Ayah Series #20 – Surah At-Takathur

One of the main points of Surah khairthal, is Allah azza wa jal is telling us and informing us about the nature of desire, because we have a certain paradigm in the modern West that believes that desire is something that once you act upon it and indulge it and try to satisfy it, that it is finished, right? And so this is kind of a teleology, right? It's, it's, it's something that you're supposed to do, whether it's a sexual desire, whether it's a desire of consumption, or wealth, or status, or a certain career or job, these sorts of things, if I have the desire in me, first of all, we assume that it's part of me, and it's not something external to myself, we say that we identify

with a desire, I am my desire, and therefore, I need to authentically Express or act on my desire in order to be a whole free person, right? Islam has a completely different paradigm for what desire is and what we should do with it. And it's a paradigm that's much more common with all sorts of pre modern societies and, and faiths or communities, whatever we want to call it, which is that desire is actually something that continues to shift and continues to move. It's plastic, it's fluid, and feeding, it is actually going to make us stronger. Right? So first of all, it's not part of who we are. We don't identify with our desires. I want to steal Am I like a stealer? I'm a thief. That's

like, existentially who I am no, right? i The you know, it occurs to me to cheat on my spouse, am I a cheater, that's who I am. No, of course, that would be ridiculous. We don't identify with our sin or with our desires, our desires are external to us, and they move through us. And we have a sort of duty to interact with those desires in different ways, principally by taming them and disciplining them and things like that. So Allah subhanaw taala. And so it's up to Catholics as Al Hakim photocathode is that to cathode which is basically competition for increase and accumulation and more and more and more and more, it's going to, it's going to be the end of you, it's going to

distract you, it's going to displace everything else that you should be doing Hotez, optimal napavine, until you go down to your grapes. And we have other Hadith from the messenger, alayhi salatu salam about how acting on our desires is not the way to actually satisfy them. It's actually the opposite depriving us as the way to satisfy them. Because the Prophet I used to sit down, he said that, you know, if a person had a value of gold, they would want another one, they're not going to be happy with with just one valley of gold, then after they had one they would want to write and then in another Hadith, the prophet is that some so that nothing's going to fill the mouth of Benny

Adam except for the dust of His grave in that you can eat and eat and eat and eat, and it's not going to be enough. It's not that you know, the thing is going to be satisfied once you act on it. So Allah azza wa jal, and through other parts of our tradition, telling us that no desire has to be tamed, desire has to be limited, it has to be policed, it has to be disciplined, and all these sorts of ways. If not, it's going to get out of control. And a further reflection in the last idea of this of this surah, Allah says, well, let's have selenium at the 99. That day, you're going to be asked about every blessing that you had, right? So this is another reason why we shouldn't just let our

desire go off the chain and desire everything that we want, and indulge our desire, our desires, and every single thing that it occurs to us to want to have or to do or to experience because everything that we have do or experience is going to be something that we're going to be asked about, we have to be accountable for it. And so every single thing when we get to the Day of Judgment, were resurrected, all the things that we enacted our desire, or we indulged our desire and we went and satisfied it. Now we're going to be asked, okay, did you do it according to the limits that a law set were you grateful for? And so now, engaging our desire and fulfilling it is actually something

that increases the scrutiny upon us and increases our responsibility on a day of judgment. And so this is something that we should really, really seriously take into consideration before surrendering to what we desire.