al-Raghib al-Isfahani #38 – Try To Number Them

The next section on oil so honey, he's going to talk about Allah's blessings. And he prefaces this by saying that Allah's blessings okay, we can't count them right Allah says that in the Koran, it's not possible to count Allah's blessings. But if we're trying to do to doubled and we're trying to be reflective upon Allah's blessings, we'll find that they fall into major categories. And so he's trying to just break down these categories, not in the sense that he's exhausting, you know, all the possible categories or blessings that are out there, but just in order to kind of get us to reflect and get us to kind of make sense of them and see the differences between some of Allah's blessings.

So the first category, he says, are the blessings of the afterlife. And then the next is the blessings of virtue. And he has this idea, and he's talking about, he wants to put all of these through sort of two lenses, he wants to look at them through which of these blessings are gifted to us, and which of them have to be earned. Okay, so we'll keep that in mind as we go on. So the first one is the blessings of the afterlife. The second is the blessings of virtue. The third are blessings of the body, and talked about like our health and our strength and things like that. The fourth, something we might translate as external blessings are blessings of your situation that has

to do with your livelihood, your family, you know, things like honor and dignity. And then finally, last is the blessings of success, right, having kind of reaching your goals and being guided and things like that. So each of these exists in different sort of proportions as to what is what is completely gifted, and what is what is earned. Right. So when it comes to gender, when it comes to Paradise, this is something that is, is gifted by a lot. There's, you know, primarily it's gifted by Allah, but there's a degree to which we have to work for it as well. Right? We have to, to act and Allah says in the Quran to act right for your for your station or your situation. So we ultimately

at the end of the day, rely upon a lost power to Allah to give to to us, but Allah wants to see some sort of effort and especially wants to see some sort of intention when it comes to the blessings of virtue. It's the same sort of thing. It's but it's somewhat gifted, but it's mostly earned, right. And we remember we talked about the hadith of a judge

Otto case and how he asked the prophesy Saddam about the two virtues, and Helen will enter. And the Prophet alayhi salatu salam said that Allah created him like that, well, that was for him. But most virtue most virtue is is earned, right? It's something that you have to work at, maybe some of us come into this world being born with higher levels, or better role models than others, but you're gonna live, you know, several decades, and you have several decades to kind of break your habits and build new ones and figure it out. Right. So this is something that maybe we can say is a little bit reversed from the previous category of blessings. It's something that we have to strive. It's mostly

earned and somewhat gifted lessons of the body when it comes to having two hands and having two feet and having, you know, health and these sorts of things. This is the opposite. This is mostly given to us, right? It's not, it's somewhat earned, you know, there are things that we can do to maintain our health, and everybody should do those things. But at the end of the day, it's not really something that we have complete control over, you look at somebody and we see this all the time. And doctors know this, somebody who and obviously smoking is terrible, and it's horrible, and nobody should do it. But there are people who smoke for decades, and nothing ever happens to them. They

live until they're very old. And then there's some people who never smoked a day in their lives and they get cancer at a young age, we find that right? And that's enough to make us pause and think that this world doesn't simply act based off of mechanical sort of rules and you know, easily predictable models and things like this that Allah Spano Tata has the power to decide and if he wants to decide something, then he's going to decide it. So and then the last two external blessings like livelihood that these are blessings of success. These are both a mix of things that Allah gives you and things that we have to earn ourselves.