Ismail Kamdar – Excelling at Dunya and Din
AI: Summary ©
The importance of balancing deen and d 85% in Islam is being taught through a series of books and principles. prioritizing obeying Allah's priorities, finding happiness, and preserving the mind is essential in achieving success. The sharia is designed to prevent distraction, competition, and distraction, and is linked to the second principle of not wanting to buy into chronic behavior. The principles of balancing d term and d union are also discussed, and the sharia is designed to ensure everyone has a sound mind and grow their mind, while avoiding distraction, competition, and distraction. The principles apply to one's life and are linked to the second principle of not wanting to buy into chronic behavior.
AI: Summary ©
I seek refuge with Allah
from
Satan the accursed.
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the
Merciful.
وَمِنَ النَّاسِ مَنْ يَقُولُ رَبَّنَا آتِنَا فِي الدُّنْيَا
وَمَا لَهُ فِي الْآخِرَةِ مِنْ خَلَاقًا وَمِنْهُمْ مَنْ
يَقُولُ رَبَّنَا آتِنَا فِي الدُّنْيَا حَسَنًا وَفِي الْآخِرَةِ
حَسَنًا وَقِنَا عَذَابَ النَّارِ Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala says in surah al-Baqarah, that amongst
the people there are those who make dua
and they say, O Allah give me of
this world.
Allah says they have nothing of the afterlife.
And then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says
there are those who make dua and they
say, O Allah give me the best of
this world and the best of the next
world and save me from the hellfire.
These two verses, verses 202 and 201 of
surah al-Baqarah summarize for us the Islamic
perspective on balancing deen and dunya.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala senses those who
only ask for the dunya.
But he doesn't call on us to only
ask for the akhirah.
He calls on us to ask for وَفِي
الدُّنْيَا حَسَنًا وَفِي الْآخِرَةِ حَسَنًا The best of
this world and the best of the next
world.
Today will be the final lecture on our
theme of finding balance.
And the topic of today is how do
we balance between deen and dunya?
How do we balance between the worldly life
and prioritizing our religion?
This is perhaps the most common question we
get when it comes to balance.
A lot of people ask, how do I
balance?
What even is balance?
And let's start with that.
When people ask, how do I balance deen
and dunya?
In every person's mind, the word balance means
something else.
For one person, balance may mean, I'm working
8 hours a day, do I need to
do 8 hours of ibadah a day to
balance?
For somebody else, it may be, what's the
minimum ibadah I need to do while exiling
in dunya?
Somebody else may think, what's the minimum dunya
I need while exiling in ibadah?
And for some people, it's like having, they
call it a halal-haram ratio.
I have done this much haram in a
day, let me balance it out with some
halal.
People have strange ideas.
People have their own ideas of what is
balance.
When you go back to surah al-baqarah,
verses 200 and 201, Allah doesn't tell us
to do the bare minimum of dunya or
the bare minimum of deen.
He tells us to seek the best of
both worlds.
And when we look at the lives of
the early Muslims, they excelled in deen and
dunya.
And so even though our topic is balancing
deen and dunya, let's switch it up a
bit and say, in Islam, finding balance between
deen and dunya is actually learning how to
excel at both deen and dunya.
Learning how to get the best of both
worlds.
How to get fit dunya hasana wa fil
akhirati hasana.
It's not either or.
Islam doesn't call on us to be monks.
It doesn't call on us to abandon marriage,
abandon work, abandon business, abandon society, to go
sit in the mountains and worship Allah all
day.
No, it calls on us to excel in
every aspect of life.
Look at the first generation of Muslims.
Abdul Rahman ibn Auf is from the Ashara
Mubashara.
He was given the glad tidings of Jannah.
He excelled in deen.
He also was a multi-millionaire.
He excelled in dunya.
Khalid ibn Walid was the sword of Allah.
His sword was his deen and his dunya.
It was through his sword, he attained the
pleasure of Allah.
It was through his sword, he attained his
status in this dunya as well.
We see that the sahaba excelled in everything
to such an extent that within one generation,
they went from being a group of small
tribes in Arabia to being a world superpower.
And within a hundred years, the Muslim world
was a global dominating power.
It was the leading civilization of the world.
So clearly, balancing deen and dunya in Islam
doesn't mean that you have to compromise.
It means you need to prioritize your ibadah.
It means your relationship with Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala should be number one.
But it doesn't mean that you have to
aim for lesser in this world.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to
do well in business.
You shouldn't try to have a good family
life.
You shouldn't try to build a strong civilization.
Rather, you should do all of that for
the sake of Allah.
You should do all of that for the
pleasure of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
To understand better the concept of balancing between
deen and dunya, earlier this week, I decided
to consult one of the earliest books on
this topic.
Adabat Dunya wa Deen by Abu Hassan Al
Mawadi.
By the way, this book has very recently
been translated to English and it's available here
at the bookshop.
Highly recommend buying a copy and reading the
translation.
Adabat Dunya wa Deen, Ethics of this World
and the Religion, is an absolute masterpiece.
An absolute masterpiece by Abu Hassan Al Mawadi.
Just to give you an idea of who
this author is and when he lived and
why he wrote this book.
Abu Hassan Al Mawadi was a scholar of
Islam 1,000 years ago.
1,000 years ago in Baghdad in the
Abbasid Empire.
This is the golden age of the Abbasid
Empire.
He lives in a very different world from
us.
Today, Muslims are at the bottom politically and
economically.
We are going through a rough patch as
an ummah.
At the time of Mawadi, Muslims were the
global superpower.
They were the most powerful nation on earth.
And he lived in the most powerful city
on earth.
And he was a great scholar of that
generation and of that world.
And at the time when Muslims were on
top, when Muslims were leading the world, he
writes a book on how to balance between
Deen and Dunya.
Which actually when you read the book, it's
about how to excel in both Deen and
Dunya.
How to be the best in both worlds.
And he himself was an example of this.
He is one of the great polymaths and
scholars of that generation.
His most famous book, Ahkama Sultania, is the
book on Islamic political theory.
Right until today, this is the main work
on how does a khilafat function.
What is the role of the khalifa?
What is the role of the qadr?
How does sharia work as a political system?
He wrote the main book on that topic.
His book Adabat Dunya Wa Deen, not as
well known, but it is perhaps the most
classical work we have that focuses entirely on
this topic.
The topic of the book Adabat Dunya Wa
Deen is how do we find balance?
How do we find happiness?
And how do we get the best of
both worlds?
How do we get the best of both
worlds?
And today I want to share with you
just four principles from this book.
Right?
I'll go over principle number four first and
then I'll go over the first three.
The fourth principle that he mentioned in chapter
three of the book is the importance of
prioritizing ibadat.
That our lives should be built around our
ibadat.
So we should be praying five times a
day, worshipping Allah, making our duas, doing our
adhkar.
All of this is now in our priority.
And if we prioritize this, we will find
time for everything else.
We'll find barakah in everything else and everything
else will fall into place.
So prioritizing ibadat, this is most important.
Umar ibn Abdulaziz Rahimullah mentioned that if you
take care of your afterlife, Allah will take
care of your dunya.
You take care of your afterlife, Allah will
take care of your dunya.
And so this is really the balance between
dunya and dunya.
You prioritize worshipping Allah, you prioritize obeying Allah,
and Allah will help you with your dunya
needs.
Now let's jump into the next part of
the book.
What's interesting about adabat dunya with dunya.
When you think about a book written about
balancing dunya and dunya, you may be thinking
like it's going to focus primarily on ibadat,
it's going to focus primarily on what's the
bare minimum you need to do to get
by in the dunya.
Instead, what you find in this book are
principles that if you apply them to your
life, the same principles will help you to
do well in both dunya and dunya.
The same principles will help you to do
well in both dunya and dunya.
I want to go over the first three
principles in this book.
And we apply these three principles to our
life, we excel in both worlds.
The first principle, the first chapter of this
book is dedicated to the aql, the intellect,
your mind.
Al Mawardi says the greatest gift Allah has
given you is your brain.
Use it, develop it.
This is what's going to save you.
This is what's going to help you.
He mentions the verses in the Quran that
the people who end up in the hellfire,
what do they say?
They say if only we listened or used
our brains, we wouldn't end up in the
hellfire.
If only we listened or used our brains,
we wouldn't end up in the hellfire.
And so Al Mawardi argues that from a
dini perspective, using your mind is what leads
you to Allah.
If you are truly intellectual, if you truly
look at the world properly and analyze the
books properly, you will gain conviction in Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala, you will find the
true religion, you will dedicate your life to
it, you will study it.
Your intellect should lead you to Allah.
That is the true and correct usage of
intellect.
But he says the intellect is also necessary
for succeeding in dunya.
How do you succeed in business?
Intellect.
How do you succeed in a career?
Your intellect.
How do you succeed in your studies?
Your intellect.
Your brain is your most important thing.
If you use it properly, you succeed at
din and dunya.
And there are many levels to this.
Firstly, there's acknowledging your brain.
Then there's protecting your brain, for example, from
alcohol and drugs and these things that ruin
it.
Nowadays they're protecting your brain from brain rot,
from content that makes you stupider, that the
internet is full of, right?
And then there's nourishing the brain, nurturing the
brain, developing your intellect.
You see, in Islam, we don't buy into
this idea that you're just born with a
certain level of intellect and you just stay
there.
There are ways to increase your intelligence.
There are ways to nourish your brain, to
grow more intelligent.
And so he advises people to do this.
Now we go back to the goals of
the sharia.
It's very interesting.
The goal of the sharia is the preservation
of the mind.
If you do not have a sound mind,
you will not succeed in din or dunya.
Your brain is necessary for succeeding in both
life.
And so the entire sharia is built around
ensuring that we are all sound of mind,
that we are all sound of mind.
Now, in the same chapter, Allah brings up
the second principle.
The second principle is linked to the first
principle.
So they're in one chapter, right?
The second principle is don't follow your desires.
Don't follow your desires.
And he puts the intellect against the desires.
He says there are two types of people
in the world.
Those who follow their brains and those who
follow their desires.
You have to choose to be from those
who follow your brains.
Simple example.
You've been tempted into zina.
Imagine a person who's been married for many
years.
They've built up a happy home, a beautiful
family.
And there's temptation to commit zina.
People who blindly follow their desires, they will
take that moment of zina and destroy a
lifetime of happiness.
People who use their brains will know that
it's not worth destroying my happiness and my
family and my home for a moment of
pleasure.
He says at the time of temptation, your
intellect is what saves you.
It stops you from making stupid decisions.
And stupid decisions, he says, are almost always
built upon desire.
Every impulsive decision that people make is based
upon desire.
In the moment, you take a shortcut in
business and it ruins your entire career.
You mess up your marriage and it ruins
your entire reputation and family life.
He says to succeed at deen and dunya,
you must not follow your desires.
People who don't follow their desires, they have
better reputations.
They have better standing in society.
They have better families.
They have altogether a better dunya.
By the way, succeeding in dunya and Islam
does not necessarily mean being wealthy.
It means having a fulfilling life, a good
family, a good reputation, a good standing in
society.
All of this is more important than being
wealthy.
Success in dunya does not necessarily mean wealth.
So these are the first two principles that
I want to discuss and these are very
important principles for us today.
With our younger generation, they are living in
a time where the internet and the content
that they are consuming on the internet, on
TikTok and YouTube Shorts and things like this,
it's actually called brain rot.
This is the actual term people use, brain
rot.
Why?
It is literally making them stupider.
It is making them dumber.
You will find so many people today believe
the dumbest and stupidest things because their minds
are not being developed properly.
We are in danger of a generation that
don't know how to think.
A generation who don't know how to read.
A generation who cannot think for themselves.
And now we have AI coming in and
they are now outsourcing their thinking to the
AI.
Their brains are going to get even lazier.
It is necessary that as this new technology
comes in, we adapt it ethically and we
don't allow it to make us lose our
most important faculty which is our minds.
Likewise, the modern world is also designed to
make you chase your impulsive desires.
It's all about instant gratification, getting what you
want right now.
And many young people have not gained the
sense of delayed gratification, of working hard to
get something later.
I'll give you one example that has become
very common in our community.
A lot of young men don't want to
work hard over a 10 or 20 year
period to build themselves up.
They want to become millionaires within a year.
And if they can't find a way to
do that, they don't want to even bother
working.
This is very dangerous.
If more and more young people are thinking
like this, we are not going to have
real men leading the next generation.
If you want to be successful at anything,
you have to dedicate 10, 20, 30 years
of your life to it.
But people today are so accustomed to instant
gratification that their lives just become servants of
their desires without any ambition, without any work
ethic, without the ability to do well in
life.
So we have to be very careful in
what we are allowing the next generation to
consume and how it is shaping their minds.
These principles are listed a thousand years ago
by Al-Mawardi as the necessary principles for
succeeding in both deen and dunya.
Grow your intellect, control your desires.
Today we have a crisis in both areas.
We have a crisis of intellect, we have
a crisis of desires.
We need to find ways to make sure
that the next generation is nurturing their intellect
and controlling their desires.
And that's a discussion for another time.
But at least for ourselves, let us keep
these two principles in mind.
You want to please Allah, nourish your minds
and control your desires.
You want to succeed in this world, nourish
your minds and control your desires.
The third principle that Al-Mawardi mentions in
his book builds upon the first principle.
The first principle is to use your mind.
What's the main way that you use your
mind and grow your mind?
You seek knowledge.
And so principle number three in this book
for success in deen and dunya is to
be a lifelong learner.
Never stop learning.
Now I want to make an important distinction
here.
One of the problems in our times in
the way we look at knowledge is that
we make a distinction between what we call
deeni and dunya knowledge or religious and secular
knowledge.
This distinction does not exist in Islam.
There's no distinction in Islam between worldly and
religious knowledge.
Historically, the great scholars of the early generations
were polymaths.
Many of them when you read their biographies
you will find they were scholars of hadith,
tafsir, fiqh, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, geography.
They didn't distinguish.
For them beneficial knowledge is beneficial knowledge in
all its fields.
Even if you look at people like Imam
Abu Hanifa, he was yes a master of
fiqh but he also was a master businessman
who excelled in business.
He did not see knowledge as something where
you have these distinctions that oh this is
deeni knowledge and this is worldly knowledge.
No.
Instead in Islam, knowledge is divided into three
categories.
Number one, beneficial knowledge.
And we should seek all beneficial knowledge whether
it benefits us in deen or dunya or
both.
We should seek all beneficial knowledge.
Number two, trivial knowledge.
Knowledge that does not benefit.
For example, memorizing the lives of all these
movie stars and all their drama and what's
going on.
There's no benefit to that.
Muslims should not seek that.
They should not worry about that.
That's not important.
Number three is harmful knowledge.
Harmful knowledge.
What is harmful knowledge?
Historically the example they would give is learning
how to do magic.
Right?
How to do sihab.
Today we would add to that learning how
to manipulate people.
Learning how to con people.
This is dangerous knowledge.
You learn this, you are tempted to do
evil.
So it's better not to learn it at
all.
So as Muslims, when we look at a
topic, we shouldn't go into this concept of
is this religious or is this secular.
Rather we should ask ourselves is this beneficial.
If it's beneficial to you, learn it.
Doesn't matter whether that benefit seems to be
worldly or religious.
If it's beneficial, you should learn it.
So Umar Ali makes an interesting point in
this chapter.
He says that knowledge is more valuable than
money, than wealth.
And he gives two reasons why.
Reason one, when you die, your money is
over.
It's gone to other people's inheritance.
But your knowledge continues to benefit people.
Like how we still benefiting from his knowledge
one thousand years later.
Point number two, how much money you earn
in your life is a matter of qadrullah.
Nobody has control over how much money you
earn in your life.
That is qadr.
Right?
And he mentions this point in the book
that money is a matter of qadr but
you do have a choice in how much
knowledge you gain.
That's in your control.
And so he says knowledge leads to distinction.
It leads to nobility.
It leads to high status in society.
It leads to the best of both worlds.
And so he says if you want to
be successful in deen, seek knowledge.
If you want to be successful in dunya,
seek knowledge.
So this is what I found very fascinating
about this book.
I opened this book to see how do
we balance between deen and dunya.
Instead you find that the same principles for
excelling in dunya are the same principles for
excelling in deen.
And you just have to apply the same
principles and you can do well in both
with the help of Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala.
And so to summarize, al-Mawardi in his
book adab al-dunya wa al-deen, he
begins the book in the first three chapters
with four principles on how to succeed at
both deen and dunya.
Number one is to nourish your intellect, to
use your brains.
Allah gave you a brain, use it.
Number two, to control your desires.
Do not allow impulsive desires to ruin your
life.
Keep it under control.
Number three, seek knowledge from the cradle to
the grave.
Be a lifelong learner and you will succeed
in both worlds.
And number four, prioritize your ibadah.
Make time to worship Allah.
Allah will put barakah in everything else.
If we follow these four principles, we don't
need to worry about balancing deen and dunya.
We will excel at both deen and dunya
with the help of Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala if that is what Allah willed for
us.
And we concluded how we began with that
verse from surah al-Baqarah, that dua, that
important dua that we make every week.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told us in
the Qur'an that for amongst mankind, there
are those who say, O Allah, give me
of this world and they have nothing of
the afterlife.
But for amongst mankind, there are those who
say, O Allah, give me the best of
this world and the best of the afterlife
and save us from the hellfire.
And we ask Allah to do that.
We ask Allah.
Al Fatiha.