The miracle drug? The ultimate “biohack”. The best “longevity medicine”. It has been sitting there all along.

Want a Longer Life? Try Righteousness

We spend billions trying not to die.

Supplements. Wearables. Cold plunges. Continuous glucose monitors. Hyperbaric chambers. Rapamycin. NAD . Special diets. Biological-age tests.

Silicon Valley has effectively declared war on ageing.

But buried within an Islamic teaching and Jewish teaching transmitted almost fourteen centuries ago is an astonishingly different prescription for longevity:

“Nothing turns back the Decree except supplication, and nothing increases the lifespan except righteousness.”

— Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, Jamiʿ al-Tirmidhi 2139 (Sunnah)

The Arabic word is al-birr. Let’s analyse it together.

It does not simply mean performing religious rituals. Birr carries the larger sense of righteousness, goodness, dutifulness and moral conduct.

Although this Hadith is sometimes classified as weak, But the idea does not stand or fall on that narration. (Sunnah)

A closely related statement is found in Sahih Muslim, one of Sunni Islam’s strongest canonical collections:

Whoever wishes for his provision to be expanded and his lifespan lengthened should maintain his ties of kinship.

— Sahih Muslim 2557b (Sunnah)

Al-Tirmidhi also records that maintaining family relationships brings affection within the family, increases wealth (see Dua at the end) and increases lifespan. (Sunnah)

Now something becomes interesting.

The Islamic longevity prescription begins not with a molecule.

It begins with how you live with other human beings.

In my last article, I explained how the work of thankfulness is a “miracle drug” and built into the architecture of Muslim living. There is enough evidence that thankfulness changes biochemistry and therefore we can plausibly say (and this needs qualification because experts can elucidate the full chain properly, it’s outside my remit) – it may have an impact on gene expression and overall physiological health.

What If Longevity Is Social?

Modern medicine understandably focuses heavily on the body.

Blood pressure matters.

Yet human beings are not solitary biological machines.

We are social organisms.

One of the landmark studies in this field examined 148 studies involving 308,849 people. Researchers found that people with stronger social relationships had roughly a 50% greater likelihood of survival during the periods studied than those with weaker relationships. (PLOS)

This tells us something profound. Relationships are not merely sentimental additions to health. They appear to be part of health.

Longevity science is rediscovering the importance of something religions have insisted upon for millennia:

Do not live alone inside yourself.

The Strange Wisdom of Silat al-Rahm

Islam calls maintaining family bonds silat al-Rahm.

The Arabic word raḥm (رَحِم) means the womb, and by extension the bonds of kinship that originate from it. Strikingly, Al-Raḥmān — The Most Merciful — is one of the Beautiful Names of Allah, the Asmāʾ al-Ḥusnā. The Qur’an explicitly names Allah as Al-Raḥmān and says that “to Him belong the Most Beautiful........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)