Deeds to Habit
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Rekindling Family Ties
Hassam Munir discusses the prophetic wisdom behind maintaining strong family relationships and gives practical advice on how to connect with your family.
Silat ar-Rahim
Silat ar-Rahim is a highly-valued deed in the list of good deeds. Silat ar-Rahim refers to the act of maintaining good family relationships - whether it is building them, upholding them or beautifying them.
The benefits of strong family relationships
Abu Huraira reported in Sunan al-Tirmidhī (1979) that the Prophet (pbuh) 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.”
Create your family tree
One way to learn about your lineage, and to start building a habit of maintaining family ties, is to create your own family tree.
Dedicate time once a week to get in touch with a family member that you haven't followed up with. Connect with them, and start conversations to learn more about your cousins, uncles, great-aunts, in-laws, and more. Then build a relationship with them, and stay in touch on a regular basis.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. 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 generations to come.
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