Don't Switch Off That Phone

A humble defence of the one device no mumin should ever dare to silence. Please, read me to the end.

Let me make the argument no one has the courage to make out loud. Keep your phone on.

Not silent. Not face-down. Not on that timid little do-not-disturb. On. Buzzing, glowing, awake in your pocket, even as you sit in the majlis of Imam Hussain AS. I say this as a man whose own phone is lying beside me as I write, turned face-down, which I have quietly decided counts as “off.”

Consider what we are defending. The phone is the single greatest invention of this century, and it is not a close contest. It carries every person you have ever met inside a slab of glass. It is your bank, your bazaar, your madrasa, your majlis link, your alarm for Fajr. For a great many of us it is the literal engine of rozi and prosperity. There are whole businesses that exist nowhere except inside that screen, that would simply stop breathing the moment it switched off. To ask such a person to part with it, even for an hour, feels like asking him to hold his breath underwater. So of course you keep it on. Who could afford otherwise?

And yet.

Here is the small inconvenience I cannot get past. Walk into a board meeting, a serious one, where serious money is decided. Walk into a conference where a man has flown across the world to speak. Walk into the chamber of any court. What is the first instruction, every single time? Kindly switch off your phones. The dunya, which worships nothing but productivity and profit, has already understood something. It has decided that some rooms are too important for the phone to remain alive. The CEO silences his device for the quarterly review. The lawyer silences his for the judge. The whole world agrees that presence is a thing you owe to whatever you have decided is worthy.

So I want to ask, gently, and mostly of myself: what have we decided about the majlis of Imam Hussain AS?

Now, the clever among us have a solution. We do not switch it off, that would be extreme. We place it face-down. We trust the silent mode. We tell ourselves the matter is handled. But place a phone face-down beside you and watch what actually happens. Your eye keeps drifting to it. Your hand keeps wandering toward it. A buzz comes and your whole body re-orients, the shoulders turn, the attention breaks, and the qarar of the waaz mubarak that had just begun to settle on your heart lifts and flies away. Researchers who study attention will tell you the same thing in colder words: the mere nearness of the device, even dark, even silent, quietly drains the mind of the very focus you came to give. Face-down is not disconnection. Face-down is a smaller leash.

And a leash is exactly the word.

Because here is what the open phone truly announces about you. It says: anyone may have me, at any moment, for any reason. Your time is a door with no lock. The cheapest thing in any market is the thing that anyone can take for free, and a man whose attention any stranger can seize with one notification has priced his own hours at zero. He has, without noticing, made himself a servant to whoever happens to be typing. We sit in the hazrat of Imam Hussain AS and leave the door open for a salesman.

There is a reason the people who actually build something in this dunya speak constantly of two skills: focus, and delegation. Focus is the courage to be fully in one place. Delegation is the courage to let go, to trust another hand with what you cannot hold yourself, to believe the world will not collapse in the hours you are not watching it. A man who never learns to let go is in trouble for the whole of his life. He cannot build a team, because he cannot trust one. He cannot rest, because he cannot release. And if he cannot release a phone for the days of Ashara, what exactly does he imagine he is in control of?

Which brings me to the word I have been circling, and it is not a comfortable one. The inability to let go is, at its root, a quiet kind of cowardice. It is the heart whispering that if I disconnect, even for these blessed days, everything I have built will slip away, because deep down I do not truly trust that Allah Ta’ala is the one holding it, that His Nabi SAW and Daiz Zaman TUS have asked nothing of me that will harm me. Tawakkul is not a slogan we recite. It is tested in small, embarrassing moments, like whether the hand can stay away from the glass for the length of one waaz.

Think of what is being asked. Ashara Mubaraka is nine days. Nine days out of three hundred and sixty-five. Our deen sets zakat at one-fortieth of our wealth, and one-fortieth of a year is, almost to the day, these nine. So this is simply the zakat of your time, a fortieth of your year, returned to the One who lent you all of it. We do not negotiate the zakat on our gold. Why do we haggle so hard over the zakat on our hours?

So yes. Don’t switch off that phone. Keep it on. Keep it buzzing. Keep one ear in the bazaar while Imam Hussain AS is being mourned an arm’s length away. Let the notification win. That, after all, is precisely what the voice that does not want you in that majlis has been whispering all along.

Or switch it off. And discover, for nine days, who you actually are when no one can reach you but Him.

Khuda ta’ala Aqa Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin TUS ni umr sharif qayamat na din tak daraaz kare… Ameen!!

Sajda in Hazrat Imamiyah.. and Wasalaam,
Abdesyedna Moez