Jazakallah to you too, for the explanation. I won’t pretend that i am someone who always puts deen ahead of dunya, but i would hope to at least feel shame when making such terrible errors in judgment, rather than attempting to justify my sins with such a phrase. The fact it is so widely recognized within a community, is quite a bad sign in itself!

May Allah guide us.

Deen aur Dunya sath lai ker chalna basically can be translated to

Religion and the life of this world go hand in hand.

So when u cant give up this world and u compromise your religion..this statement is usually uttered in the urdu speaking community.

“Chalna” literally means to walk, as you said, or in this case, “follow”. It’s common for us in the Indian community to take this to mean that we should follow our worldly desires and compromise on our deen, because “Allah wants us to progress in dunya too!” There is no harm in worldly progress, unless it happens at the expense of our deen. We can’t let the dunya become the purpose of our life.

Yes, i meant the last half of the title.

The shame stems from the fact that English really is the only language i can communicate in, with any proficiency. :/

Imagine: i spent years learning French and Latin at school (with a bit of German thrown in at one point), and Hindi was the first language i spoke. And yet, after all that, i still only know English!

I suppose in terms of usefulness, it’s not the worst language to be restricted to, but with my background, shame is inevitable.

I think ‘chalna’ means ‘go’ or ‘come’ or ‘walk’, or something like that… then again, maybe not. {sob}

I think you meant:

lai ker chalna

Pass

Dunya means, this life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunya