Husain Sattar – Ramadan ReDeveloping Our Soul
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
has created us,
and He has created us of 2
essential components.
The first is the body and the second
is the soul.
The soul is who we are.
The body is what that soul is trapped
in.
This body has a very temporary
limit.
And once we pass from this life,
this body will disappear
and the only thing that will remain is
our soul.
The example would be
a person
who gets in a car
and travels from Point A to Point B.
When you see a person traveling in a
car, you can say there's a person and
he's in a car.
The person is the actual most more important
thing. The car is just a mechanism to
get the person from point a to point
b.
In the same way, Allah
has created us
in a vehicle.
We the essence of who we are is
our soul. The vehicle in which the soul
is traveling
is called the body.
And in this life, Allah
has trapped us in this body
and
has created certain tests
to ensure that we maintain our soul without
focusing on our body.
Now, what's interesting is that although Allah
has created for us both a body and
a soul
and the soul is the more important and
the key component of who we are,
the body also has its needs. It needs
to be maintained.
Look, in the same way that you do
an oil change and you change the tires
and you maintain your car, even though the
car is not the goal,
you have to maintain it.
So in the same way,
the body has to be maintained.
The body requires food.
The body requires drink.
The body has its needs,
and those needs have to be maintained in
order for the body to be able to
act as a vehicle for the soul. But
if the body becomes too focused on,
then the soul also
gets harmed. Now what's beautiful is that
the Sharia
is the manual
for how to maintain both the body and
the soul. This is a great blessing from
Allah upon us that
the Sharia and the Sunnah
recognize the intricate components of the human being,
recognize the balance that's necessary in order to
maintain the human being,
and then they
assign
and prohibit acts based on what's best for
both the body and the soul. Now, we
would not be able to do that ourselves
because the body and the soul are so
intricately
connected that sometimes you even lose sense of
what's what.
And, in fact, the vast majority of human
beings have completely lost sense of what's important
and what's not.
So for us to have a doctrine,
which is revealed by our lord and exemplified
by Rasulullah,
for us to have an example of that
is a great blessing upon us and something
that we should be extremely thankful for.
When the Sharia says that, you know, you
should do X and avoid
Y, anytime you do X and avoid Y,
it's going to be beneficial for the soul
and beneficial for the body.
For example, the Sharia says you should eat
because the body needs to eat, but you
should maintain the amount that you eat so
that you don't make the body lazy and
sick
and a burden on the soul. It's only
by maintaining the appropriate balance that a human
being can succeed in this life
and the Sharia outlines that perfect balance. And
if you want to look at today's world,
you'll see that
many, many, many people have overemphasized
the body to the extent that they've completely
lost
sense of the soul.
So much more importance is made on what
the person wears than who the person is
and what the person drives rather than who
the person is, and where the person sleeps
rather than who the person is,
and what the person eats rather than who
the person is.
Now, one thing that we should recognize, and
it's the major fallacy the world today, meaning
the major mistake that people have made in
in the world today, is that we have
lost sense of the importance of nourishing both
components of who we are. So,
look, when a baby is born,
every person knows that you have to take
care of the baby so that the baby's
body can grow.
Everybody knows it and so much emphasis is
placed on it. Now, of course, the Sharia
accepts that the body is important, that the
body needs to be maintained. But just as
the body needs to grow and it's the
responsibility of the parents to ensure that the
body grows, in the same way when a
baby's born, the baby's soul is extremely immature.
So it also becomes a responsibility of the
parents to ensure that the baby's soul is
grown.
So, these two components of a human being,
they both have to be developed across the
life of the human being. You have to
develop the baby's body and brain and intellect
and you have to develop the baby's soul.
The vast majority of emphasis in this day
and age is placed on the body. How
big, how tall, how fair,
how smart,
all of these are aspects of the body,
but very little emphasis is placed on ensuring
that there is development of the soul.
Now, if a person wants to develop the
body or wants to develop the soul, then
they have to recognize that the nutrients of
the body and the nutrients of the soul
are very different.
The body is nourished from where the body
came and the soul is nourished from where
the soul came.
Very simple point principle. The body is nourished
from where the body came
and the soul is nourished
from where the soul came. So start with
a.
Essentially, the body is composed of dirt. Right?
Or dirt and clay and different components of
earth.
So the body came from dirt and the
body is nourished and protected
through dirt.
For example,
in order to feed the body, you give
the body food. Food comes from where? Food
comes from the ground
or food comes from the animals which also
come from dirt.
Right? The animals that eat the leaves from
the ground, they grow, then they get slaughtered,
then you eat their meat. All of this
is from the same realm.
So, similarly, in order to protect the body
and house the body, you put the body
in a
The house comes from bricks. The brick comes
from the ground.
So the body comes from dirt, and everything
that nourishes the body will also come from
dirt. The food that we eat, the houses
that we live in, the clothes that we
wear, they are all derived from the ground
just as the body is derived from the
ground.
So that's the nourishment of the body.
The nourishment of the soul
comes from where the soul came from. So
where did the soul come from?
The soul came from Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
and so it it's a spirit in essence.
So the spirit will be nourished by things
that are spiritual.
So, for example, what's spiritual?
Salah is spiritual.
Quran is spiritual.
These are the things that nourish the soul.
Now why do we place an emphasis on
this? Because we have become confused in this
day and age and we assume that
the things from the ground will benefit the
soul. And I will guarantee you there is
no way shape or form
that the things from the ground will benefit
the soul. Now, how is that? So some
people think that
if I eat better food, I'll feel more
spiritual.
So they may spend more money on their
food or they may put place more emphasis
on the type of food they eat.
However,
food
will never nourish the soul.
Some people say that if I drive a
nicer car, I'll feel more spiritual. I'll feel
more uplifted.
It doesn't matter what car you drive. It
is not going to spiritually benefit the soul.
Some people feel that if I live in
a better house, I'll feel happier.
There's no there's no correlation with the size
of the house and the happiness of the
person because happiness is a characteristic of the
soul,
and the soul does not get nourished by
things from the ground.
So this is the first fallacy that we
have to appreciate that in this day and
age, we become very deceived by this. We
somehow think that
the more we have from the ground,
the happier will be and there is no
way that we will be happier with more
from the ground. It just does not feed
the soul, it only feeds the body.
And what's interesting is that the more the
body is fed,
the more it grows.
And the more it grows, the more it
represses the soul.
You can think of it this way. It's
a it's a box.
The human being is a box.
It has a component that's body. It has
a component that's soul. There's only so much
space in the box.
If you overgrow the body, then the soul
gets compressed and pushed to the side. And
in this day and age, all this emphasis
on body has resulted in people becoming
very emphasis over placing an overemphasis on the
body and the soul becoming
extremely marginalized in this day and age, which
then basically means what? People become
like their bodies, which is animalistic, and then
you see that animalistic desires begin to take
over a person as they begin to live
the life of the body repressing the soul.
This is the general principle of who we
are. So very in just in a very
in a nutshell, we are composed of a
body and a soul.
The body is temporary. The soul is permanent.
The body will be placed in the grave
and will disintegrate. The soul will move on
to the next world. This the body has
to be maintained and the Sharia establishes its
maintenance. However,
anytime the body is overemphasized,
we marginalize the soul. And when we marginalize
the soul, it is at the cost of
our own spirituality.
Now, unfortunately,
we spend the vast majority of our lives
and the vast majority of the year
completely out of balance.
Completely out of balance. We put all this
emphasis on what we eat. We put all
this emphasis on what we wear. We put
all this emphasis on where we live. We
put all this emphasis on what we drive.
And then
what ends up happening is over time, we
marginalize marginalize
marginalize the soul until the soul is barely
hanging on, you know, by a fine thread.
And we feed the soul, but we feed
it very little.
A quick salah
with very short and sujood,
minimal interaction with the Quran,
limited good company.
So the soul no. Even though we're Muslim
and we put an emphasis on the soul,
the soul becomes extremely marginalized. Now with that
background, then you can say that one of
the great blessings of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
is that he allows us to reformat
ourselves once a year once a year.
It's like a computer. You know, a computer,
you turn it on, turn it off, turn
it on, turn it off, you interact with
the outside world and eventually over time you
pick up viruses, you pick up all this
bloatware and all these other things that slow
the computer down.
Now you can do this, you know, you
can have these little search bots that go
through and remove the files that don't belong,
but eventually,
if you don't if you aren't careful, you
need to completely reboot the system. So what
do you do? You just basically
wipe out the hard drive and start over.
So in the same way, Allah
gives us a chance to completely reboot,
and that comes in the month of Ramadan.
It's a huge blessing of Allah
And you see the construct in the month
of Ramadan
reverses the mistake that we've made the other
11 months.
Now what happens in the month of Ramadan?
Very, very simple. So rule number 1,
no eating from dawn to dusk.
Right? No eating throughout the daylight.
Now rule number 2, no drinking. Rule number
3, no marital relations.
That's it. That's the summary of the month
of Ramadan.
But what does that do? Its effect is
far reaching.
By doing that, the body now loses
its overemphasis.
So, now, there's a shift in balance. Before,
when the emphasis was on food and drink
and sleep,
the body was
growing, growing, growing and took control.
Once you remove food and you remove drink,
right, and you remove sleep because of the
schedule that a person has to keep, the
body now loses its fuel
and the body slowly over time begins to,
well, you know, begins to come back down
to what it should be, which is a
marginalized
sideshow.
So now what happens? This becomes like a
snowball effect.
Slowly, over time, the spirit gets revived and
the body becomes
marginalized as it should be.
Such so much so that by the time
the person reaches the end of Ramadan,
they come out completely reset.
Those last days of Ramadan,
Allah begins
to
free the people that had bound themselves to
the hellfire. Now how are they bound themselves?
They let their bodies take control. Their bodies
were driving what they did. They became animals.
They began to pursue whatever their eyes saw.
They began to pursue whatever they thought in
their mind. They began to do things that
they know they shouldn't be doing. So essentially,
the person was driving themselves in the direction
of hellfire because the body is the vehicle
that control where you go.
So what happens is the person gets a
chance to completely reset.
That's the essence of this month that is
upon us.