al-Raghib al-Isfahani #37 – Transactional Deeds

We were talking about sincerity. And the issue came up about transactional ism and how obviously, the goal is to do things for the sake of Allah do things for the right reason and not do things just to receive something in return. Right? So if I'm giving a charity, I want to do it for, you know, seeking the pleasure of Allah and how I'm actually might be ruining my deed, if I'm doing it in order to get praise or to get some sort of recognition from other people or even just to feel like I'm a good guy. So this brings up a question that a lot of us are honey addresses, which is, what about Jana? What about paradise? Is it allowed for us to worship Allah and move through this life

with the intention and the motivation being that we're trying to get paradise? Isn't that transactional? Are we saying that there's no proper intention for any of our worship except purely for the sake of Allah? So Allah honey says that it's permissible, it's allowed for somebody to worship Allah in a transactional way, not for the dunya. But for the afterlife, right? They want agenda, they want the, you know, the eternal life, they want the complete bliss, they want all these sorts of things. But that's not the end goal. That's not the highest level, right? No doubt, it's a higher level and a more mature level of spirituality to be worshiping Allah subhanaw taala shortly

because of who Allah is right out of your sense of gratitude out of your sense of indebtedness out of your sense of awe, right to not even be fixed or fixated on the fruits or the you know, the food or whatever it is that you're looking for in Jeddah, and he compares it to the difference between someone who's merely patient versus somebody who's pleased with Allah's decree, right. So we have these two levels, many books talk about this, like a salad versus a robot, you have somebody who's able to be patient, something bad happens to them, whether they get sick, or you know, they are injured, they're out of work, they lose their job, they, you know, go through a divorce, whatever it

is, and they're able to be patient. Well, that means that it's very difficult for them on the inside, but they're able to control they're outside, they're not going to curse out anybody, they're not going to abuse other people their words, they're not going to treat anybody wrong, or they're not even going to express their grief in an unbecoming way that would be offensive to the Tao heat of Allah or Allah's might. But that's different from read law, which is somebody who's actually not just externally controlling themselves while they're burning on the inside, but somebody who's actually controlled their inside as well. And that has trained their inside to submit and actually

be content and to be happy with what Allah has decreed, even though it's not what they want, and it's not what they wanted, you know, in the beginning of, of the, the issue. So these two people aren't the same, obviously, to be internally pleased. And internally content with what Allah has decreed is a much higher level of spirituality than somebody who's merely patient with what Allah has decreed. And so similarly, he's drawing the analogy. Somebody who worships Allah is found to otter out of all of Allah and out of gratitude and debt to Allah is vastly superior to somebody who's worshiping Allah going jumping through all the hoops, five daily prayers month of fasting

every year, just because they want to get into agenda just because they don't want to die, or they don't want to be put in the Hellfire or they don't want to, you know, be annihilated in any sort of horrible way. And, you know, he finishes this section with a really interesting quote, he says, you know, we have the saying, and it's an Arabic as well as an English that the truth is bitter, right? And he says, The truth is better only for the person who hasn't accustom their tastebuds to the truth. And it says, Because if somebody has done the work, and they've brought their tastebuds in line with what is true, then they're actually going to find sweetness in the truth. And so this is

again, one of his sort of metaphors for the difference between somebody who takes truth and finds it better. That's somebody who's being patient with That's somebody who is maybe they're they they want to sin, but they don't want to go to hell, or they want to sin but they really want to go to Paradise, versus somebody who's attuned themselves to realize that the truth is, in fact, sweet, right? And that person is a person who's worshipping Allah Spano Tata for who Allah is, and that's the person who's able to be content on the inside with whatever Allah decrees