al-Raghib al-Isfahani #49 – The Necessary Tools For Guidance

So there's a couple of things as low as for Hani kind of draws this section of the first main chapter of the book to a conclusion about guidance, there's several things that help one on the path to guidance. And he wants to draw our attention to them and kind of summarize them. So one of the things and probably the first thing is having a humble heart, right, having a humble heart is the most important probably, or at least the first sequentially, ingredient to being able to receive and accept Allah's guidance. If you think you already have it figured out, you're not going to change or you're not going to accept any sort of guidance from outside or any sort of correction from outside

or any sort of, you know, even further insight, you know, you think you're good. So having a humble heart and realizing that you don't have a figured out and realizing that you actually do depend on sort of guidance from the last bounce oughta tofi success, all these sorts of things. That's the first stage or the first sort of tool, I guess you could say, on your tool belt. The second is intense listening, right? Being an intense listener, right, hearing what people have to say, actually hearing it. Now we see in social media, sometimes people just talking past each other, right, the person comes to the conversation, and they already have in their mind what they want to

say. And so it doesn't even matter the person that they're talking to is just like a wall, you know, and no matter what they say, they've got their thing prepared, the other person has their thing prepared, and they just shout past each other. And this is the opposite. If we want to be guided, if we really want to be guided, then that's the exact opposite thing that we should be doing. You know, if we want guidance, we need to listen carefully to what the other person means what the other person understands. Maybe they have a different understanding of a certain concept. We're using the same words, we're using the same concepts, but we have a different understanding of how that

happens. Maybe we both love Allah and love His Messenger, and we love the Koran and we love the Sunnah. But we have a different understanding as to what's the best way to proceed, or what's the what takes priority first or what has to be done first, right. So really intent listening is an extremely important thing when if somebody wants to be guided again, they don't want to just live in their silo in their echo chamber and just keep on believing the same, the same. Um, the next one is having penetrating insight, right to be able to have understanding and insight this is something that it requires you to develop your intellect, you're only going to go so far as to the things that

you're able to understand. And so if somebody is dropping gems on you and you know, left and right, you need to be able to have developed your intellect to the point where at least you can benefit from those things. So those are the first three the first three has to do with having a humble heart intent, listening and developing your intellect so that you can actually have penetrating insight and understanding