al-Raghib al-Isfahani #39 – A Deeper Dive Into Our Blessings

So at all whilst he was talking about different types of blessings, he broke them down into five broad categories. So now we're going to take a deeper dive into each one of them. Because I thought well, so he has different reflections about the different categories of blessings. So the first category had to do with the blessings of the afterlife. And he said that the big takeaway for us is that you can't get the blessings of the afterlife except through effort, right? It's not something that's going to be entirely gifted without anything right and the prophesy centum he said that anybody who has even a mustard seeds worth of faith is going to get into paradise. Well, you have to

work to protect that mustard seed. Right? It doesn't just come from nowhere. Of course it comes to Allah's Taufiq and Allah's blessing and things like that every there's no power and might accept through a law, of course, but we have to do something in order to maintain that little spark in order to inshallah get into paradise. But rather, so he's also going to look at all these blessings in through two other lenses, which is, are the blessings complete pure good? Or might they be misused, right? Is there some sort of evil that can come into these sorts of blessings. So when it comes to this category, the blessings of the afterlife, pure good, pure, good, it's not possible to

be evil. And he's going to go into like the major aspects of what's so good about general what's so amazing what needs of the human being doesn't satisfy. And the first he identifies four things, and the first one is eternal life. Right? Eternal life is the most important one. We have, as human beings are baked in a hardwired circuited fear of death. And this is something that even atheists recognize, you know, everybody is afraid of dying. And people who don't believe in Allah, or people who have funny ideas about Allah, they are often in a frantic scramble to try to avoid death or to prolong it as much as possible, right, you see some people who are super rich, who by or you know,

they in turn their bodies into some sort of chamber, right? Maybe science one day, we'll be able to bring them back. And, you know, they'll like preserve their brains in some sort of fluid, like the matrix or something. And hopefully, that science, you know, like, they look at where their faith is that they don't believe in a law, but they believe in science, they think that one day science is going to figure out how to keep them alive. And these sorts of things, look at how afraid they are dying, right? Everybody's in this scramble for death. And yet, especially in North America, we don't like to talk about death. And that's the really ironic thing. And shows the kind of spiritual

dissonance that exists in our space I was driving by there's a row of of cemeteries on this one street in Utica, where we were located, and the sign said,

prepare for your burial today, something like that is like come in and see about your coffin or see about your plot or whatever. And it struck me in such a funny thing. Because if somebody I mean, I'm a religious guy, if somebody says, prepare today for your death, I'm thinking about the soul. I'm thinking about getting into paradise, I'm thinking about all these sorts of spiritual things. I'm not necessarily thinking about, you know, it's like, oh, well, what kind of coffin do I want? And you know, how big do I want the grave plot to be? And do I want it up on the hill under the cedar tree? Or do I want it over? I mean, those are all real, real concerns. I'm not trying to belittle

them. But it struck me that this is the sort of thing that we're kind of encouraged to talk about in this space, we're kind of encouraged to talk about the materiality of death, or the logistics of death. And nobody wants to talk about the spiritual aspect, right? People just die. And we'd like to imagine that they're up on a cloud waving down to us, you know, saying, Hi, that's the general perception of what happens when someone dies, we assume everybody goes to heaven. This is at least one of the Christian understandings and the General Post Christian understanding of what happens. Nobody wants to talk about sin. Nobody wants to talk about resurrection. Nobody wants to talk about

judgment. No one wants to talk about, you know, all these sorts of real, real important things. In our society. We just No, let's not talk about that. Let's busy ourselves with the morphine levels and the logistics of death. And how's this going to happen? And how is that going to happen?

Muslims, we're not supposed to be afraid of death like that. Right? And this is something that we've taken pride in from day one from the first generation of Muslims. We are people who don't fear death. No, we are not afraid to confront death. We can talk about death. We can even look forward to the meeting with our Lord, right, because we believe in real things. We believe in beautiful things like Ali Abbas Mahoney said, We believe in gender we trust in Allah's Bounty we trust and allows promise, right? And so we know that this world is difficult. It's not meant to be a cakewalk. It's not meant to be easy. And we struggle every single day to do the best we can and we constantly screw

up and go astray. And we constantly try to turn back to the last final data. But at the end of the day, we're ready. We're ready. If it's death through this way, or that way, or the other way we know and we're told and constantly reminded that it's just around the corner. Right so

When we're looking at Muslims, especially in North America, and the process of sort of assimilation that takes place, this is one thing that we can't lose, right? We can't become afraid to talk about death, we have to be very frank about its reality, to prepare for it. Because if you're not preparing for it, then you're preparing to fail. And being overly afraid of death, right? There's another extreme. So there's some people who just don't want to talk about it at all. And then there's some people who are so afraid of it, that it makes them easy to control and easy to manipulate it. And this is a general principle, anything that you're too afraid of. It can be used

against you, right? If you're too afraid for your reputation, somebody can use that against you. If you're too afraid to be poor. Somebody can tempt you with money if you're too afraid, you know, anything. So if you're too afraid of death, this is something that the shaytaan will use against you. Right? Like, oh, you're afraid to die. If you don't do this, you don't do that you're going to have to, right? He's going to try to you how we feel right as the last says in the Quran, like the shaytaan he relies on fear. Well, yeah, I don't, I'm gonna probably I'm gonna crumble fascia, and he like, threatens you, and he tries to get you to jump and he tries to get you to act in haste. Right?

So this is something that we have to be careful about as Muslims that we're not afraid of death, right? I mean, we're afraid to meet a law of course. And we're, we have a reverent fear of the Day of Judgment, and everything is this going to happen. But that's different than being afraid of death in the sense that we see non Muslims around us afraid of death, they don't want to talk about it, they don't want to think about it, they want to push it to the, you know, the back of their minds. So that's the one of the main four things what's so great about Jenna eternal life, right? It solves this huge existential fear that that that people have. The second is that we have perfect ability.

And that's not in the sense that Allah has perfect ability, it has to do with sort of, as opposed to here in this world. Here in this world, the things that we wish, or we want, we can't get all of them, we only get a few of them. Right. But in general, the things that we want, whatever it is that we want it, it's going to be ours. And that's what it all so honey is referring to when he's saying like this perfect ability, if you want to learn something, imagine here you want to learn a new language, how much time do you have to dedicate? How hard do you have to work? How much do you have to do? Well, if you want to learn something in Jannah, what do you think's going to happen, it's

probably going to be very easy, right? Allah is gonna give it to you, if you want to memorize something, if you want to, you know, have a better relationship that you're there with your spouse and gender, right? Here, it's very, very difficult, you have to put in so much work to get these things done. And I was finding a saying that one of the blessings in Jenna is having ability in a way that you've never had before. Right? These things that you want, they're going to be yours and Allah azza wa jal talks in the Quran about how the fruits are hanging down, like bowing towards you. And basically, you know, all you have to do is basically even touch them and they they pop off the,

off the vine, or they pop off of the branch, right? That's what I was finding he's talking about. He also talks about so number three, so we have eternal life,

ability or increased ability, we could say, increased knowledge, right? So there's so many things in this world that we don't know. And how many times in the Quran does the law set, say that once we get there, then you're going to know, then you're going to know what you used to do, or then everything's going to be revealed to you.

Here our eyes, our curiosity can get the better of us and it actually can be a problem for us and we can actually be led into sin because of our curiosity. If we want to know something,

then in Jannah, then this is something inshallah that will be given to us. And we don't have any worry, you're not going to have any room for fear of the unknown. And the final thing, the final thing number four is wealth without poverty. Okay, so in this world, we're defined by our poverty, especially in North America, we have to work and work and work just to pay rent, right? Everything's so expensive, we've got COVID we've got you know, this, that the other gas prices are through the roof, you have to have two, three jobs, all these sorts of things. And the afterlife is not going to be like that. There's no such thing as need, there's no such thing as want, the trees are going to

bend over to towards you to reach down to keep you shade to give you shade to give you food. And so these are these are this is what makes gender so satisfying, in addition to the greatest blessing of all, which is seeing the face of a loss balance out on the afterlife is the Prophet alayhi salatu salam said, but these are parts of the things that make this blessing so amazing and reflecting on this should motivate us to try to work towards it, so that we can obtain it with Allah's Grace.