Lowering your Gaze: Reducing Temptation
One of the most difficult thing to overcome is how to reduce our temptation towards each other sexually. After all it’s in our very biological nature to be sexually tempted, when our eyes fall upon an individual whom we get instantly attracted to it is then that lowering our gaze is so difficult. Why it…
One of the most difficult thing to overcome is how to reduce our temptation towards each other sexually. After all it’s in our very biological nature to be sexually tempted, when our eyes fall upon an individual whom we get instantly attracted to it is then that lowering our gaze is so difficult. Why it is so difficult, can be dealt in probably more than a thousand different theories but we need to assess the facts on the ground.
We live in an age where Islam mostly is practiced on pick and choose methodology, people tend to follow what they seem is easy and are comfortable doing. Therefore cherry picking in the religion itself, the religion which not only tells us to worship our creator but gives us a whole blueprint of how we should conduct ourselves in our day to day life activities.
“Tell the believing men to lower their gaze (from looking at forbidden things), and protect their private parts (from illegal sexual acts)” [al-Noor 24:30]
As the verse of the Quran above says, ALLAH Almighty himself have given us clear instructions to lower our gaze, that alone should be suffice to keep us away from such actions. But we have lost our ways and it seems too difficult for an average person living in a society where he/she is surrounded by evil of pornography is becoming an addiction, where immodesty is now almost the norm. How are we to protect ourselves from this fitnah, the solution is to change the condition of our hearts and imaan, if we involve ourselves in the worship of ALLAH and constantly remember how a simple wrong glance can lead to extreme sin such as Zina, we’d be better able to understand how serious the implications of our gaze are.
Every change must come from the innermost of ourselves, our heart needs to be beating in remembrance and fear of ALLAH, to do that we need to realize if we are following the basic principle obligatory acts. Most of us never miss our favorite TV shows and games but are we same when it comes to praying our farz prayers five times a day. We can easily spend hours and hours devouring ourselves in front of TVs and computers, but do we spend even a quarter of that time reading Quran.
Your eyes are doors to your faith just like a room which has the door but if it’s left open for too long it accumulates dust and other things, similarly our eyes are the doors, if they are left uncheck our hearts get accumulated with the dust on our faith. Guarding our eyes from the evils of gaze is not much different than a room whose door is kept open.
Muhammad ﷺ said: “O young men, whoever among you can afford it, let him get married, for it is more effective in lowering the gaze and guarding one’s chastity. And whoever cannot afford it should fast, for it will be a shield for him.”[An-Nasai]
Our Prophet ﷺ has given us two surefire methods on how to control our temptation and lower our gaze, is that one is able to marry he/she should get married and if not then fast. Marriage does provides us with the Halal way to fulfill our natural desires and it greatly reduces our unlawful gaze, and if that is not possible for an individual than he/she must fast as that lowers sexual urges.
