I believe in Allah (SWT). I believe in His Angels, His Books, His Messengers, and the Last Day (of Judgement). And I believe in Divine Decree – that the good and bad of it is from Allah SWT.
This is important, because as a Muslim, I have to believe this. But it is also important for another reason, which I will get to at the end.
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The year was 2020, and this was meant to be our year. That is how I planned it. It was going to be the year of the two C’s – a Cruise and Campus.
For me, I was feeling positive. I was back at work at my previous job and had managed to build up some savings. I thought, as a family, we deserved to be spoilt a bit, so I started shopping around for Mediterranean Cruises that were planning to sail towards the end of that year.
And as for Yaseen, he was really excited. He was about to embrace life as a campus student, and he could barely wait for the independence and sense of freedom that came with it.
His dad had bought him some new clothing for campus, some jeans and some sweaters, a bit of spoils after twelve years of him being stuck in the grey pants and white shirt of a school uniform.
So February 2020 came and university life began. Then, after just a few short weeks of living the campus dream, everything changed. Not only for our family, but for almost every family in the world. In Asia first, then Europe, and before long we too in South Africa found ourselves gripped in the midst of the pandemic called Covid-19.
With the rules and regulations and curfews, life changed drastically. For students a new reality emerged, the social scene at schools and universities had ended and the solitary system of online learning began.
Yaseen adjusted relatively easily to the online system (although he wasn’t crazy about it), and after the first semester he was still performing with impressive results.
It was a few weeks into the second semester of university when things started to unravel. Like the entire rest of the world, our family was trying to cope with a pandemic. But for our family specifically, there was something additional, something worse that was lurking. Cancer.
Our first, silent, alarm went off when Yaseen developed two protruding glands in his neck. As he’d had glandular fever and protruding glands more than once before, I wasn’t overly concerned. Our house doctor was away, so I arranged an appointment with another doctor in our area who examined Yaseen, gave him some medication, and told us to return for a follow-up if the glands persisted. There didn’t seem to be any cause for alarm.
Until the second alarm sounded. Not only did the glands not subside, but it went from being two glands in the neck, to four.
At the time when I noticed the four glands, a part of me started to register that something was unusual, that this wasn’t like the previous times and that something could be seriously wrong.
Our house doctor had returned, and I urgently arranged an appointment with her. She examined Yaseen and wasted no time in referring him for some blood tests. And those blood results left us to hear the very word we dreaded. “Biopsy”.
In those few, short days, it seemed like everything from consultations to tests and procedures seemed to move with such a fast speed, we had little opportunity to properly reflect and contemplate what was actually happening.
In late August 2020, a few days after the biopsy, we got the news. Yaseen had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph glands. He had tumours in 4 places: the neck, two places in the chest area and one near his abdomen. Stage 3, we were told.
In what seemed like the space of a heartbeat, our lives went from long term dreams of Yaseen’s bright future, to short term goals of needing to fight for him to have a future. We had moved from a world that was relatively certain into a world that was unknown. And we were little prepared for it.
As I tried to register the news, to process the implications of it, how we would navigate through it, I never imagined the road ahead would be so difficult.
As a Muslim, a believer, I have faith in Allah SWT. I believe in everything that Allah SWT wanted me to believe in* – all His Angels, all His Books, all His Messengers and the Last Day (of Judgment). And I believe in Divine Decree.
The year 2020, the year that was meant to be our year, I had decreed for two C’s – a Cruise and Campus. And Allah SWT had decreed by replacing my two C’s with two of His own – Covid and Cancer.
So here was my test: it was easy enough to believe in Divine Decree, and that the good and bad of it was from Allah SWT. But was I willing to accept the Divine Decree, especially when what was decreed was something that I perceived to be bad?
The moment of Yaseen’s diagnosis was my very real reminder that a believer, with their faith, surely will be tested. And Allah SWT had decreed it so that I was to be tested with the quality that He SWT loved, and that I lacked most. Sabr {Patience}.
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* A beautiful summary of our religion is contained in what is famously known as the Hadith of Jibreel (AS). [See Muslim: Riyad as-Salihin, Hadith 60]