al-Raghib al-Isfahani #17 – Patience

So Raghu lasagna, he says you have to train yourself with education so that you develop wisdom. And you have to train yourself with restraint so that you're able to develop generosity. And the third thing he says is that you have to train yourself with patience so that you can develop bravery, courage, and some other things as well like forbearance and, and contentment. So I guess there's two prongs to this one. So in one sense, if you patience is something that's easier to achieve than forbearance and contentment, why? Because patients you can be burning up on the inside, but patience is controlling your outside, right? If somebody cuts you off on the road, somebody insults you, in

the comment section of YouTube or something like this, right? Maybe you're boiling on the inside, but you can control yourself, you're not going to say something back, you're going to make sure that you conduct yourself in an appropriate way. It's how you behave. But you're still boiling on the inside, right? So forbearance has to do with having a higher boiling point, let's say right, so your, it has to do with what happens up front? How quickly do you get pushed to that point where you're boiling and seething and rage, right. So if you're able to train yourself with patience, eventually you're going to get good at it. Because anything that you do over and over as practice,

you're gonna get good at it. And so you're going to develop forbearance and forbearance means that you're not going to be rattled as easily, you're not going to be made angry as easily, you're going to have a much longer rope and a lot more ability to sustain the harms from people or, you know, insults from people and things like that. It's also gonna help you on the back end, because after things happen, you're going to be much more content with whatever happens. So if you train yourself on patience, something happens, your car breaks down, or you lose your job or relationship falls apart. Or you're estranged from this person or that person. It's not because of your sins. It's not

because you did anything in particularly wrong or bad. But this is just what happened as part of life. Okay, if you train yourself on patience and your patience, while you're going through it, you're going to have a higher capacity to be content after everything is said and done. So you know, this is from a law, this is what allowed the Creed for me, and I'm not going to spend my time wondering what could have been, right? That's kind of the opposite of contentment, like, Oh, if only I had, oh, well, it could have been this way it could have turned out that way. You could be patient and still succumb to that sort of thinking. But if you're content, then you're not going to open

those doors, you're going to be like, Okay, this is what happened for a reason patients. Okay, so that was the first prong develop, training yourself on patience, develops forbearance and develops contentment. And contentment is the source of a whole bunch of virtues like when and especially when it comes to theology, like being content with Allah's decree, being able to contextualize the evil and the hardship that comes in life, all these sorts of things, being able to delay gratification as a huge one. Contentment is an essential tool for that and being able to deal with disappointment and not getting what you want. Contentment is the the basis of all those sorts of things. And then also

patience in another avenue patience develops bravery, and it develops courage, how we might think like, how is that possible, because you have to be patient with other people's harm. If you're going to stand up for what's right saying about it, you see something happen on the street, maybe you see somebody walking up on their on their spouse, or, or their kid or somebody is getting in a fight on the street or something like that, you can keep walking, okay, that's kind of the easy way out, because you don't have the patience to deal with what's going to happen if you get involved, right? If you step in, you're gonna have to deal with people their words, you might have to deal with

physical violence, you might have to keep your temper under control, you might be provoked, right? So if you're able to train yourself on patience, now you're able to develop that courage and that bravery to say, This is my responsibility. Oppression is happening right now, this is wrong. And somebody's got to stop it. And I'm here and I'm able, and I'm going to stop, right a lot of people have an incorrect sort of understanding of what patience is, I think patience is just being meek and be like, Oh, whatever happens, there's a there's a dimension of patience, where you have to be out there putting people in their place. Yes, if somebody steps out of line we have that happened.

Sometimes in the West, somebody comes in, they snatch off somebody's hijab, or somebody tries to cause problems for our Muslim sisters. If you're a Muslim man, and you're on the street, and you see that sort of thing happening, guess what, it's your responsibility, you've got to step in. And you've got to stop that sort of thing from happening. And let people know that there is a consequence to be had that if they're going to act in that certain way, that takes patience, right. So patience develops this courage and it develops this generosity doesn't mean that we're crazy. It doesn't mean that we're vigilantes, everything has rules and boundaries and its proper context. But

you need to have patience, if you're going to be able to deal with those sorts of situations and the consequences and the fallout of getting involved in those sorts of situations. Somebody's got to do it. At the end of the day, there are bad people in the world. Or if we don't want to say bad people, good people, there are people who do horrible, horrible things. There's people who tried to kidnap children and then like traffic them and you know, pimp them out and this stuff happens is so you know, you can go on social media and see video

It was happening every every day who's going to step in? Who's going to do it? It should be Muslims. It should be somebody who's patient who has the patience and who is trained themselves on patients so that they develop that courage and that bravery to step in and do the right thing.