Minute with a Muslim #348 – Four Steps To Nobility

arrive as for honey says that there's four steps to nobility. The first step is to believe in the beautiful.

And I love this because it's very

subversive to what people are telling us these days, people today, they want to tell us that what you believe in doesn't matter. Right? You believe in this, somebody else believes in other things, it doesn't really matter. As long as you're a good person, as long as you're nice, as long as you help or helpful consider it and stuff like that.

That's not very convincing. And Islam, I think, has a lot to say to the contrary, that what you believe in matters, the content of what is not just whether you believe or don't believe the content of what you believe really matters, and has real life consequences. Right? If you have somebody that believes that this entire universe is just random, was put together for no purpose, that how is that person going to feel the call to be dutiful, towards the creation, and other sorts of individuals, the family that they have, or their neighbors or people that they don't know?

It might happen occasionally. But structurally, is it going to lead to, you know, most people with that sort of outlook in life, taking care of these sorts of things, it's not. Whereas somebody who understands that life has a purpose, not just even a bodily purpose, but a spiritual purpose. That person, again, not every single individual, some people, there's always going to be exceptions. But structurally, it's going to produce a subject that's going to produce an individual that is much more serious about duty, right to other people doing the right thing, when no one's looking, doing the right thing, even if it's against yourself. Right. So what you believe in matters, it actually

matters a lot. If you believe in a perfect God, and eternal consequences, that is very, very significant to being a moral person and doing the right thing and having integrity. Again, there are exceptions. But it's extremely important compared to somebody who believes in an imperfect God, right, or temporary consequences in the afterlife, where doesn't believe in God at all? Or doesn't believe in any consequences in the afterlife? Why shouldn't I oppress somebody else? Why shouldn't I take somebody else's trample on somebody else's rights or do something, you know, just to get look out for me and get what I want? Why shouldn't I? Just because it's not polite, just because it's not

my culture. These are very thin, weak motivations. They're not they're not good enough. They're good enough, maybe when society is not in a economic crisis, or a pandemic or war. But when those things hit when crisis hits, you need someone who believes in a perfect God with eternal consequences that's going to do the right thing when no one's looking, and do the right thing when it's even against their material, personal interests. So the first step to nobility you have to believe in the beautiful, yes, this world is beautiful. It's purposeful. It's intentional. It's genius. Right? This is intelligence, kind of brought into a form. Right? Mercy, merciful.

These are beautiful things to believe in. If somebody doesn't believe in mercy, they don't believe they believe that the world is just random. They don't believe that there's mercy in the world. What type of subject is that going to produce? How is that person going to want to be merciful or field and duty to be merciful to the rest of the creation? It's a stretch. First step is to believe and the beautiful second step to nobility is to tie your beliefs to proof evidence, science, okay? Because it's good that people want to believe in something. It's good that people want to believe in something supernatural or something divine or something that is

beyond the material. Right, the hidden the unseen. But we can't just admit every single idea that pops into our heads, right?

For example, you know, we somebody dies, okay, what do we think happens to them? What, in the movies and TV television like, what do we think happens to them, they fly up and they're sitting on top of the clouds, and they're smiling down upon you waving? You know, it's kind of a very kind of

nice thing to think. But these ideas, are they based off of proof, or they're based off of evidence they're based off of science? Or is it just kind of our wishful thinking about how we want things to be? Somebody is going to come and say, Well, you can't have true for any of these sorts of things. You know, I can't, obviously, if people are dead, and they can't come back and tell us about what exactly happened, so that's true. Well

We're not necessarily talking about materialistic proof that you have to see with your own eyes. We're also talking about Revelation. Right? What does revelation justify and warrant? And which revelation? Because there's lots of things that claim to be revelation out there. What Revelation is actually genuine revelation? And what is fabricated revelation? What's a mix of the two? And how would we know? Right? If you're not having those conversations in the first place? If that's not even your concern, then you're leaving yourself open to entertaining a lot of wild and unfounded beliefs, you should at least care and have the concern for how are we going to figure out what is

actual genuine communication from the Divine. And what is just people making up stuff, or guessing or conjecture, or tradition, or culture, or these sorts of things? Right? So that's two steps, nobility, belief and the beautiful, tie your beliefs to proof, tire beliefs to evidence and signs, and that is revelation. And then the last two, you know, the things that people talk about all the time, break your bad habits, that's a huge one. We can't accept ourselves as the sort of completed essential people, right? Oh, I'm just angry. That's how I get, oh, I curse when I get angry or Oh, I yell, when I get angry. That's not an excuse. You have to break it. That's a habit that you've

developed over time, maybe you came into this world with a higher propensity to be like that than other people, okay? But that does not mean that you don't have the duty to break yourself out of that cycle. You do have the duty to improve yourself and to work on yourself and to take those bad habits and to to fix. You look at women.

Write that habit, you curse or you're angry or you're combative with other people, write that habit. Take ownership of it, take responsibility for yourself, and work on yourself to try to improve. And then the final thing, the final path, path to nobility or Septima nobility is to replace those bad habits with good habits. Right? If you are

used to argue and you're used to being angry, training yourself, to be gentle and training yourself to be humble, is extremely important. If you are accustomed to being stingy, and to not being generous with other people, trying to train yourself to become generous and giving to others. If you're able to follow this path and these four steps and you're going to find that Allah subhanaw taala is going to give you nobility in this life and in the next