Tom Facchine – Virtues of Ramadan 2022 – The Devil is Chained Up

			One of the virtues of Ramadan is that the Shaytaan, The Devil, Satan is chained up. This is from the
Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And what that means for us practically,
we don't need to go into irrelevant details about oh, where is he chained up? And what types of of
chains are holding him back and can't he slip through and break through the chains? That doesn't
matter? What matters for our purposes, is that this means that we are alone with ourselves, and a
month of Ramadan. There's no more excuses. Now somebody could come and they could ask, okay, if the
devil is really chained up, then why do people still sin? Why do people still hurt each other and
		

			these sorts of things during Ramadan? And the answer is that
		

			there is still evil around people can still choose evil. But the difference is that outside of
Ramadan, people are choosing to be persuaded by suggestions from the devil. And now you're simply
left alone to yourself. So if you have an imprint of evil on your heart, or you have developed a
habit, where you have developed a dependency or an attachment to something that is sinful, or
something that is against what Allah wants, then that thing is still going to remain. You're not
going to be getting any new suggestions maybe from the devil himself, but you still have what your
own soul has kind of developed as a habit. And that's actually a tremendous opportunity for us
		

			because Ramadan is where you get to re establish new habits and break old ones. So you're left
alone, you yourself, your neffs your soul, your habits, and they're the barrier is a lot lower, to
work to reestablish good habits to break bad habits. And so this is the month of opportunity