al-Raghib al-Isfahani #19 – The Importance of Self Purification

So by this point, I thought it was funny. He's told us the four things that we need to train ourselves on or subject ourselves to, in order to develop ourselves. If we want to get to this level of effort, we need to train ourselves with education so that we develop wisdom. We need to train ourselves with restraint so that we develop generosity, we need to train ourselves with patience, so that we develop bravery, courage, forbearance and contentment, that we need to train ourselves to have an eye for justice so that we develop SN and excellence towards everything and the logo. So he wants to stress at this point that there is no possible way that you're going to become a Halifa,

that you're going to be eligible for this type of work unless you go through this process of self reform, that there's no possible way to do it to be a leader without purifying yourself, he compares it to the first he draws on the Quran, right? What is one of the first things that Eliza gel says what route is a fragile, right? He says to the Prophet alayhi salatu salam, he says that you have to purify yourself. And there's various interpretations among them of sad and about what exactly that means. But there's this this aspect of self purification before you can take the message or the duty out towards others. Because at the end of the day, it's as if, if you have a pure vessel, it's going

to affect the contents of your vessel. And if your vessel is contaminated, it's going to contaminate the contents of that vessel, right? If you have a glass and the glass is, you haven't washed it in a long time. It's got streaks and stains and bits of food and things like that on the inside, then you put water into it, okay, what's gonna happen to the water, it's gonna get contaminated by whatever's in the glass, right? So that's you, you're the glass, your heart, your soul is the glass. Don't think that you're going to assume this leadership role. A lot of us make this mistake, especially in the Muslim community. When it comes to activism. We want to get into this activist role. We want to

start rubbing elbows with the, you know, the legislators and the community leaders and the people out on the street doing this work doing that work doing this work, and we haven't purified ourselves. We haven't cleaned our glass, what do you think's gonna happen? Do you think that you're really going to be able to lead and serve the people if you haven't purified yourself? I'm a history guy read the history of social movements, the United States of America, anybody who got big or started doing really good work, what was their downfall, nine times out of 10 it was lack of discipline, if you can be bought, if you can be bribed. If you can be tempted, then you are useless.

You're useless to the Ummah, you're useless to the world, you're not ready for, for Khilafah you're not ready to take on this role. You're not ready to be an activist out in the streets because it's going to come, it's going to come people who don't want your mission to succeed or people who want to undermine you, they're going to tempt you, they're going to try to bribe you, they're going to try to buy so do yourself a favor before you put yourself into the ring before you throw your hat in the ring and get into the arena purify yourself, purify yourself so that you can withstand that sort of pressure, that sort of temptation or not, because if you get into it too early, and then somebody

ends up messing with you because you haven't done the work. You haven't discipline yourself, then it's going to look like oh, that's the Muslims. This is a slam and you're going to set us back even further.