Whether we may admit to it or not, we all consider ourselves to be Allah’s gift to earth.  A person will admit to the most felonious of crimes before they admit to vanity, envy, and/or any other spiritual illness.  Those of us who admit to them, do very little to rectify them.  Those of us who try to rectify them barely or rarely succeed.  Those of us who succeed, become deluded by our so-called success and fall right back into the same problem even deeper and harder.  The only person who is safe is the one who acknowledges their fault(s), tries to rectify the issue(s), proceeds further with more caution and diligence, and remains more suspicious about them self than before.

Compare the above to ourselves.  We think we do others great favors as if they owe us.  Even if we admit to being jealous or arrogant, we just become complacent with our problems.  If we are given a solution to solve the problem, we give up before even beginning or give up halfway.  If we get anywhere, then we think we have conquered the world and it is now our oyster.

The problem with this is that we are already drowning when it comes to Allah, but along with that, we treat people with disrespect.  We behave with insolence towards our elders.  We snap back and retort back every chance we get.  If we are told something, we are so “talented and gifted” that we have an immediate witty reply for everything.  Beyond that, we throw it right back at the one’s we should be laying down our lives for.

What we need to do is get off our high horses and realize where we came from and what our reality was.  We need to realize that if anything, we are at a certain place due to the sacrifices of certain people and not our own meager efforts.  There is an Arabic proverb which means, “How can you love the fruit yet be ungrateful towards the tree?!”  We do not appreciate the people who have helped us along the way.  We love all that we have in every sense, but we do not value those who helped us achieve anything.

The worst is that we treat them as equals.  As if they are obligated to fulfill our “rights”.  Other religions worry about asking for their rights.  Islam teaches us that it is our obligation to fulfill the rights of others regardless of whether our rights are meted out or not.  But our disease is that of unreasonable expectations and not being pleased with the decree of Allah.  We want things to go our way, and Allah forbid, if things do not go our way, then we expect to be given solutions to our own problems that we ourselves created by not realizing that things only go Allah’s way.

When I say that we need to get off our high horses, I also mean we need to stop being animals riding upon one another.  We need to be true to our father Adam (‘Alayhi as-Salaam) and carry on his legacy of being an “Adami”, that is to be a human with a link to Adam (‘Alayhi as-Salaam).  It means to follow in his footsteps and be responsible and own up to our faults.  He could have easily blamed shaytaan, but instead he pleaded to Allah to forgive him and his wife.

The opposite of this is to have a satanic link to iblees and be a devil in disguise.  When iblees disobeyed Allah, he blamed Adam (‘Alayhi as-Salaam) and started to use reason and logic, which by the way was faulty.  Just take stock of ourselves and see how many times we put the blame on others instead of just owning up to our mistakes and taking responsibility.

To conclude, I will mention a famous statement of Hazrat Thanwi (RA).  He said, “I consider myself at present to be the worst of all Muslims, and in terms of the future, worse than all humans.”  If that is how he thought of himself, than we really need to learn to walk with humility on the ground and get off our high horses.

I pray to Allah that He makes us all amongst those servants of His who when they err, they repent immediately and by His grace become His beloveds.

Aameen.

from: http://annoor.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/getting-off-the-high-horse/