al-Raghib al-Isfahani #35 – The Two Tools Everyone Needs

A lot of us Rouhani talks about the prerequisites to developing your nobility. What are sort of the tools of the trade? What are the kinds of things that you need to have on hand in order to develop yourself and to change? There's two main ones that he identifies. The first is what we could translate as docility being docile in the literal, older sense of the word. And the second has to do with your intention. So what do we mean by being docile, we mean, somebody who's ready to receive instruction, somebody who is humble enough to be pliable to change, if you think you've got it all figured out already. If you think that you're good, and you're not gonna want to change, and you're

not going to be able to get any better, right? The first step is to realize that there's better out there, there's more out there that you yourself could be doing better, and to actually then nurture within yourself that desire to want to to attain to that better station, right? If you think that you're just totally cool, then you're never going to want to change and why should you within this within being docile is being as we said, humble, realizing that the truth is not just inside of you. It's outside of you. It's spread among the people, but also to be generous and charitable. And this has to do with a lot of how we interact with our teachers. Okay, we need to strike a balance between

being overly critical and being insufficiently critical. And regretfully, in a Muslim community, we see that we exist on each extreme, often, right? So you have some people who are so extreme in their criticism that everything's a refutation. We see this and you know, we joke, the PDF comes out about this person and that person, right? Every look, you'll have people who are combing, you know, someone's YouTube channel for the slightest misstep or he's misspoke here, he was wrong about something, you know, or whatever, and we're hypercritical about people. And so you can't take anything from this individual. You know, I've heard some people say, you can't even take chocolate

from them. You know, that's extreme. And it's like, That's extreme criticism. If you have that logic, you're never going to find anybody to benefit from and you're never going to find anybody as a teacher or an instructor who can influence you and who can change you and can who can help you develop. And that's its own thing, because this often has to do with actually protecting yourself from having to change. But that's another video the other extreme that we have. And we see this in some circles, especially circles of extreme Sufism, where we have a complete, uncritical, an extreme ly insufficient amount of criticism or wherewithal when it comes to leaders. And this leads to

spiritual abuse, right? Nobody's above being questioned, nobody's above, you know, you have certain, you know, villages. And you know, where it's very cult like behavior. The shape is telling everybody who to marry, and everybody what their job should be, and everybody, you know, naming all the kids and, you know, we're not just talking about like a cute little tradition, here. We're talking about authoritarian control. And then it's just a matter of time, a couple of decades pass, and then it comes out that there was sexual scandal, or there was financial scandal, or there was spiritual abuse, or, or manipulation or psychological abuse, or even physical torture sometimes, right. And

this is at the other extreme, right, we can't be so uncritical of our teachers that we just imagine that they can't ever do any wrong. And you know, the shake has always, you know, he's always playing chess, and we're just playing checkers and stop for a while. I can't question anything. That's the extreme fe, that's extreme. There's a sweet spot in the middle between these two extremes, right. And when we were in Medina, we asked lots of questions. And we wouldn't always get satisfactory answers to our questions, because not everybody is going to know everything, and some people are going to be wrong, right? So if somebody who is susceptible to this sort of extremist thinking, you

know, either they're going to say, well, that's what he said, and we can't question it, right? Even if he's wrong, or on the other extreme, they're gonna say, Oh, this guy's worthless. We can't take any friends. He's off the path. And he's off the the men hedge and, you know, we need to put his name on blast on social media or make a video about him, right? These are two extremes. The students who are mature the students who were most dedicated to fixing themselves and developing themselves, they would realize when they got a bad answer from the sheikh, and they would just move on, they would realize, okay, that's not right, or that's not the best answer, or the sheikh doesn't really

seem to know what he's talking about in this particular instance. All right. Next question. You move on, right? And if you have that burning question that you have, maybe you need to go to somebody else, and maybe you need to go around, but you can still benefit from multiple people. Right. So this is one of the essential parts of being docile. It doesn't mean being naive, right? It means having the sweet spot between being generous and charitable on one hand, but being a certain amount of of critical and reasonable amount of criticism on the other hand, and the final thing is that for being docile, it means being courageous because you're signing yourself up the change and it's not

easy to change. A lot of people they become attached to who they were right and especially other people around you are attached to the you who used to be right so that you'll see that when you start changing yourself.

People are going to be like, well, you think you're better than us, you think you're better than everybody else. You're making all these changes. You think you're pious, you think you're righteous, they don't want you to change. They're attached to who you used to be. And they want you to keep being that pert, that old person that you've been forever, so that you vindicate them. And they don't have to change, right? It takes courage to be like, You know what, I'm going to be better than that. That doesn't mean that you're judgmental doesn't mean that you're talking down to other people and be like, why you guys are losers. I'm doing all these things in my life and you're not doing

anything. It doesn't mean that but it means having the courage to be able to walk your own path, whether other people approve of you or not. All of this comes to the first major prerequisite of being a good student, somebody who is going to benefit and develop their nobility and that has to do with docility.