" Wow it's gone up to 106 pence now!"

My eyes rolled over the meter on the fuel pump as my daughter expressed her shock at the new price for fuel. It's been rising madly recently. According to one news channel, the price will go up to 120 pence per litre by Christmas.

We use fuel to fill our cars, planes and boats, to go wherever we need to and when the fuel tank is empty, we return for more fuel. But what if we started decorating ourselves and our cars with this fuel, spent all our time in the fuel station and forgot everything about the journey ahead - the reasons why we came to get fuel in the first place. Imagine if we started bathing and swimming in this fuel.. what if we never left the fuel station. All these thoughts started slipping into my mind as we drove out of the station.

Because really, what do we do with the fuel for life? The fuel for life is our food, clothes, house to live and day to day necessities. But do we really treat all this as just the fuel? It was supposed to be something to keep us alive so that we could live this life according to the way taught by our Creator and return to him successful one day, return to our home, our destination.

Let's start with the 1st type of fuel, our Food. What do we do with this fuel? Rather, is there anything we don't do with it?? The lists of food related tastes and desires are endless! Flick over to any Asian Muslim TV channel or Radio station during Ramadan, most of the time you'll be welcomed by hours of food recipes and cooking shows. We go out of way to satisfy our desires for the varieties of food. Most of our earnings are spent to hoard new and various foods as much as we can, or even if we can’t - by any means. We tend to copy other cultures and communities whose view about this life is totally different to ours; those for whom Hereafter is not something that comes first or, in fact, at all.

In this race for food we even forget the ones who do not even have the basic food to keep them alive. Hence our hands are tied up when it comes to the charity for such purposes.

Let’s take clothing next. Consider if you will: whether we really use clothing as one of the fuels for life. No doubt beauty and charm are a part of our natural sense of aesthetics, but don’t you feel that we over do it a little? The voracity to wear a new dress on every occasion and buy as many clothes, rather all the ones that take our fancy, has unfortunately become a higher priority than it perhaps should be! So much so that we feel that as though have very little time & resources to reach out and help the people who are in need of clothes themselves...

Let's not forget that in the race for fashion and beauty, the values of modesty and decency have been completely ignored. Just one look at current cat walks and magazines will reveal to you the nudity involved in this trade. It has become a norm. rather a feature associated with the winners of beauty pageants! Yet the Divine Revelations tell us that the purpose of Libas (dress) is to cover ourselves decently with zeenah (beauty) while we live on this earth according to the code of life given to us by the Creator. The main purpose of life being His pleasure by serving His creatures around us.

Fuel 3 -Housing: Coming to this 3rd but equally essential necessity of life, again we are aware that not every human being on this earth has a house to live in. Poverty has deprived people of adequate living conditions as well. Natural disasters continue to add to this problem. But despite this we find that there is a never-ending competition for the best mansions and palaces to live in. You can find people who remain busy throughout the year decorating and renovating their houses from one state to the other. There is a difference between the essential housing we require to respond to the needs of our family and an ever expanding lodge still failing to fulfill the lusts and desires of the residents. I feel that this particular inclination, like the other two, has been inspired by a culture that does not recognise the Hereafter and the followers of such a culture are always busy getting the unsurpassed in this world.

Fuel 4-Transport: There is no need to say anything about this. I really feel that the race for the ‘marked horses’ mentioned in Qur’an applies to the chase for model cars, jeeps, motor bikes, luxury sail boats and so on of today. Be it in the MP's houses or in us individuals, you can see this competition everywhere.

Fuel 5- Career: There is nothing much to find out about the time and money we spend on this. to a certain extent is okay but leaving everything else behind to get to that highest position; leaving parents, loved ones, prayers, other duties to fellow humans~sometimes funny enough, we ignore the basic human rights in order to get a post to serve these humans. We have to keep our race for career balanced and rightly directed.

There are hundreds and thousands of examples that can be given in this regard of the things we struggle for in our lives including material, personalities, satisfaction, fulfillness~ you name it.

To conclude I would like to point out again that the imbalance in our attitudes regarding this fuel for life basically originates from a weak faith in the Hereafter and another life. This itself is enough for one to try and get everything in this very world no matter in what ways and by which means; whether it causes chaos for the rest of the world, one is not bothered because for him/her this is one and only chance to earn something in this only life he/she has.