al-Raghib al-Isfahani #14 – PurifyThe Self

So after all this preparatory work around wells for hunting gets into, okay, how are we going to do it? What? How are we going to obtain these higher qualities, these elite skills that are going to qualify us make us eligible and even rightfully deserving of this lofty status of the Khalifa, the whole effect of Allah on this earth are in this creation, He identifies four major things, and he's going to continue unpacking them throughout the book, but in general, the first is education, okay, we're going to purify the self through education. The second is purifying the self through restraint. And this is in line with the Hadith of the Prophet Mohammed Salah Saddam, somebody came

to him and they asked him for one thing that he could do that could make Allah love him and the people love him. And he replied, is had been dunya you had book Allah was her femur and the nurse you have brokenness, that if you abstain from what is in the dunya, you only take what you need, right? It's not that extreme asceticism we were talking about before, it's a moderate aestheticism, you only take what you need, then Allah will love you. And when you abstain from what belongs to other people, right? Okay, you're invited to somebody else's house. They prepare food for you, you take modestly you accept the food that they give you. Okay? That's what we're talking about. You

don't you don't crush the whole plate and then say, what's next? What else you got? Start going through their cupboards and opening their fridge, right? We're talking about but you also don't reject the food entirely. Right? You don't say no, no harm the good? No, thank you. No, no, there's two extremes. So you take modestly from what belongs to other people, you restrain you abstain, you refrain, then the people will love you. So these are two things, two out of four, we have education, and we have restraint. Then we have patients, we're going to refine the self through patients and the scholars have talked a lot about patients to talk about three different types of patients,

there's patients with, there's the obvious patients that we think which is patients in the face of hardship or calamities, okay, you're injured, you lose somebody close to you, you lose your job, these sorts of things patient with the decree of Allah subhanaw taala. Like, that's definitely something. But there's also other types of patients, there's patience and worship, right? Being patient in your prayer. That's hard. For most of us, prayer is not the most exciting thing in our day. That's just the reality. But waking yourself up for fetcher, every single day, despite that requires a certain amount of patience. So these are the things and we'll talk more about them in

detail later on in sha Allah, but this is the patients that we're talking about refining yourself, getting ourselves moving ourselves towards Khilafah, through education through restraint through patience, and then finally through justice, because it makes complete intuitive sense that there's no possibility that we could administer or manage this creation and give every single creature its due right without a strong sense of justice. So these are the four the four things these are the four main tools or avenues through which that were that the author also Hani is going to tell us about refining yourself through education through restraint through patience and through justice.