Everything around us moves at such a fast pace, everyone climbing their own ladders. Not necessarily the ladders of a job but maybe the ladder of life. The attitude of ‘get up and go’ and constantly going for that next step but never pausing to look back and look to the top, assessing the situation and how far there is to go. The ladder was chosen, the choice of stairs was neglected. The choice that each step on the ladder means that anyone else on that step has to either go up or go down a step.
It’s strange to use the stairs, it’s strange to take each step thoughtfully with someone alongside you, it’s strange to really assess the mission and how far to the top of the stairs is left.
When life is so focussed on mindless actions, emptily achieving more, striving for a success that you did not write but rather by someone who’s throwing these ideas at you from the top of the ladder, this starts to make a human lose its worth, lose its value… and forget, ‘what really is a human?’.
It was narrated from ‘Abdullah that the Messenger of Allah (saw) said: “Islam began as something strange and will go back to being strange, so glad tidings to the strangers.”
Sunan ibn Majah 3988
The Mirage of the Ladder
The ladder is how life is today, there’s no room for others, there’s no pondering, reflecting, intentions… it’s actions that drive the person rather than thoughts. The next title, milestone, badge is ahead. But this creates an automated machine, a machine that has no direction and no distance travelled, a machine that doesn’t actually know what it’s doing and is living the life that someone else has forced the machine to live.
Everyone races to be the best machine out of the bunch, there’s no space for being a team, a community, a purpose-aligned group.
Humans were never meant to be isolated beings, we have been put in this world with eight billion other people, why do we overlook that everywhere you look there is a person, why do we see them as competition, or a higher figure, or lower at times. We have become people of a one-man-show, of constantly creating hierarchies, and this has created the railings of the ladder.
When people live a life like a machine, entirely following the rule book, a deeper primary reason for intentions and actions begin to be forgotten, so we look no deeper than what’s the norm, or been said, or instructed.
So What is a Stranger?
A stranger isn’t someone who observes the world from the stairs and just thinks, nor is it someone who reacts to how they feel about the alienation of the world. It’s someone who understands the situation, the scenario, and actively does what they can in every action and intention to correct this. This isn’t just a stranger… This is a human too.
It’s someone who withdraws from the ladder not for the reason of creating your own ladder but rather to build something completely different… a set of stairs with each step being a different length, a different width, a different height… Why? Because each step takes a different level of input, a different amount of collective input and a different amount of energy.
Becoming This Person
When you step off the ladder and choose to build those stairs, something inside you fundamentally unlocks. You stop being a passive passenger in your own life, coasting on autopilot, and you finally take full ownership of every decision, every action, and every single breath.
You gain an unshakeable conviction that the noise of the world cannot touch. Public opinion, societal expectations, and the constant pressure to conform lose their power over you, because your worth is no longer tied to cheap titles or badges of busyness handed out by people who don’t even know where they are walking. You break free from the exhausting, endless rat race of trying to outrun everyone else, stepping off the treadmill to focus entirely on a higher, objective truth.
Most importantly, you shift from being a bystander who lets life happen to them into an active powerhouse of intentional contribution. The internal void, the constant underlying confusion, and the aimless drift vanish, replaced by pure, relentless clarity on who you are, why you are here,
and where you are going. You trade isolated, competitive living for true, purpose-driven brotherhood, walking step-by-step alongside people who are striving for the exact same destination.
To live manually, to take every step with a purpose, to build the stairs when everyone else is blindly scrambling up a ladder, that is what it means to be a stranger. And that is what it truly means to be human.
١٦٢ قُلْ إِنَّ صَلَاتِي وَنُسُكِي وَمَحْيَايَ وَمَمَاتِي لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ ١٦٣ لَا شَرِيكَ لَهُ ۖ وَبِذَٰلِكَ أُمِرْتُ وَأَنَا أَوَّلُ الْمُسْلِمِينَ
Say, “Surely my prayer, my sacrifice, my life, and my death are all for Allah, Lord of all worlds. He has no partner. So I am commanded, and so I am the first to submit.”
Al-Anʿām, Ayah 162 – 163