It Took Me Over 5 Years To Come to This...
I posted the below in the Muslim Matter post "
The Beard Story: Exclusive Interview With Yasir Qadhi"
I've come to a point in my life where I realized that I've wasted - yes I will use the word "wasted" - much of my time reading, researching, and discussing what is and is not acceptable of my beard.
In the end, I gained little piety or beneficial knowledge from a narrow fiqh issue.
As a Muslim teenager in college who decided to be a good practicing Muslim, the issue of the beard with thrust upon me by these "clear" rulings/fatwas by Great Scholars of the past on growing the full beard (I was initially under the impression that even trimming more than what a fist holds was not the preferred method).
This coupled with the "zealous" young Muslim brothers around me who emphasized the need for a beard so much that it shaped the way I perceived Muslim men who shaved/kept small beards as being open sinners for openly doing something directly in opposition to what the prophet told use to do (let our beards grow).
In fact, some even pointed me towards the likes of Shaykh Yasir Qadi is an example of of an intelligent American Muslim who held firm to his Islamic principles and let his beard grow in the Sunnah manner. Seeing and knowing that Shaykh Yasir was out there in America and doing great dawah work and even attending Yale later with his Sunnah beard gave me much hope and inspiration to pursue my own academic and professional studies with the feeling that 'hey, if Yasir is doing it with the full Sunnah beard - I should be able to pull it off as well.'
This helped me not to cave into all my other family members who regularly pressed me that I should at least shape up my beard and make it "neat and not unkempt looking" since my beard was thick, curly, and frizzy. This concern was further magnified by them when I (still currently am) began my graduate studies and went to job interviews looking very much like the Medina Yasir in terms of my beard.
Yet now, in this lecture I come to find that I had it all wrong: I should have made my beard "neat and professional" as Shaykh Yasir points out in lecture tape 1 (24:40 mark). I guess I was wrong and stubborn for trying to keep what I genuinely perceived to be a Sunnah beard (coming from the same scholars who I learned/read about hadith & aqeedah and the one's Shaykh Yasir quoted and referenced in his lectures/books).
In the end, all this emphasis on following the "correct sunnah" of the Prophet ended up distancing me for learning and practicing other important aspects of Islam - from memorizing more of the Quran, reading more Seerah, and making more prayers/adkhar.
After 5 years from my teenage years, I've come to to this point: I no longer care about what others do/ have about their beard or may think about mine. All of this has left me disillusioned about my Muslim identity and feeling like the narrator in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - only the Muslim version.
