It is eight in the evening, and my family has gathered in the kitchen the way it has for generations — the same kaleen spread across the floor, the same kettle of noon chai cooling on the stove. But something has shifted. Nobody is talking. My father scrolls through a news feed. My teenage brother is lost inside a game. My sister watches a reel with one earbud in. My grandmother sits at the edge of the room, waiting for someone to notice her. The lights are on, the house is full, and the room still feels empty.

This is the quiet irony of our age. We can video-call a cousin in Dubai in an instant, yet we can sit for an hour beside our own parents without exchanging ten sentences. We are wired to the world and unplugged from the people who share our roof. What looks like a harmless evening habit is, in fact, something more serious: a slow unravelling of sila-e-rahmi — the joining of kinship ties — which Islam does not treat as a pleasant custom but as an obligation woven into the fabric of belief.
In Islamic teaching, family bonds are not a matter of taste. The Qur'an ties it directly to the fear of Allah. Surah An-Nisa opens with a command to be mindful of God and, in the same breath, mindful of "the wombs" — a phrase classical commentators, including Ibn Kathir, read as a direct reference to kinship itself (Qur'an 4:1). Reverence for God and reverence for family sit side by side, as though neither can be separated from the other.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) made the connection sharper still. In a hadith recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, he tied belief in Allah and the Last Day to the maintenance of kinship, describing one as a natural expression of the other: "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should uphold the bond of kinship" (Sahih al-Bukhari 6138). Scholars who have written on this hadith agree on one point: sila-e-rahmi is not fulfilled through good wishes alone. It asks for time, attention, and presence — the very things a smartphone is best at stealing.
That last part matters, because a family WhatsApp group full of forwarded duas and good-morning stickers can feel like closeness while producing none of it. A quick emoji sent to a mother is not the same as sitting with her. The obligation was never about staying in touch in the technical sense. It was about staying present.
Older Kashmiris still remember what the hamam once was — not simply a heated room, but the emotional centre of the house. It was where children did their homework under a grandfather's watch, where a mother kneaded dough while listening to her daughter's day, where disputes were settled and stories told long after the lights should have gone out. The kitchen carried the same weight. Neither space was decorative. Both were where the family actually happened.
What has replaced that architecture of closeness is what psychologists call "absent presence" — bodies in the room, minds elsewhere. A father asks his son a question and gets a delayed, half-heard answer because a video was more interesting. A wife shares something from her day and finds her husband's eyes still on his screen. None of this is dramatic; no one raises a voice. But something as ordinary as adab — the discipline of attending to the person in front of you — quietly breaks down, one distracted moment at a time.
Nobody feels this more than the elderly. A generation of Kashmiri grandparents who once sat at the centre of household life, whose opinions were sought before decisions were made, now often sit at the margins of rooms crowded with their own grandchildren. They are not alone the way a person living by themselves is alone. Theirs is a harder loneliness — the kind that comes from being surrounded by family and still going unseen for most of the evening. A grandmother repeating a story nobody quite hears, a grandfather clearing his throat before giving up on being noticed — small moments, easy to miss, which is exactly the problem. None of it looks like neglect from the outside.
It would be unfair to place the blame only on the person holding the phone. Short-video platforms and endless-feed apps are not neutral tools; they are built by teams whose job is to keep a thumb moving. The unpredictable reward of the next video is a mechanism, not an accident, and it works on the same part of the brain regardless of how devout or disciplined a person believes themselves to be. This is not a uniquely Kashmiri predicament — psychologists studying attention and social media describe the same pattern, sometimes called "phubbing," across households worldwide. What gives it particular weight here is that Islam names the harm directly: severing kinship ties is treated not as a minor lapse but as something the Qur'an and hadith single out.
Seen this way, the endless scroll resembles what the Qur'an calls ghaflah — heedlessness, a kind of spiritual sleep. A person does not usually decide to ignore Allah's command to maintain family ties. Attention is quietly captured, minute by minute, until none is left over for dhikr, for a parent's question, or for a child tugging at a sleeve. The heedlessness is not chosen so much as engineered — and recognising that is the first step toward resisting it.
None of this calls for abandoning technology; that ship has sailed, and there is no undoing it. What it calls for is drawing a few firm lines around family time. Dinner and the hour after Maghrib prayer are natural places to start — periods when phones stay out of the room entirely, not merely out of hand. Something as simple as looking up when an elder speaks, and listening until they finish, restores a habit many households have quietly lost. A weekly hour where every phone goes into a basket in the corner, however awkward the first ten minutes feel, tends to end in conversation that used to happen without effort.
Mosques and community elders in Kashmir have long treated sila-e-rahmi as something to be taught, not assumed — through Friday sermons, through visits to the sick and the housebound, through the insistence that a phone call is no substitute for a visit when one is possible. That teaching has not disappeared; it has been drowned out by a device louder and closer than any sermon. Reviving the habit needs no new institution, only households willing to treat the dinner table with the same seriousness they already give to prayer times.
The Prophet's promise is worth remembering: that maintaining kinship ties expands one's provision and lengthens one's life, recorded in a hadith narrated by Anas ibn Malik (Sahih al-Bukhari 5986). Whatever one makes of that promise in a literal sense, its logic is not hard to see in practice. A family that still talks, still eats together without screens, still notices when a grandmother goes quiet in the corner, tends to be a family that holds together when harder times come.
The living room does not need renovation. It needs someone, tonight, to put the phone face-down and look up.

Email:--------------------yunusbhatt586@gmail.com