al-Raghib al-Isfahani #33 – THESE Beliefs and Actions Lead To Corruption

then a lot of as for HANA, he talks about the four stages to corrupt your nobility or to lose or take away your ability to act ethically, okay? So they're complete mirror images of the four stages to develop your nobility. So the first two are related to belief. And the second two are related to your actions and your habits. So the first stage is delusion. Okay. And this is the opposite of believing in good things, right to be deluded is to have your beliefs shaped by your own corrupting kind of self interest, right? You have a, you know, you have a conflict of interest and what beliefs you're taking on. And we brought up the example previously of Prophethood in the Christian

tradition, and how it's a very, very loose concept. Okay. Is there a conflict of interest for somebody identifying themselves as a prophet? Yeah, there is because if someone says that they're a prophet, then guess what, they're going to be treated differently, they're going to be given more respect from the community and etc, etc. Which is why then we find, okay, 1015 years later, down the road, there's a huge scandal this person was you know, having extramarital affairs, and this person was doing all this shady stuff, taking money from people. Oh, why? Why? Because he was deluded, he was deluded in the first place. His beliefs were rooted in his own personal, narrow, narrow material

interests, not only were they not based in proof, but they were, they were self serving, right. And so delusion is the first stage to corrupt someone's nobility and deny or invalidate their ability or capacity to act ethically. The second is conformity, okay, doing things just because everybody else is doing it. And this is something that we struggle with, as a Muslim community with lots of Muslims, for better or for worse, their beliefs. And their practices are based off of conformity, right? You take certain Muslim populations, nobody prays, somebody starts praying, wait a second, what are you doing? Right? It's seen as suspicious, because the assumption is that you better be

doing something that everybody else is doing, you got to get with the program, you're in a Muslim community, or a community of you know, culturally Muslim, so let's say, and nobody wears hijab, someone starts wearing hijab. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Why are you getting so extreme? Right? We have this in certain sectors of the Muslim community, or at least you know, of the Muslim world, right? So this is just conformity. We're not talking about nobody cares. What does a lot there's a lot of proof of this action or doesn't approve of this action. What did he say about this action? Or what did he say about this other action? Right? That's not the register that we're

operating on. We're only looking around us and saying, Well, what's he doing? Or what are they doing? Right? We have this other, you know, similar problem when it comes to our relationship to the material world, everybody else's children are becoming doctors and lawyers and engineers, nobody's becoming social workers. No one's becoming any man. No one is, you know, doing nonprofit management, right? Something that would be really, really important for the operation. MSG is across the country. Everybody's just looking around, what's everybody else doing? Oh, they're doing it and that's okay. And that's not to completely demonize that way of thinking there might be situations

where it actually will save us from falling into error, but to base our beliefs on those sorts of things as an error. We don't we have to have higher standards for the things that we believe than simply while everybody else believes the final two stages relating to action for depleting our nobility or whittling away our ability or capacity to act ethically has to do with heedlessness and idleness Okay, so this is somebody who they're lazy, right? They have the ability, but they just sit around, they don't apply themselves. They're healthy and this is where the Hadith take advantage of five before five comes in. Right? You have the wealth you have you're comfortable you have the time

you have the ability but you're just not doing anything. Okay, this is something that it's just a matter of time and so this is going to be a an erosive and corrosive effect on your soul. And then finally, after the stage of heedlessness is actual advice, so you're not just not doing good. Now you're actually actively doing evil, you've developed bad habits, you're going to the bar, you're watching things that you shouldn't be watching right and once vise has taken hold, then you've pretty much severely compromised and handicaps your nobility and your capacity to act ethically.