Quality versus Quantity

Have you noticed how the standards of our time have changed? We are living in an age where people think more about the quantity than the quality. Unfortunately this applies to every aspect of our lives: In school students are striving to study more and more and memorize more volumes which in reality turns out to be inefficient because if such students consider quality in their studying they might not need to spend the entire day confining themselves in a library or in a study room reading or studying the number of pages which they can easily learn in an hour of quality studying.  In business, people are striving to sell or buy more, in other words they are geared toward the quantity of their transactions which undermine the quality of their product and services and in the long run causes them to loose their customer base and profit margin. In social affairs, we are concerned to make more and more friends forgetting to focus on the quality of our friendship, which in turn, causes us to loose our old friends. This imbalance of quality and quantity have even crept in to our religious believes and our relationship with our creator. If we are doing dhikr (remembrance of our creator) we are busy calculating the numbers of times we remember him forgetting the fact that our creator knows the secrets of hearts and we cant deceive him by these plain numbers, rather he loves our sincerity behind our worshipping. When we are reading our creator’s last testament (The holy Quran) we are more concerned about the number of verses or number of chapters we recite, forgetting the fact that the companions of our beloved prophet (peace and blessing be upon him) and the early generations were directed toward the quality of their recitation and understanding of the Quran, so much so that they would read ten verses and would not move forward unless and until they understood and acted upon the first ten verses that they have started. Many a time we forget the fact that the foundation of our believe and relationship with our creator is based upon our sincerity. Moreover, we are living at time where people are obsessed by the saying that “Majority has the authority” following this illogical statement people in our times are following the masses of people regardless whether they are truthful or not, again this goes against the notion of our believes where our creator mentions in numerous places in his final testament (The holy Quran) that “most of them don’t know” , “most of them don’t realize “ , etc.… the divine verses of our creator supports the minority who is upright over the majority who is corrupt and useless.

To be successful in our affairs we have to work hard to get away from the side effects of consumerism that is trying to push us to focus more on quantity, rather we should direct our energy and effort to achieve quality in all courses of our lives.