🐘 The Shataat Crisis: Why Our Distraction Is an Ummah Problem

14th Sha’ban 1447H

Assalamu'alaikum,

One day in the Prophet's Masjid ﷺ in Madinah, a young student from Andalus was sitting in the circle of Imam Malik ibn Anas. 

Suddenly, someone rushed in announcing that a great elephant had arrived near the masjid.

All the students rushed out to see this rare spectacle, except the young man who remained seated.

Imam Malik turned to him and asked, "Why didn't you go out to see the elephant?”

The young man replied: "I came from Andalus to see you, not to see the elephant.”

This young man, Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi, would go on to become the reason the Maliki madhab spread throughout Andalus and North Africa. Imam Malik called him "Aaqil al-Andalus" the Wise One of Andalus.

I wonder if this young man was living with us today, would he be distracted as we are?

These days, it's not elephants visiting our cities. It's the small devices we carry in our pockets that promise us an endless circus of entertainment...

Billions of dollars are being poured into this attention economy, and we're losing.

We often think checking our phones every few minutes is harmless. That scrolling through content that jumps from the horrific to the funny to the lustful is just... modern life.

We don't realize what these fleeting moments are costing us.

The Three Levels of Shataat

Our scholars have a word for the "brain rot" we're experiencing: shataat.

It's often translated as "distraction," but it's deeper than that. Shataat is the feeling that things are scattered, spread in all directions. It's as if a bomb exploded in your heart and blew pieces of it everywhere.

I think of shataat at three levels:

1. Shataat al-Qalb (The Scattered Heart): Your heart is so distracted from Allah that it cannot focus on what truly matters. You sit for prayer, but you're not really there. You open the Quran, but you're unable to feel or understand the words of Allah in your heart.

2. Shataat al-Nafs (The Scattered Self): Your nafs is pulled in a thousand directions; one moment craving entertainment, the next craving food, then wanting to check that notification. The ability to instantly gratify every desire at the touch of a button has scattered our Nafs.

3. Shataat al-'Aql (The Scattered Mind): Your mind feels like a computer running out of memory, constantly switching between tabs; some are important, most are trivial. You can't hold a thought or think deeply about something. 

The Ummah Dimension We're Ignoring

We talk about the personal costs of shataat: the inability to focus in our salah and Quran, the declining work performance, and the relationships that suffer because we're physically present but mentally absent.

But we rarely talk about the Ummah cost.

Reports suggest that Chinese TikTok serves more educational and meaningful content than American TikTok. I'm not a political strategist, but one could argue that the nation with the greatest ability to focus will become the superior nation.

If our Ummah wants to "free Palestine", it starts with us freeing ourselves from mind-numbing habits. It starts with gathering our shataat and focusing our efforts on meaningful pursuits.

Last week, I was at the GEMs summit in Doha, a gathering of the thinkers, doers, and financiers supporting the Ummah. One message was clear from the conference: the battles we face as an Ummah require sustained attention, strategic thinking, long-term commitment, and the push through complex problems to solve them.

Shataat makes all of that impossible.

So What Do We Do?

In my next email, I'll share both the spiritual and practical solutions to gather our shataat.

But for now, I want to invite you to join a small experiment we're starting at Productive Muslim Company called BarakahFlow™️, it's a virtual co-working space to help us create a shared focus session together. I'll explain more in my next email, but for now, check it out and try our free trial.

Final thought: Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi had one elephant to ignore. We have a thousand elephants parading through our pockets every single day. Being distracted isn't a personal inconvenience; it's weakening our Ummah at a time when we need strength more than ever.

The first step to healing is acknowledging how serious this is.

Sincerely,