Assalamualaikum. Imagine a scenario in which your child comes home one day from school and they have been given an assignment to create a family tree to map out the roots and the branches of your
family. And they're certainly familiar with their cousins and they're familiar with their aunts and uncles, but they need to go beyond that for this assignment to try to map out as much as they
possibly can. And this is something you're really excited about once you hear about it because you yourself wanted to pursue a similar kind of project. You thought it would be cool, it would be fun, but you just never got around to it. And now you have an opportunity to do it. So you start
working on it, but as you work on it, you realize that there are many gaps in your memory. There are many unread messages from family members. There are many unresponded calls that you go through
their Facebook feeds, you go through your WhatsApp contact list, you suddenly see names and you think I haven't contacted that person in a while or wow I didn't know that this was happening in the life
of that cousin and that aunt and my grandmother etc. And you really start to feel that this is
something that you should be doing more regularly. Now the good deed I am alluding to here with this scenario is silat al-rahim, which is something that's extremely important, something that's,
you know, given a very privileged place in the list of good actions that we can do. And silat al-rahim essentially is maintaining good family relationships, maintaining them,
building them, enhancing them, beautifying them, upholding them. And there's one particular aspect of silat al-rahim that I would like to discuss and draw attention to, something that is I think
an extremely effective way of actually doing all of that, building and beautifying our family relationships, not just with our immediate family but our extended families and our relatives.
Abu Khaira radiallahu anhu reports from the Prophet ﷺ in a narration recorded in Sunan al-Tirmidhi that the Prophet ﷺ said, learn your lineages to solidify your family
ties. Indeed, keeping family ties causes love among the kinship, enriches the wealth, and increases the lifespan. So the Prophet ﷺ offers both some of the benefits of maintaining
strong family relationships and also gives a very practical advice, a very practical directive of how we can go about doing that, which is right at the beginning, learn your lineages to solidify
your family ties. And this essentially is what we consider or how we would say today to be, you know, creating your family tree, mapping out your family tree. Silat al-rahim in general has
many benefits. It's extremely important. There are many ayat in the Quran that emphasize it. There are many ahadith of the Prophet ﷺ that emphasize it. But this particular aspect of it,
as a historian, as a student of history, when people often come to me and ask me for recommendations about where should they start when they want to start studying history,
what I'm inclined to do in many of the cases is to say, start with your own family history and try to map that out because that will be personal to you, that will be inspiring to you, and that
will actually help you immediately. It'll be very beneficial for you because it will help you build your family ties, and that's something that's extremely important in Islam. So I think we can
definitely all make an effort to do this in a more practical way, in a more regular way, to keep in
touch with our families. And this is, in this scenario, ultimately what our person whose child has brought them this assignment begins to realize, that to really maintain this family tree and to
really draw it out and map it out, they will need to actually have conversations, to actually learn more about their cousins and their aunts and their uncles and their siblings and their siblings'
in-laws and other relatives, second cousins, etc., going further and further beyond. And the sort of hidden wisdom in this is that if you have a strong family, which is the basic social unit of a
society, if you can make things work in a very healthy way, in a very loving and caring way within the family, you are prepared to actually go out into society and, you know, mold society in
the same way. And so it's something that our person decides to pursue by making it a regular habit as part of their regular routine at a time that they don't know they will be distracted by
anything else, such as right after a particular prayer, once a week, maybe five minutes, maybe ten minutes, they're going to identify one member of their family they haven't followed up with, they're going to give them a call, they're going to talk to them, they're going to share their concerns, they're
going to ask the family member how they're doing, they're going to build that relationship over time, and they're going to keep updating this family tree and keep extending it for their own future
