I was sitting next to my mother yesterday, and she reached out to me with her arm and said “give me your hand.” So I did, but instead of just holding my hand, she kissed it. “When we were young” she said, “we were the ones who kissed the hands of our parents and elders. But now it’s the other way around. Anything to please you!” and she laughed.

But I didn’t laugh.

I was dead silent… The “Hadith of Gabriel” had instantly jumped to my mind. In that famous hadith, in which Gabriel asks Rasool Allah (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam) about Islam, Iman and Ihsan, he also asks him about the Signs of the Hour. Rasool Allah (saws) replies, ‘That the servant should give birth to her mistress, and you see poor, naked, barefoot shepherds of sheep and goats competing in making tall buildings.”

You see, up to this generation, the young were servants to their parents. They were ibad, not in the meaning of worship or ownership, which belongs exclusively to Allah (swt), but in the sense of servanthood. As for example, the Prophet’s grandfather who was named Abdul Muttalib, the servant of his uncle Muttalib. Likewise, in the time of the Prophet Isa (pbuh), the Greek word pais had two meanings: child, and servant (see Elaine Pagels’ Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, p. 26).

Up until the previous generation here in the Arab world, the generation of my parents, children were taught to kiss the hands of their parents and elders in respect. Their “job” in life was to serve their parents and please them in every way. Rasool Allah (saws) said, “Paradise is under the feet of the mothers.” Do you know what that means? It means if you want to find paradise, to enter paradise, then put yourself under your mother’s feet. Put her feet on your head, on your neck. Not literally, but by serving her completely and pleasing her in every way.

But now, in this generation more than any other, things have switched. Though in the Western world this might have happened a bit earlier, it is only really now in the Arab world that the child has become the master, and the parent the slave. It is the “job” of parents to do anything they can to please their children, give them everything they ask for, or else all hell will break loose at home. Parents fear the wrath of their children. So in essence, parents are giving birth to their masters. “The servant gives birth to her mistress”- it is, if you think about it, the exact opposite of “Paradise is under the feet of the mothers.” My God how things have changed….

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Note about the second sign:

What’s special about Bedouin building tall buildings? Well, sure, the Arabs have built tall buildings for a long time. In Yemen they did thousands of years ago, and in the Hijaz and other places later. But they weren’t shepherds (i.e., nomads). They were settled city-dwellers. Whether it be the people of Yemen or the people of Quraysh, those were city dwellers, who lived comfortable lives and traded in clothes and silk. The people mentioned here are the nomads. The people of Najd were nomads. Unlike Quraysh, they were very simple nomadic people, herding cattle and raiding other tribes, etc, deep in the desert. But all that changed in the beginning of the 20th century, when people from Najd, under the leadership of Aal Saud and inspired by the teachings of the Shaykh of Najd, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, came to power. And there they are, competing in building tall buildings.