Adnan Rajeh – The Empty Space #07 – Sins and Solutions Part2 + QA
AI: Summary ©
The speakers stress the importance of avoiding negative comments on social media and learning from successful people in different languages. They also emphasize the need for reinforcement and learning from people in different languages. The speakers stress the importance of finding people with a certain degree of guilt and hesitation and finding people in one's family who can help them out. The speakers emphasize the importance of practice and sharing experiences to improve one's life, including playing a role in survival and helping animals.
AI: Summary ©
Today inshallah, for the first maybe 15 or
hopefully no more than 20 minutes, I will
talk a little bit more about some of
the sins and some of the available solutions
that we have.
And for the rest of the time after
that inshallah, I have a list of questions
that have been shared with with us.
Please feel free to share with us questions
right now on the on the actual link.
There's a place for comments on the video
on the live stream and brother Khalid will
read them out to me or I'll be
able to access them throughout the episode and
I can answer them inshallah.
I had talked about the I start talking
about the four major sins of the heart
and unfortunately we only got through three of
them and we really did go through them
quickly.
I didn't realize I guess how much time
they would actually require in terms of explanation
and commentary.
So I talked about vanity, when I talked
about arrogance, when I talked about ostentation, and
today inshallah the final fourth, the final and
the fourth sin of the heart is al
-hasad, envy.
And Islamically al-hasad and al-ghibta are
two different things.
Al-ghibta is you wish you had something,
you see something, you wish you had it.
That's al-ghibta.
Especially if it's a good thing, if you're
wishing to have to have a good thing,
then that's actually a good trait to have.
Al-ghibta, when you see someone who's very
knowledgeable and you wish you were knowledgeable, you
see someone who's successful, you wish you were
successful, that's al-ghibta and that's fine.
You try to focus it towards things that
are beneficial for you in dunya and akhira
and not to be superficial.
So don't just hope to have things, it's
not what we should be thinking about.
But al-hasad is tamanni zawali al-ni'mati
min al-ghayr, or istifqa al-ru'yati
al-ni'mati al-akhireen.
Al-hasad is hoping that people who have
things lose them, or finding it difficult to
accept or to be happy or to be
content with others having more than you, or
achieving more than you.
When I say having more than you, I'm
using the actual phrase quite liberally.
Having not just materialistic assets, but having as
in achieving and being successful and getting ahead
in life.
And this is probably, if you put in
the word hasad and ayn in Google, especially
in Arabic, you can just enjoy what we
have been able to come up with as
a society in terms of the most, probably
the topic that has the most voodoo and
superstition surrounding it, unfortunately, is hasad and ayn.
And we have really abused some of the
teachings that we have in the Quran and
the Sunnah regarding what these things are.
Ayn and hasad or haqq, there's no doubt
surrounding that they exist, but they are unmeasurable.
Something that you cannot measure, you cannot claim
that you know how to heal or to
fix or to treat, and you can never
ever say that that is what we're seeing
right now is the effect of hasad or
ayn, because there's no way for you, there's
no test.
If you have a fever, there are ways,
there are objective ways for us to figure
out why you have that fever.
There are tests that we do, we take
samples from your blood, we take, and we
figure out what's causing it.
But if someone feels sick or feels unwell
or things aren't going well for them in
life, you can't say, well, that's because they
have ayn and hasad upon them, because there's
no way to objectively say that.
So for us to walk down that path
in terms of trying to figure out who
is the one who affected them with ayn
and hasad, is a complete waste of time,
and it's fully superstitious.
But what we should be doing, and that
takes us back to even before jahiliyyah.
Like jahiliyyah probably did better than us regarding
how we deal with ayn and hasad today.
Some of the practices are completely insane in
what people do.
Then how are you supposed to deal with
ayn, and how are we supposed to deal
with hasad?
Well, the way the Prophet ﷺ taught us.
You recite Quran, you do your adhkar, your
invocations, you supplicate to Allah ﷻ, you protect
yourself by doing all these things, by reciting
Quran.
It's always good to recite Quran for someone
if they're not feeling well.
Regardless of whether it's ayn or hasad or
not, ruqyah is something that we do as
Muslims.
Does that mean we don't go and take
the person to the emergency room or the
doctor so they can be checked up and
looked at?
Of course not, we're going to do that
too.
Never accept someone saying that this, what's happening,
this is hasad.
That's why you...
And I'll explain how it can be hasad
in a moment, so you do understand that
there is an effect of it that can
be sometimes seen, but not the way that
we're dealing with it.
Someone looked at it and then that's why
it didn't work out, or it didn't...
There's no way for us to prove that,
so there's no point of following up on
that type of behavior.
Another way to protect yourself from ayn and
hasad is don't share the good stuff that
you have, meaning what Allah ﷻ bestowed upon
you in terms of blessings, except with people
whom you know truly love you.
Don't share with everyone.
If you go parade your success in front
of everybody, obviously people are going to be
envious and jealous.
And that's what social media has actually caused
us to...
We're sharing everything with everybody, and we're not
discriminating, and that's not healthy.
Islamically we're not supposed to do that.
If Allah ﷻ grants you any blessing, whether
you own something new or you achieve something
great, not everybody should have access to that
information.
You choose the people who are going to
know these things.
My teacher used to tell me, share your
successes with those who love you, and share
your failures with those who really love you.
Because these personal milestones that you go through
during your life, it's not public information, and
it can cause people...
Someone may not be envious, but you keep
on pushing how well things are going for
you.
And sometimes, by the way, a lot of
people, meaning they put something like that online,
and it's not true.
It's not truthful, meaning they're actually not doing
too well, and they're suffering, they're struggling, but
they want people to think that they are,
which is even worse.
You're actually...
You're invoking hasad in people.
You're provoking, sorry, hasad in people for something
that's not even true.
It's a complete mess, wallahi.
If you want to get rid of hasad,
then do your invocations, recite the Qur'an,
perform ruqya, make du'a, and then don't
share everything with everybody.
I know people who do it on purpose,
who purposefully will share with someone else because
they want to show up and to see
how well they're doing.
And then they wonder why.
Well, you're provoking hasad, and that's your fault.
But there's no way to measure hasad.
So all the recipes that they give you,
it's all made up.
There's no evidence for it in the Qur
'an.
And I'll end with that because this is
an hour and a half lecture that I
give.
But let's talk about how hasad can be
effective.
I'll tell you how.
And this is...
I want you to listen to the story.
A person got engaged to someone.
And they told their friend.
And then a few weeks later, the engagement
broke off.
So the mother will say, you know, it's
hasad.
Your friend must have performed hasad.
Now she's thinking in a mystic manner, meaning
he looked at something and he ruined it.
But no, his hasad actually ruined his friend's
engagement, but not the way you think.
He ruined it because he's always been envious
of him.
He's always been jealous of this friend.
And when he heard that he's getting engaged
and getting married, things are working out for
him, that bothered him.
So when the father of the bride, or
the bride-to-be, asked him, because he's
a friend of him, about his friend, he
told him, no, he's not a good guy.
And the father said, okay, you're not marrying
this person.
And he ended it.
So hasad did end it.
Hasad was the reason that this person lost
his engagement, but not the way you think.
وَمِن شَرِّ حَاسِدٍ إِذَا حَسَدٌ It's not just
some energy wave that is leaving the eyes.
It's more than that.
People who are envious of you will harm
you.
If you are envious of people, then you're
likely to harm them, or you're likely to
withhold benefit from them when you're given the
chance to actually help them, which is the
problem of hasad.
Where does hasad come from?
Hasad is one of the instincts of the
nafs, one of the reflexes of the nafs.
It comes from its basic instinct of wanting
to be on top, wanting to be the
strongest, wanting to be the most powerful amongst
people, so it can survive longer.
So because that's what it believes, and I
talked about this, I think, in one of
the episodes, it starts to see other people's
success as something negative.
Because if someone else is succeeding, they're getting
ahead, that means you're not ahead, that means
you're not going to survive the most, that's
a negative thing.
So it stems from that problem that the
nafs has, it wants to be the best,
it can't accept others being the best.
And it turns later on into hasad, it
turns into envy, where you don't want people
to succeed.
And when you're told, فُلَان يَعَنِي
جَسْتْ your heart closing up, and you feel
bad, that's why, it's because you're jealous, because
you're envious.
And then you have to deal with that,
you have to figure out why is it
that I feel that way?
There's a few things that you can do.
Number one, you have to remember that other
people's success is not your failure.
Other people succeeding doesn't mean that you're failing.
There's no correlation here whatsoever.
Other people succeed, they are doing the best
with what they've got.
And they started at some one point, and
they're moving towards another one.
You are unaware of all of the details
of where they were, where they're going, how
they got there, you don't know anything.
So there's no point of you feeling negative
about it, because it's something that is very
unknown to you, there's too many details you
don't know.
And where you are in comparison to them,
there's no way to compare it, because there's
too many variables that doesn't allow a proper,
acceptable, you know, valid comparison.
People's success does not mean that you're not
succeeding.
You're just going to arrive where you're going
at a different time.
We have different stories.
Everyone has a storyline.
We're all, you know, living our stories out.
Everyone has a different story.
Everyone reaches milestones at different times.
We all achieve different things in different ways.
No two stories are identical.
That's impossible.
No matter who it is, even identical twins
don't have identical life story, storylines.
We live different lives.
So when you see someone that was succeeding,
that shouldn't make you feel bad about yourself.
Because as long as you're walking down your
path, the only reason you should feel bad
if other people are succeeding is that you're
not doing anything.
And that's really not a problem of others,
it's not really different.
It's lack of self-esteem, and it's lack
of himmah, or lack of ambition, which we'll
talk about in a moment.
It's a different thing.
Second point you need to think about is
عطاء الله غير محدود.
Allah سبحانه وتعالى, His blessings are limitless.
Sometimes the nafs uses that basic instinct of,
there's only so much that can be distributed,
so if this person is taking a lot
of it, then there may not be enough
for me left.
It's just, you know, go back to the
same French fry plate thing.
If there's a lot of people around the
plate, then you start thinking, am I going
to get enough?
Is it going to be enough for me?
And you start thinking about that, because the
nafs wants to make sure, wants to ensure
that it gets its portion.
So the nafs sometimes look at the dunya,
if Allah سبحانه وتعالى is giving people a
lot, and this person is getting ahead, and
this person is successful, it starts thinking, is
there enough of all that for me?
Or am I going to be left out?
And the Qur'an says, قُلْ لَوْ أَنْتُمْ
تَمْلِكُونَ خَزَاءِنَا رَحْمَةِ رَبِّي إِذَلَّا أَمْسَكْتُمْ خَشْيَةَ
الْإِنْفَاقِ وَكَانَ الْإِنسَانُ قَتُورًا See, if the human
being had the خَزَاء and the safes of
Allah سبحانه وتعالى, where all the رحمة, all
the compassion, and all the blessings exist, if
he had all that, if the human being
had that in his hands, then the human
being, even though it's a limitless amount of
blessing and compassion, would withhold it in fear
of it ending or finishing, or not being
enough.
It's just that the human being is just
like that.
But Allah سبحانه وتعالى's blessings are limitless, they're
endless.
So if someone's getting a lot, doesn't mean
that there's not enough for you, there's enough
for you, you're going to get.
But these are just little beliefs and convictions
that the nafs has that you have to
work on changing.
How do we change convictions?
We talked about that.
Dhikr, dua, contemplation, reading.
You have to continue to reinforce thoughts and
reinforce ideas and reinforce topics through the invocation
of Allah, through supplication, and through contemplation.
These are three things you do and allow
you to reinforce thoughts so that you replace
one thought with another.
You replace the thought that there's not enough
and people getting ahead is negative with something
different.
With the fact that everyone is walking down
their path, and I should be happy for
people who are successful.
I'll tell you how to do that in
a moment or what we can do to
better achieve that.
The third one, and the third thing that
we should think about, is that we are
not asked to be ahead of others.
We're not being asked in our life to
beat others, to be first.
We're asked to do the best we have
with what we've been given.
That's what we're asked to do.
The concept, and I'll talk about competition inshallah
later, so there's a few questions about that
too.
Competition is a thing, but its only function
is to encourage you to do more, to
test your limits, to push yourself to your
limits.
That's the point of it.
But Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la
is not requiring you to be better than
people or to get ahead of people.
As we talked about in arrogance, that's not
what you're required to do.
What you're required to do is to use
the tools that you were given to reach
your potential, to be the best you can
be with what you have.
We all were dealt different hands.
You can't judge people, you can't judge yourself
on whether this person is more successful than
me, or I'm less successful than them, based
on the fact that we went to school
together, or we grew up in the same
city, or from the same family, all that
is irrelevant.
Just look at what you have and use
it to the best of your ability.
Just utilize all the potential that you have,
and that's all Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta
-A'la wants from you, your best.
وَلَا نُكَلِّفُ نَفْسًا إِلَّا وُسْعَهَا Only what you've
got, only your ability, within the limitations of
your abilities, just do your best.
And that is how you reach the highest
ranks in Akhirah, just by doing your best.
The fact that some others are ahead of
you or made it farther than you doesn't
mean that you're not doing well, doesn't mean
that you're not doing your best, doesn't mean
that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la
is not satisfied with you.
Hasad comes from that.
Sometimes some scholars look at arrogance as one
side and hasad as the other, and they
affect each other.
Because kibr is wanting to be better, and
it leads, or believing that we're better, and
it leads to us not wanting to see
anything about someone else that is better than
us, causing hasad.
So hasad in one way is the result,
in certain aspects, is the result of kibr,
of arrogance.
Because if I'm trying to believe that I'm
better than everyone, which I shouldn't, once I
see that they've done something really important that
I haven't done yet, it causes me to
be upset, because now I can't justify that
I'm better.
I can't justify it anymore, so I become
envious, and I hope that they lose it,
and I wait for them to fall.
I'm looking for their mistakes, I'm looking for
their flaws, and say, yeah, maybe they're successful
here, but I'm trying to find a flaw
for them.
They did that, but they also do this.
That's why they're not good.
So how do you get rid of all
this?
Hasad, the solution, is really not an invocation,
as much as it is an Islamic concept.
The concept of al-jama'a.
Al-jama'a is one of the core
Islamic fundamental principles, that the ummah is one,
and that we work as a jama'a,
we pray in jama'a, we do everything
together.
Why?
We're trying to identify that we all wear
the same jersey, we're on the same team.
If you're a team player, you don't mind
having a really good player on your team,
because you want the team to win.
But if you're on a team, and you're
an individualist, and you don't care about the
team, then yeah, you'll be upset if there's
someone stealing the spotlight from you, and you'll
be envious of them.
But if the goal is for the team
to win, you want as many good players
on your team as possible.
It's just being able to see that people
who are succeeding around us are on our
team, especially if they're Muslim.
And if they're not Muslim, they're on our
team as in humanity, as the human team.
The more people who are doing well, the
better the human race is going to be.
If we have a lot of people who
are able to achieve a lot in science,
and in technology, and in human sciences, and
in law, and in human rights, then we're
going to be better, and they're on our
team.
So there's no...
it's a shift of mindset.
Instead of seeing them as you're on the
other team against you, working against you, you
see them working with you, for you.
They're on your team, they're on your side.
And that requires a mindset shift.
That's why jama'a is so core in
Islam.
You have to do things in jama'a.
Closing masajid is a musiba, because it takes
away a lot of the jama'a, or
whatever is left of it in our ummah.
Because most aspects of jama'a have been
sucked out of the ummah slowly.
All we're left with is the religious aspect
of jama'a, which is good.
It helps.
It keeps people feeling that they're one, that
they're together, that they work together, that they're
on each other's sides.
We compete, and competition is just to encourage
hard work, is to make us try.
But we're competing, still hoping that everyone reaches
the finish line.
Everyone actually reaches before we do, as long
as I reach as well.
As long as inshallah I make it too,
and I put in my effort, and we
help one another along the way.
So it's a different type of competition, competing,
that Allah ﷻ encourages in the deen.
So to get rid of hasad, you have
to change the way you see.
It's a perspective shift.
You have to start seeing things differently.
People around me aren't working against me, they're
working with me.
They're part of the same team.
And that allows you to actually enjoy people's
successes, and share them, and not feel envious.
As long as you feel that you're doing
your best, you're trying the hardest you can,
and you're making progress, then welcome.
May everyone inshallah make progress and move forward.
And the more good people we have, the
more likely it is we're going to succeed
as an ummah.
Meaning the priority has to be the success
of the ummah.
That's what we have to want.
We want this ummah to succeed, because that's
what Allah ﷻ wants.
Not just for me to succeed, and everyone
else to fail.
If I'm the only person succeeding, and everyone
else is failing, that means things aren't working.
That means everything isn't working, and things have
to be fixed.
You want everyone to succeed, so that the
ummah succeeds.
So Allah ﷻ, and that's what Allah ﷻ
wants, that's what Allah ﷻ commanded.
So it's understanding what Allah wants, putting the
priority of the group instead of before ourselves,
and then understanding that we're on the same
team.
These are just concepts that we need to
learn in order for us, inshallah, to get
rid of hasad.
A few dishonorable mentions of diseases of the
heart that are important.
Selfishness, shuh, stinginess, shuh, or selfishness is the
ultimate expression of the human soul.
The human soul is extremely selfish, that's how
it expresses itself.
It wants everything for itself, and we talked
about that, what it wants.
It wants to live longer, and it wants
to survive, and it wants to find immediate
pleasure.
So it's very selfish, it doesn't care about
others.
That shuh can be directed in different directions.
It can be here in dunya, which turns
a person into a very difficult individual to
live with, or it can be directed towards
al-akhirah.
Be very, very selfish about achieving and arriving
at Jannah.
Be very selfish about that.
And if you're very selfish about that, that
you want to make it to Jannah, you'll
find that Allah ﷻ has commanded you to
be very selfless in dunya, and that's how
you actually use the nafs, selfishness, because you
never get rid of it, and you need
it.
Without it, you can't survive as a human
being, you need that instinct.
You're just going to redirect it from dunya
to al-akhirah.
That requires learning more, and turning ideas into
principles that you live by.
That idea of al-akhirah has to sink
in, you have to continue to learn that
and think about it.
And other mentions is shuhwah, lust.
Lust is a problem that should take at
least two episodes, to be honest, on its
own.
Just talking about lust, specifically for men.
Not that women don't suffer with this, they
do.
And some men think that they don't, they
do.
It's just the intensity is a bit different,
and the frequency is a little bit different.
Actually, every person struggles with these four or
twenty-five sins of the heart differently, because
we have different structural, psychological structures, and we're
raised differently, we have different backgrounds.
So we struggle with different things differently.
Some people have kibra as their most difficult,
some people have hasa, some people has riya,
that's the most difficult thing.
Some people's lust, it depends on just who
you are.
But the intensity of lust for men is
extremely difficult, and very important to tackle, because
it stems from a human instinct of wanting
to spread your seed, and have as many
children as possible, so that you're stronger, so
that you have more protection, so you survive,
and your legacy continues, that's how the nafs
looks at it.
So it's an instinct, a very strong instinct.
It's always difficult to change instincts.
Actually, it's impossible to change an instinct, but
there are certain things you can do to
control it, and to limit it, so that
you're not falling into haram, falling into fawahish.
And again, I think we're coming to the
20-minute point, so I'm going to end
with these things.
I hope what we talked about, inshallah, was
beneficial, and that you found that you found
some answers in the episodes that I offered.
I believe that this is not, by any
means, enough for someone to actually make true
change.
I just try to open the door, and
kind of point where the path is, so
that we start walking down, asking questions, and
wondering, and trying to figure out ourselves, and
trying to figure out what we need to
do to change ourselves.
And that has to be one of our
main priorities as a Muslim society, and as
Muslim individuals, which is the goal of having
this series.
I did get a number of questions.
One of the questions was about the references.
I will struggle with that a little bit.
What I'm putting together is the accumulation of
years of study, and of spending time with
people who have this knowledge.
But to point out a few things, some
good books, well, the main core reference for
this in Arabic is the Imam Ghazali's known
study, the Resurrection of the Sciences of the
Religion.
But it's a very comprehensive one, and it's
difficult, and you can't study it on your
own, or you can read it, but you
will find it difficult to understand, because you
do need scholars and teachers to explain what
he's trying to say.
There's an easier one in Arabic, and I
think it's translated to English, but I'm not
sure exactly who translated it.
There's Mukhtasar Minhaj Al-Qasidin Lilnaqdisi, which is
an Arabic and easier text that you can
study.
There's Risala Al-Qushayriya, for Imam Qushayri, is
a book that talks a lot about spirituality
as well.
Fanna Al-Dhikr Wal-Dua is a more
modern one for Sheikh Muhammad Ghazali, where he
talks about the art of invocation and supplication,
and it goes down the road of talking
about stuff like this.
The Hikam Al-Ata'iya, the Hikam Ibn
Ata'illah Al-Sakandari, are a very good
number.
There are pieces of wisdom that were explained
by multiple scholars throughout the centuries that are
very deep and profound, and they talk a
lot about the nafs, and there's a lot
to learn from there.
In English, I know there are some books
that I've looked at, or I've been introduced
to, is the Purification of the Heart by
Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, which has a good approach
there.
You can benefit from the concepts of purification.
Sister Yasmin Mujahid wrote a book, Reclaim Your
Heart, that also has a number of points
and topics that you'll find beneficial.
In general, there's a lot of material that
talks about these things out there.
There's really no limitation, just limits on who
you should read for and who you shouldn't.
This is something we all have in common.
One of the questions I got was, do
I listen to, you know, I want to
learn from someone that talks about these things,
but they have bad political opinions.
You're not learning their political opinions.
You're learning something about the nafs that's fine.
Please don't, treat Muslim speakers, or speakers in
general in the world, as in take all
or leave all.
That's a very bad way to approach life
in general.
That's not how we do things.
You take what is beneficial, leave what's not.
If this person has really bad political opinions,
leave them.
Don't learn them from them.
But if they have a lot of insights
on the human soul, we'll listen to that.
Even if they're not practicing it, but if
they have knowledge to offer you, then listen
to it.
Learn what you can, take the positive from
every experience.
We've been like that as Muslims, unfortunately, over
the last number of centuries.
We either take all or leave all with
scholars, and it's caused a lot of problems.
If a scholar makes a mistake, we end
up trashing everything that they've done for 60,
70 years.
There's a lot of benefit in the work
that they put forward, but we're not mature
enough to be able to differentiate.
Remember that they're human beings.
They'll do things right, and they'll do things
wrong.
Just when you're more famous than you're looked
up to, the echo of your mistakes tend
to be a bit louder, and people get
to see them.
Alhamdulillah, our mistakes are concealed, and people don't
see them because no one cares.
But once you're more famous, your mistakes become
more obvious.
So I would definitely advise listening to whoever
is talking about these things and learning from
them as much as you possibly can.
I'm going to go through some of the
questions I have in front of me, and
then I'll allow Brother Khalid to share with
me some of the questions that you guys
have put.
Are there any questions that are live?
Okay.
So I'll try to go through a few
of them.
I was asked about competition.
Competition is fine in Islam.
Athletic competition is not what I was talking
about.
When you're playing a sport, you're supposed to
compete.
Thinking that you're better than people is not
in a specific domain.
Well, I'm a better chess player.
I'm a better soccer player.
I was thinking you're better in general, which
is the problem.
That's what kibbutz is.
Thinking you're better in general.
I'm better than them just as a whole,
as a human being.
That's the problem.
If I'm better in a certain thing and
I'm competing with them, that's fine.
Humbleness would also require you to acknowledge that
people are good and that sometimes there's a
lot of luck in winning competitions.
People who are professional athletes know that.
Smart professional athletes will always acknowledge the other
players who are doing just as well, probably
better than them, but they got lucky and
they were fortunate to win.
That comes from also a good understanding of
how the world actually works.
What about kibbutz towards non-Muslims was the
question.
The worst thing you can do is to
use Islam as a mean for arrogance.
That's the worst thing you can do with
the deen.
I mean, you're given the best, the biggest
blessing in the world.
You're given Islam.
The worst thing to do with it is
use it as a means to be arrogant
and to look down on people.
You don't know how the person in front
of you is going to end their lives,
do you?
You don't.
So the person in front of you is
a non-Muslim.
You can't be arrogant because you don't know
how his life is going to end.
You don't know how your life is going
to end.
Very easily, very easily, Allah Subh'anaHu Wa
Ta-A'la can change things around.
That person's life can end with, لا إله
إلا الله محمد رسول الله.
You can end somewhere else.
May Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la
grant us حسن الختام.
Because we don't know how things are going
to end, we have no rights to look
at people and say we're better.
And again, we still don't know what their
stories are, what their storyline is like.
We don't know why they are what they
are.
We don't even know if Allah Subh'anaHu
Wa Ta-A'la is going to hold
them accountable for the mistakes that they made.
We don't know anything.
So even if they're non-Muslim, we don't
have the right to look down or to
be arrogant.
We still offer the message.
We still warn from punishment and give the
good news of Jannah and try to teach
people Islam and tell them this is the
only faith that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta
-A'la is going to accept.
But then what he does يوم القيامة with
people is completely his business and not mine.
So I have no reason.
I can't say, well, Ya Rabb, you said
you're going to put these...
That's not my business, what he does.
He's not questioned, Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A
'la, what he's going to do with people.
So there's no meaning.
You cannot be arrogant towards non-Muslims ever.
I was asked a question about how to
convince the nafs of the long-term plan
rather than the short-term.
This just happens through reinforcement.
A lot of dhikr, a lot of dua,
and a lot of contemplation regarding that and
listening to dhurus and listening to lessons that
talk about it will reinforce that topic in
your mind.
It'll sink in.
It'll become a part of your nafs.
It takes time.
That's why these lessons take time.
That's why you're going to have to force
it for a while.
And then it'll kind of be silent for
a while.
And then it'll finally change.
It takes time.
These still take years.
This takes years to happen.
But we're going to be here for years,
so might as well do it.
Because if you're here in 10 years and
you didn't do anything, well, you just wasted
10 years of your life.
But it is a process, and there's no
one thing that you need to do.
Just do all the...
Just use all the rules and all the
tools that we talked about, and you'll see
that slowly the nafs will start turning around.
I was asked about dua and sujood.
Does it have to be in Arabic?
No, it can be in any language you
want.
And there is different opinion regarding the fardh
for that fatwa, but I'm still comfortable with
it being in any language, even in a
fardh, especially if you're not comfortable saying in
Arabic.
I was asked about CBT a few times,
which is cognitive behavior therapy.
And is that...
Yes, and that is very much an application
of what I talked about in terms of
thoughts and behaviors and feelings.
And I don't claim that I came up
with thoughts, behaviors, and feelings.
People have been talking about this for a
millennium.
I'm just putting it...
I just put it together in a certain
way.
That is mine, but that's how I look
at it.
But no, of course, CBT is an extremely
powerful tool that therapists will use to help
people change.
And you're very encouraged to learn more about
that.
And if the therapist is asking you to
engage in it, definitely engage in it.
Again, I didn't really offer anything that is
exclusively mine in this series.
I just gave it a name.
I just gave the cycle a name just
so it's easier to have some nomenclature that
is common between us when we're talking about
something.
But no, CBT is a very powerful tool,
and you're definitely encouraged to follow it.
And it's very similar to what you talked
about.
What about youth and teenagers?
If you have someone 11 or 12 years
old, how do I introduce these things?
You introduce these things the way I introduce
them to you.
You start talking about them.
You start explaining things like, inside you have
enough.
It's that part of you that wants to
do this.
Especially when your kids make mistakes, it's better
to actually talk to them about why they
made that mistake and where the urge came
from, where the tendency came from.
So they start understanding themselves.
You want to start with just basic understanding
and observation, the ability to acknowledge, oh yeah,
I felt that, and that feeling comes from
my nafs, and I shouldn't always listen to
it.
I should be able to resist it and
do the right thing.
So you start as early as the kids
can understand this stuff, and then you start
working with them.
There's a lot of...
If we can extend this series after Ramadan
or we find time for it, I'll focus
on that a little bit more.
But it is something that kids should start
learning at an early age if possible.
I was asked about Riyadh and whether wanting
people's attention, there's an underlying problem for it.
In certain situations, it is.
Riyadh is just a manifestation of an underlying
problem of seeking attention because of deficits in
the spiritual, psychological deficits.
In that case, you need to actually see
therapists to help you out because figuring out
why that is, what happened in your childhood
and what's happening now, that makes you need
to clinge on and hold on to people
and not be able to live without people's
attention.
Riyadh is different.
Riyadh is less intense than that.
Riyadh is just wanting people to continuously see
you and acknowledge you and praise you.
And you're not doing things for the right
reason.
You're not doing them selfless.
There is secondary gain, which is people's attention.
But if it turns into a point where
you can't live without it, that's more intense
and that needs professional help to actually approach
it.
I was asked about Nifaq and why it
wasn't talked about.
Nifaq is basically, we put all these problems
together in a person's heart and they're all
functioning really well, these problems.
That's what Nifaq is.
Nifaq is the outcome of having all these
problems.
That's why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, when
he talks about Munafiqeen, he says, في قلوبهم
مرضون.
In their hearts, there's a disease.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala points it out
like that.
So it's not its own disease, Nifaq.
Nifaq is the sum of all these diseases.
That's why getting rid of these diseases is
how you get rid of Nifaq in general.
And those are the questions I got.
The last question I had was, am I
available to be a mentor?
I'm not the right person for doing that.
I understand where the question is coming from.
But definitely, you need to look for someone
who has more experience in life, who is
a bit more older, who's done more, and
who has proper, I guess, backgrounds regarding these
things.
You don't want to look for someone like
me in their 20s or 30s or 40s.
You want someone who's a bit more experienced
in life to help you with this.
But as a group, we can start putting
together an effort to help one another, to
work together on purifying the nafs and learning
a lot of these aspects.
But there's really no sign up.
Here, you can sign up to be a
mentor.
But that's not how this works, really.
But we will figure out, inshallah, a way
to help everyone on their journey of self
-purification.
Those are the questions that I have.
You can go ahead and share whatever questions
you have.
Sure, whatever I've addressed, you can just skip
and you can give me whatever.
Yeah, so the question was, is laziness a
disease and how do you deal with it?
Laziness is one of the diseases.
Had this series been longer, then ghafla and
kasal would have been one of the things
I would talk about.
Kasal, laziness, is definitely one of the diseases.
It stems from the nafs, from the soul's
instinct or reflex not to want to spend
energy if it's not getting immediate gratification.
If it's not going to find joy immediately,
it doesn't want to spend any energy at
all.
If there's no selfish interest in it for
the nafs, it doesn't want to spend any
time.
So that ends up becoming laziness.
How you fix it is that you have
to become someone who's ambitious.
People who have ambition, people who have great
hopes for the future, people who are high
functioning, who want to do something with their
life, aren't lazy.
Those who struggle, and it kills me when
I see youth who are lazy, who don't
have hopes, who have ambitions that are very
simple, that don't have any soul or spirits
in it.
There's no love in it.
They just want a simple job, enough money
to have an apartment, and just to enjoy
their life with their friends.
That's not how it's supposed to be.
You're supposed to be ambitious.
You're supposed to want to change the world.
You should have goals of trying to make
the world a better place, and work for
the ummah.
That ambition comes from listening to people who
were successful, and spending time with people who
are ambitious.
You need to go and find people who
are ambitious, surround yourself with them, and they
will strengthen your himmah, strengthen that urge to
be better.
It's okay to, at the beginning, to allow
the nafs to enjoy its self-interest and
ambition at the beginning, and then you can
change the intention later on.
Because you want to use the instincts that
you have for khairik.
If you have an...
the nafs wants to get ahead, right?
It wants to be the strongest.
But it has to be able to see
that what you're doing is going to take
it there, in order for it to get
really excited about it.
If not, it'll just sit back.
Studying will get you somewhere, but it's too
long term for the nafs to see, so
it's too lazy to get up and do
it.
It doesn't want to do it.
But if you're able to convince the nafs
that doing these things will give us strength,
will give us status, will give us...
will get us ahead, then the nafs is
going to...
is going to want to do it.
And you can...
you can use that, you know, that instinct
within the nafs to get yourself motivated to
do things, and then you can work on
perfecting the intention for the sake of Allah.
SubhanAllah, that's fine.
But laziness comes from lack of ambition, this
lack of motivation.
And that...
to change that, you have to surround yourself
with the right people.
You have to listen to the stories of
the people who were great and what they
did in their lives, and encourage yourself.
And it's a large...
it's a big topic, but I hope that,
you know, those...
those are some gems that you'll benefit from.
Yeah, so I think I talked about it
a little bit, but...
so the question is, how do you approach
pre-adolescent children regarding issues of nafs and
hawa and spirit and all that?
As I said, you know your children.
Will they understand these things?
If they won't, we'll give it some time.
Once they...
you feel that they have the ability to
comprehend these concepts, start explaining it to them,
just so that they learn to observe.
So they learn that when you felt that
way, when you, you know, broke your sister's
toy, why did you do it?
Don't...
don't...
we get preoccupied with yelling at them that
they shouldn't have done it.
When the question should be, okay, why did
you do that?
They don't know, and then you explain why.
Maybe...
maybe you're envious, maybe you're jealous, maybe you
felt that they were getting more attention.
And kids actually will...
will surprise you with how much insight they
have if you open the door of this
conversation existing.
And then you can talk about this.
This comes from the nafs, comes from the
soul.
That's where it stems from.
I mean, I shared this couple of these
things with my son.
He's nine, and I found him to be
much more receptive to them than I thought
he would be.
So I think...
I think, you know, age eight, nine, ten,
I was, you know, presented with these things
at a young age.
The concept of the nafs and the fact
that it urges you to do some things
that aren't...
that aren't good, and why, and that I
should be...
I should acknowledge that, and I should be
aware of that.
So you can...
you can start introducing these concepts slowly, but
it has to be as gradual and slow
and lift.
Remember the rules we talked about.
It has to be tender and kind, how
you're going to present these things, and how
you get people slowly.
See, you're not going to see change within
a week or two, or a month or
two.
This takes years.
So if you're going to be your child's
spiritual mentor, you have to have a lot
of patience, and you have to be very,
very calm.
And if you can't, then you should leave
it for someone else, or you should get
other people in the family involved, or people
of knowledge or wisdom who are involved, who
can help you out.
And you'll always find people like that in
your family...
in your families.
And a lot of what I'm telling...
saying you...
saying in this series is common knowledge for
people who are over 65 or over 60.
People...
people have lived life...
they know what I'm talking about.
They don't need to hear this.
They know.
And that's why you'll find that, you know,
grandparents are much more easy going with children.
They weren't like that with you when you
were a kid.
And you start to wonder, what happened?
Did you go soft?
No, they just realized a lot of stuff.
They just came to a lot of realization
that what we used to do wasn't the
right way to go by it.
And, you know, I mean, there's other ways
to actually help children develop and learn about
themselves.
So I hope that kind of answers.
But we will work on that.
And we will, inshallah, in a spinoff of
this series, to work on something that's more
focused towards that age group, inshallah ta'ala.
Yeah.
So the question was about shame and guilt,
and whether Nafs al-Lawwama is about shame
and guilt, and do we need to adopt
that or not?
And how do you move forward?
There's been this really powerful movement in the
world today to get rid of shame and
guilt completely.
To remove it even as, you know, political
correctness has moved towards removing it as something
that should never exist in the wordings within
schools and homes.
And I agree to a certain extent that
shame is not a tool, Islamic tool.
Guilt and shame are natural responses of the
Nafs.
Religion didn't produce them, didn't create them.
The Nafs has them.
The Nafs, the soul, the human being, when
he lives within a society that has certain
standards, and he goes against those standards, and
the society looks at that person, as in
why you did that, you end up having
shame.
It doesn't necessarily need to be religion.
You don't even have to have a set
number of ethics and values.
It's just there.
It's when we use shame as the only,
or as the main motive to change people,
or to get people to behave, is where
we abuse it, and where we actually harm
individuals.
The Nafs al-lawamah is just another word
for the conscience in the Quran.
It blames you in the form of saying
that, reminding you that you shouldn't have done
that.
And a certain amount of that guilt is
healthy, is important.
Without it, you know, if someone doesn't feel
guilt at all, and they make a mistake,
it's a problem.
If you have a child that makes a
mistake and feels nothing, and is totally fine
with it, that's actually something that needs to
be addressed quite quickly.
Because you're supposed to feel bad about when
you make a mistake, or do something wrong,
or harm someone.
And that is a small amount of guilt.
It should be there.
But it's when we motivate people with nothing
but guilt, and nothing but shame, where it
becomes a problem.
But the conscience is there to regulate our
behavior by making us feel good when we
do something good, and making us feel bad
when we do something negative.
And that's just how we function as human
beings.
I've heard theories trying to completely get rid
of that as a motive.
But it's unnatural, and it's unnecessary.
I don't think it, and I've not seen
it work before.
So no, we shouldn't be motivating ourselves with
shame and guilt only.
We shouldn't be doing that for our children.
But having a certain amount of it is
a healthy thing.
It allows us to function.
You have it anyways.
When you don't get up for your prayer
immediately, you feel guilty, you feel bad.
Because your nafs says, you have a good
nafs, you have a good conscience, that's saying,
you should have done that earlier.
Why are you waiting till now?
Why didn't you get up?
Why didn't you do this?
Why didn't you do that?
That's just normal.
But it shouldn't be the only.
And if it turns, it can become pathological.
Meaning certain psychiatric deficits and mental health issues
can cause shame and guilt to get out
of hand, which is something we need to
watch out for.
So if you're someone who struggles with that,
then it's not really this series that's going
to fix things for you need to speak
to professionals.
There are deficits within the soul, as I
kind of pointed out in the first and
second episode, that this, what I'm talking about
the purification process can be helpful for, but
will not fix.
It will not cure, it will not treat.
Some deficits need to be dealt with professionally.
And there are different approaches to it.
And I have been in contact with people
who have extreme degrees of guilt and shame
all the time.
And they think it's good because it's Islam,
but it isn't.
That degree of it is not healthy, and
it needs to be.
And everything is in moderation in this life,
as we know, is healthy and is natural.
And when things go into extreme degrees, it
was when it becomes problematic.
No, it's actually, so feeling entitled, does it
come from vanity or is it different?
Feeling entitled is one of the manifestations of
vanity with a little bit of kibber.
Meaning it's kind of both coming together and
causing this feeling where I deserve, I deserve
more.
Because deserving is not just deserving something, but
it's deserving more than others.
So other people are involved in entitlement a
little bit.
Entitlement is not purely just how we feel
about ourselves.
It also involves others.
So it kind of comes from both vanity
and arrogance existing inside of the heart, making
us feel that somehow we deserve what we
have.
And even if people don't have it, we
still deserve it.
So somehow we are better, we are special.
I should get, I mean, it happens a
lot in life when you see a long
line and you want to get ahead, because
you don't feel like you're like everyone else.
You feel like somehow you deserve to get
there first.
We all feel it and many of us
practice it, but that's where entitlement comes from.
It just comes from the lack of gratitude
and lack of acknowledgement that everything in life
is a privilege.
And again, that stems from vanity and arrogance.
And if you deal with vanity and arrogance,
it slowly goes away.
But it also requires some realism, meaning people
who are entitled are just unrealistic about the
world.
Usually experience takes it away.
I mean, the moment you go and you
work in a place where people have nothing,
you realize that you're not entitled to anything
and that you're very privileged.
Usually experiences will, you know, kind of cure
that.
But yes, it does come from both arrogance
and vanity kind of together.
There are books.
I would have to go and look up
titles today and try and put them.
Yeah, maybe inshallah we can try to create
maybe on the videos or even as like
a little poster with some information with some
recommended books that can be read.
I'd have to figure out whether there are
good translations for them.
But there are a lot of Arabic books,
a lot of books that talk about that
just are the, like Sifat al-Saffah, for
example, for Ibn al-Jawzi.
It's a very known book that just tells
stories of the righteous and the pious and
from people who observed them and from their
own, I mean, from their own words.
And Alam al-Nubala for Imam al-Zahabi
is a book like that as well.
But I don't know to what extent these
books have been worked on in English and
translated.
And some of these, for some of these
books have stories that are completely insane and
should not ever be circulated.
So there's been work over the last number
of years with taking these books and getting
rid of some of the stories that don't
make a lot of sense and that actually
are harmful for people shouldn't be exposed to.
But yeah, we'll work on that inshallah.
So what is khushu'a?
The question is, how do you use all
the concepts that we talked about?
Spirit, soul, fu'ad, qalb, all that stuff
to increase khushu'a.
So really what the question is, what is
actually khushu'a?
Khushu'a is when the nafs achieves that
last stage, when the nafs actually enjoys prayer,
when it turns into a nafs mutma'inna,
when it stops doing something because it has
to, or it stops doing something because it's
too tired to fight, but it does it
because it wants to do it.
Once you achieve that, once you're making du
'a because you enjoy it, khushu'a is
so easy.
Khushu'a is not even something you have
to work on.
It just happens on its own.
Actually, you'll be holding it back.
You'll be trying not to ruin what you're
doing where you can't even understand yourself.
The release that occurs when you actually enjoy
your salah, enjoy your du'a, enjoy your
dhikr is natural, but you have to enjoy
it.
You cannot achieve khushu'a when you don't
like what you're doing and it's a heaviness
and you feel like you're coerced and this
is not something that you like.
So you have to move through the stages
to achieve khushu'a.
And I talk about it every year, especially
in tahajjud.
There are different examples that I can give
you for it, inshallah.
Maybe I'll do that tonight, inshallah, throughout tahajjud.
I'll talk a little bit about that.
But khushu'a is basically, it exists once
you achieve that last stage.
So you say, well, sometimes I have khushu
'a but I'm not on the last stage.
You'll have moments of that stage.
You see, we kind of move from following
our nafs, coercing it, it being silent and
enjoying.
We move from one stage to the other,
sometimes within an hour.
Sometimes we do exactly what our nafs wants
and then we force it to do something
good, and then it's now accustomed to do
certain things.
And then for a moment we actually enjoy
what we're doing and we have khushu'a
and then we go back again.
So that movement is there, like we're always
moving.
What we're trying to do is to become
consistent and to become permanent in a certain
stage.
Like we arrive in a stage of calmness
and of love of what we do, of
worshiping Allah, and just stay there and stop
moving back and forth.
But there's always going to be movement, by
the way.
Even the highest-ranked people, close to Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala, they spend 99%
of their time in calmness and in closeness
to Allah.
But they will regress and back and forth.
But the matter is, where do you spend
the most time?
Where does your nafs exist the most?
So that's what khushu'a is.
Khushu'a is just finding, enjoying what you
do.
Doing it because you love it, not because
you have to.
So I talked
about the rules.
We go back to the episode of the
rules.
I talked about being very tender and kind
in dealing with your nafs.
Harsh punishments don't work.
If you fall short, you have to take
some time to figure out why you fell
short.
What caused it?
What is the element in your life that
caused you not to be able to achieve
your goal?
The approach that I gave you was that
when you feel your nafs resisting something, you
increase the amount of it.
You're trying to silence it.
But if you miss something, you don't do
it at all, harsh punishments don't work.
Making up for missed time is a good
way to do it.
A more compassionate self-approach is noted.
But the question I'm being asked here is
very generic, and there's no generic answer for
it.
Meaning, it really is case by case.
It really is where you are, what you're
doing, what type of person you are, how
you respond to stuff like this.
That's why having someone in your life to
run these things by and finding a shaykh
is important.
And finding support and having people that you
can discuss these struggles with is important.
There's no one answer fits all, unfortunately, for
that question specifically.
So it really is a case by case.
But the general rule is rizq and graduality.
That's a general rule.
Harshness rarely works.
Purification as in like the nafs.
So the question is, are there more stages
for the nafs?
Yes, after nafs al-mutma'inna, there's all
these other, I talked about that as well,
there's all these other stages, higher stages that
I don't know about, and I can't talk
about, and I'm not qualified to even, you
know, imagine.
This is for the extremely elite, and for
those who are, who Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala puts his nur right directly into their
hearts at all times, and they live with
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala every moment.
I am talking about these stages that exist
for most human beings, and I'm using myself
as an example.
You start with, you know, submitting to your
soul, then you coerce it to do the
right thing, then it quiets down and accepts
that what you're doing, and then it starts
to love it.
And it does it for the love of
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, which is the
nafs that the Quran talks about, al-mutma
'inna.
But are there higher stages?
There are, Allah a'lam, some scholars have
gone up to 15 and 16 stages of
trying to explain how the nafs kind of
moves up forward.
And there's different categorizations, and there's different ways
to approach this topic.
I chose to approach it this way.
You'll find other people in different books approach
it differently.
It's fine.
It all, at the end, serves the same
purpose and has the same ideas.
I mean, you're not going to find something
that's contradicting.
You won't find two approaches that are completely
contradicting each other.
You'll just find different ways of looking at
things, that's all.
But yes, there are much higher ranks, inshallah.
May Allah grant you these ranks, inshallah, and
may grant all of us, bismillah ta'ala.
But I just talked about the basics that
most people will be in in their lives.
So, until this day, psychologists, sociologists, evolutionary biologists,
and evolutionary psychologists aren't sure why it is.
For example, why is it the soul plays?
Why do we play?
Why do we play?
If you go look that up, you'll find
a hundred different answers.
And scientists have tried to answer that question,
why is it that animals and human beings
want to play?
And there's still a lack of clarity.
So, immediate gratification, immediate pleasure is one of
the instincts that the soul carries, because it
is attached to survival.
Because the way the nafs looks at it
is that the happier you are, and the
more gratification you get, the more pleasure you
get, the less stress you have, and the
longer you live.
So, that's kind of how it fits into
the concept of survival.
But the other question is, since this came
up, why is reproduction a part of human
instinct?
Because you don't really survive through reproduction.
I mean, you're still going to die.
So, it's more about protection, and it's also
about pleasure itself.
So, scientists are still trying to study and
understand, fully understand, all the instincts of the
human experience and the human behavior, and why
we do what we do.
The answers aren't all there.
There's a lot of theories.
I didn't go into them, because it's not
going to be of benefit.
But the two concepts that I explained to
you are more than enough to know or
to figure out why we do what we
do, and why we feel the way we
feel.
We want to survive, and we want to
find immediate gratification or immediate pleasure.
But yes, you're right.
If you go and study, I mean, if
you read papers, scientific papers on the matter,
you'll find different opinions that don't all see
eye to eye on what I said.
But one way or another, we'll acknowledge that
that is what the human being wants, with
different explanations of why the human being wants
it and where it comes from.
And even animals want it as well.
Animals want immediate gratification.
That's why animals, if you give them, for
those who take care of domesticated animals, know
that if you give them too much food,
they'll eat themselves to death, basically.
You have to moderate how much food is
available to them, because they just want to
find that immediate gratification of eating.
It's a part of their instincts.
They don't know how to regulate themselves properly.
And this is something that is observed in
the animal kingdom as well.
Inshallah.
So I think that's all the questions that
we have.
Brother Khalid is asking if we will continue
to do this more often.
Inshallah.
After Ramadan, we'll figure out a plan of
maybe how to continue to approach these topics,
and maybe a weekly session or something.
I think workshops are important when it comes
to stuff like this.
It's not just the theory.
There has to be some practice for it.
There has to be examples of how this
can be done, and then actually action plans
for people to go out and do something,
to learn more about themselves and learn how
to regulate their emotions and feelings and behaviors
and purify the heart.
So inshallah, after Ramadan, I will take some
time and contemplate and think about how we
can expand this series, maybe repeat some of
the topics and go into more depth with
them, and maybe create a group of people
who are interested in helping others get involved
and offering them some...
Because you do need support groups for this
to work.
Without support groups and without mentorship, it doesn't
really go that very far.
On your own, you can only do so
much.
You only start the journey.
To complete the journey, you need more social
involvement to get it done.
So inshallah, that's what we'll do.
I hope the series was beneficial.
I hope that those who attended it found
some khair in it.
Whatever khair you found in it was from
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
And whatever mistakes I made, forgive me for
them and ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
to forgive me for them as well.
We make them all the time.
Inshallah, Ramadan Mubarak.
This is the beginning of the last 10
nights of Ramadan, so it's a good time
to really take a lot of what we
talked about and start putting them into practice.
And ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to
aid you along your journey.