The Spiritual Hypocrisy Of Our StreetsTHE SPIRITUAL HYPOCRISY OF OUR STREETS…….FROM WASTELANDS TO GARDENS: RECLAIMING OUR DIGNITY
Mrs. Ishrat Zeeshan
(Educationist )
I recently watched a man roll down the window of a luxury car and casually toss a plastic bag of remains onto the roadside. It hit a pile of garbage that had clearly been sitting there for weeks, right against the crumbling, historic walls of our city. In that moment, it struck me: we have become a nation that keeps its drawing rooms spotless but treats its own soil like a landfill. We speed past these mounds of filth every day, rolling up our windows to shut out the stench, but we cannot escape the truth. We are living in a self-made dustbin, and it is rotting our souls as much as it is our streets.
The Prophet (PBUH) famously said, “Purity is half of faith.” It is a phrase we recite often, yet we seem to have forgotten its weight. If cleanliness is half of our Iman, then the current state of our highways, our canal banks, and our neighborhood corners suggests a massive spiritual vacuum. We have developed a “walled” mentality—as long as our prayer mats are clean, we don’t seem to care that the Earth, which is also a place of prostration (Sajdah), is suffocating under our waste. This isn’t just a failure of the municipality; it is a failure of the heart.
There is a psychological cost to living like this. When you are surrounded by ugliness, you begin to act with ugliness. You feel small, frustrated, and angry. But just imagine for a second if we replaced these eyesores with life. Imagine if those roadside dumps were cleared and replaced with thick, green belts of neem trees, wild shrubs, and grass.
Think about the shift in our collective mood. Science and common sense both tell us that nature heals. If our commutes were lined with greenery instead of garbage, our blood pressure would drop. We would breathe in actual oxygen instead of the toxic fumes of burning plastic. There is a reason why we feel “cool” and “calm” in a garden; it’s because we aren’t meant to live in a wasteland. A cleaner, greener environment would breed a kinder, more patient society. We would stop feeling like scavengers and start feeling like the dignified human beings we were created to be.
We need to stop waiting for a “system” to save us. No government can keep up with a population that has lost its sense of shame. Every wrapper we hold onto until we find a bin is a small victory for our faith. Every tree planted where trash used to sit is an act of worship. We are at a crossroads: we can continue to live in a dustbin and think like garbage, or we can reclaim our streets, our health, and our dignity.
Let us stop living in the waste; let us start living in the pure.
”Clean Streets, Clear Minds: Half the Faith, All the Dignity.”