winter. In our case, we couldn’t even move around or out of the house for four days!
