al-Raghib al-Isfahani #43 – The Benefits of a Virtuous Environment

So Arago so honey, he was talking about the different types of blessings. And he was basically about to make a defense of these blessings and show how they can actually be really important to the cultivation of virtue and the cultivation of an ethical life out of us for honey doesn't want us to think that virtue is in jest living out in a cave somewhere with no family, dirt poor write with sort of like rejecting the world, he says that know that these sorts of things, actually, the blessings of this life, Allah gave them to us for a reason. And if we properly harness them, then they can be used, actually, to help us become virtuous, ethical people. So we talked about wealth

and how important wealth is to some of the acts of worship that a Muslim can perform, such as a cat and such as hedge and other things, and how having a certain amount of wealth opens you up to certain avenues or opportunities of worship that aren't otherwise open to you. Then I'd also Hani, he defends the idea of blessings of the family, he says that the family is something that, again, he's not saying that you have to have a great family situation in order to be a virtuous or ethical person. But if you do, it's really, really helpful. We shouldn't reject it out of hand in this sort of antagonistic or oppositional thinking. And he always backs up his his opinions and his kind of

insights with the Koran. He talks about Luke Alehissalaam, about how when his people were banging down the door and trying to get to his guests, which were the angels because they wanted to commit heinous acts with them. What does he say? He says, If only I had some sort of Earth, well, if only I had some sort of family, strong family, or some sort of broken Chedid, something that I could rely upon. And so from this idea, we understand that having family and having people in your corner actually are a tremendous blessing and a tremendous benefit. And they can help you if someone's trying to trample on your rights, or if someone's trying to do something bad to you, having an

extensive family and a virtuous family is actually really, really important. Family is also kind of your it's an extension of your own self, right, your eyes and your ears and your network and their people, you know, how many times for people who are kind of born into a Muslim family, you know, their their future spouse comes from somebody that the family knew or their future job comes from somebody that the family knew, right. So these sorts of things, we can treat knowledge, Islamic knowledge, and we can think of virtues as the same, right? If you have a particularly virtuous or ethical person in your family tree, then that increases the likelihood that you're going to take

them as a role model and as a mentor, and actually kind of model your own behavior off of them. So again, we're not saying that these things are essential that if you don't have a, you know, a virtuous family that you're done for, but certainly it's going to help. And this should give us pause and make us think about how we're constructing our families, right. Because every single one of us we get to a certain point where we want to get married, we want to have kids, we want to kind of construct this family unit with, you know, other sort of mentors for our kids and, and people that are going to be potential role models for our children. So we have to think very, very

carefully, because every single one of us wants better for our kids than we had ourselves. So if you're thinking man, it's like, yeah, I have maybe a big family, but I didn't really have anybody that was particularly virtuous or ethical that I could look up to, I had to kind of figure out things the hard way and do it all myself, then you should try to put your kids in a better situation where you're kind of constructing your you're building your team, right? You're kind of having these people around you and around your kids who are virtuous people that it's going to make it a lot easier for your children to have a to grow into a virtuous and an ethical person.