We hope your Ramadan is going well for you inshaAllah, today we bring you another mini blog post on Making the Most of Ramadan, and we discuss the importance of maintaining family ties.
While we are striving this Ramadan to improve our relationship with Allah and seek His reward and forgiveness, we shouldn’t forget our families. Islam places so much emphasis on maintaining the ties of kinship, and our relatives have certain rights over us which we should honour. Being away from home and our families means it’s even more important that we strive to honour these rights and maintain these bonds.
Maintaining family bonds is a source of plentiful blessing for us, and severing them will have severe consequences. The Prophet ﷺ said:
Kinship (rahim) is derived from Allah. If anyone maintains ties of kinship Allah maintains ties with him. If anyone cuts them off, Allah cuts him off.
Maintaining family ties means we show our families compassion and kindness, we help them when they are in need and we stay connected. Allah placed these people in our lives and made them our family for a reason, and we should honour and cherish them as much as we can. For example, we may take some time out of our day to ring our parents, siblings, or other family members. It may be that it is our parents or relatives who usually ring us, so this simple act of reaching out first might make their day.
Truly upholding these ties means we do so in times of difficulty and towards relatives who may not have treated us favourably in the past. This is not easy, but we should know that it is a sign of faith. We should also make plenty of dua for our family, as well as the Ummah.