If you allow dunya to own your heart, like the ocean that owns the boat, it will take over. You will sink down to the depths of the sea. You will touch the ocean floor. And you will feel as though you were at your lowest point. Entrapped by your sins and the love of this life, you will feel broken, surrounded by darkness. No light reaches it. However, this dark place is not the end.
Remember that the darkness of night precedes the dawn. And as long as your heart still beats, this is not the death of it. Sometimes, the ocean floor is only a stop on the journey.
And it is when you are at this lowest point, that you are faced with a choice. You can stay there at the bottom, until you drown. Or you can gather pearls and rise back up—stronger from the swim and richer from the jewels. If you seek Him, God can raise you up, and replace the darkness of the ocean, with the light of His sun. He can transform what was once your greatest weakness into your greatest strength, and a means of growth, purification and redemption.
Know that transformation sometimes begins with a fall. So never curse the fall. The ground is where humility lives. Take it. Learn it. Breathe it in. And then come back stronger, humbler and more aware of your need for Him. Come back having seen your own nothingness and His greatness. Know that if you have seen that Reality, you have seen much. For the one who is truly deceived is the one who sees his own self—but not Him.
Deprived is the one who has never witnessed his own desperate need for God. Reliant on his own means, he forgets that the means, his own soul, and everything else in existence are His creation. Seek God to bring you back up, for when He does, He will rebuild your ship. The heart that you thought was forever damaged will be mended.
What was shattered will be whole again. Know that only He can do this. Seek Him. And when He saves you, beg forgiveness for the fall, feel remorse over it—but not despair. We are told that it is a polish for the heart.
It makes the object that is polished even shinier than it was before it got dirty. He stands before Allah, broken-hearted and with his head lowered in humility. As for the doer of good, then he does not consider this good a favor from his Lord upon him. Rather, he becomes arrogant and amazed with himself, saying: I have achieved such and such, and such and such.
So this further increases him in self-adulation, pride and arrogance—such that this becomes the cause for his destruction.
Indeed, Allah forgives all sins. And so, this is a call to all those who have become enslaved by the tyranny of the self, imprisoned in the dungeon of the nafs self and desires. It is a call to all those who have entered the ocean of dunya, who have sunk into its depths, and become trapped by its crushing waves.
Rise up. Rise up to the air, to the Real world above the prison of the ocean. Rise up to your freedom. Rise up and come back to life. Leave the death of your soul behind you. Your heart can still live and be stronger and purer than it ever was. Does not the polish of tawbah remake the heart even more beautiful than it was? Remove the veil you have sewn with your sins. Remove the veil between you and Life, between you and Freedom, between you and Light—between you and God.
Remove the veil and rise up. Come back to yourself. Come back to where you began. Come back Home. Know that when all the other doors have shut in your face, there is One that is always open.
Seek it. Seek Him and He will guide you through the waves of the cruel ocean, into the mercy of the sun. This world cannot break you—unless you give it permission. And it cannot own you unless you hand it the keys—unless you give it your heart. And so, if you have handed those keys to dunya for a while —take them back.
Reclaim your heart and place it with its rightful owner: God. He was everything she had always dreamed of. Meeting him was like watching the sun rise in the middle of a snowstorm. His warmth melted the cold. Soon, however, admiration turned to worship. Before she could understand what had happened, Sara had become a prisoner. She became a prisoner of her own desire and craving for that which she adored. Everywhere she looked, Sara saw nothing but him.
Her greatest fear in life was displeasing him. He was all she could feel, and without him, happiness had no meaning. Leaving him made her feel as though her soul was being peeled from her very being. Her heart was consumed with only his face, and nothing felt closer to her than him.
He became to her like the blood in her veins. The pain of existing without him was unbearable because there was no happiness outside of being with him. Sara thought she was in love. Sara had been through a lot in her life. Her father walked out on her when she was a teenager, she ran away from home when she was 16, and she battled drug and alcohol addictions. She even spent time in jail.
However, all that pain combined could not compare to the pain she would come to know inside this new prison of her own making. Sara became a captive inside her own desires.
It consumed her, but never filled her. Like a parched man in the middle of a desert, Sara was desperately pursuing a mirage. But what was worse was the torturous result of putting something in a place only God should be. As human beings, we are created with a particular nature fitrah.
That fitrah is to recognize the oneness of God and to actualize this truth in our lives. Therefore, there is no calamity, no loss, no thing that will cause more pain than putting something equal to God in our lives or our hearts.
Shirk on any level breaks the human spirit like no worldly tragedy could. By making the soul love, revere, or submit to something as it should only God, you are contorting the soul into a position that it, by its very nature, was never meant to be in. To see the reality of this truth, one only has to look at what happens to a person when they lose their object of worship.
On July 22, , the Times of India reported that a year-old woman committed suicide in her home by pouring kerosene over her body and setting herself on fire.
Most people could sympathize with the pain of these people, and most would be heartbroken in the same position. But if having a child or a particular person in our life is our reason for being, something is terribly wrong. And our break will occur as soon as it does. What happens if, while climbing a mountain, you hang on to a twig to hold all your weight? Laws of physics tell us that the twig, which was never created to carry such weight, will break.
Laws of gravity tell us that it is then that you will most certainly fall. This is not a theory. It is a certainty of the physical world. How feeble are the petitioners and how feeble are those they petition! Every time you run after, seek, or petition something weak or feeble which, by definition, is everything other than Allah , you too become weak or feeble. Even if you do reach that which you seek, it will never be enough.
You will soon need to seek something else. You will never reach true contentment or satisfaction. That is why we live in a world of trade-ins and upgrades. Your phone, your car, your computer, your woman, your man, can always be traded in for a newer, better model. However, there is a freedom from that slavery. When the object upon which you place all your weight is unshaking, unbreakable, and unending, you cannot fall.
You cannot break. God is all hearing and all knowing. I have in my breast both my heaven and my garden. If I travel they are with me, never leaving me. Imprisonment for me is a chance to be alone with my Lord.
To be killed is martyrdom and to be exiled from my land is a spiritual journey. He described a believer whose heart is free. It is a heart free of the shackles of servitude to this life and everything in it. It is a heart that understands that the only true prison is the prison of replacing something with God. The pain of that bondage will be greater, deeper, and longer lasting than any other pain which could be inflicted by all the tragedies of this life.
It is our own selves which we become enslaved to. And that imprisonment is the result of putting anything where only God should be in our hearts.
In so doing we create the worst and most painful of prisons; because while a worldly prison can only take away what is temporary and inherently imperfect, this spiritual prison takes away what is ultimate, unending and perfect: Allah and our relationship to Him. Love is not a mental disease. Desire is. Despite what we are taught in popular culture, true love is not supposed to make us like drug addicts. It goes by a different name. And who is more astray than the one who follows his own lusts, without guidance from Allah?
When our love for what we crave is stronger than our love for Allah, we have taken that which we crave as a lord. But those of Faith are overflowing in their love for Allah. We are slaves. Allah has, knowing him as such , left him astray, and sealed his hearing and his heart, and put a cover on his sight.
Hawa is not pleasure. It is a prison. It is a slavery of the mind, body and soul. It is an addiction and a worship. Beautiful examples of this reality can be found throughout literature.
It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did! It is hawa. Real love, as Allah intended it, is not a sickness or an addiction. It is affection and mercy. Indeed in that are signs for a people who give thought. Hawa will make you miserable.
And just like a drug, you will crave it always, but never be satisfied. You will chase it to your own detriment, but never reach it. And though you submit your whole self to it, it will never bring you happiness.
In a sense, has this person replaced Allah in my heart? It should strengthen it. That is why true love is only possible within the boundaries of what Allah has made permissible.
Outside of that, it is nothing more than hawa, to which we either submit or reject. We are either slaves to Allah, or slaves to our hawa. It cannot be both. Only by struggling against false pleasure, can we attain true pleasure. They are by definition mutually exclusive. For that reason, the struggle against our desires is a prerequisite for the attainment of paradise. For the owners of floral boutiques and chocolate shops, Eid comes in February. Yet, even amidst such commercialized affections, one can hardly keep from thinking about those they love.
And while we do so, we are inevitably faced with some pivotal questions. I was reminded of some of those questions when I reflected on something a friend of mine had told me. She described how it felt to be with the person she loved. In her words, the whole world disappeared when they were together. The more I reflected on her statement, the more it affected me, and the more it made me wonder. As humans, we are made to feel love and attachment towards others.
This is part of our human nature. While we can feel this way about another human being, five times a day we enter into a meeting with our Lord and Creator. I wondered how often we ever felt the whole world disappear while in His presence. Can we really claim that our love for Allah is greater than our love for anyone and anything else? Allah also tests with ease. We fail because when Allah gives us these blessings, we unwittingly turn them into false idols of the heart.
When Allah blesses us with money, we depend on the money rather than Allah. We forget that the source of our provision is not and never was the money, but rather it was the giver of that money.
In so doing we are foolishly—and ironically—disobeying the Provider in order to protect the provision. When Allah blesses us with someone that we love, we forget that Allah is the source of that blessing, and we begin to love that person as we should love Allah. That person becomes the center of our world—all our concerns, thoughts, plans, fears, and hopes revolve only around them. If they are not our spouses, we are sometimes even willing to fall into haram just to be with them. And if they were to leave us, our whole world would crumble.
So now, we have shifted our worship from the Source of the blessing to the blessing itself. They love them as they [should] love Allah. But those who believe are stronger in love for Allah. In fact, some of those blessings are signs of Allah. Our spouses and our children are listed here because they are among the blessings we love the most.
And it is in that which you love most that you find the greatest test. So if conquering that test means seeing through a storm of greeting cards and roses to a greater love that awaits, then so be it.
And when could that be more relevant? Because after all, love is in the air. Sometimes giving, sometimes taking. Sometimes chasing, but often, just waiting. They believe that love is a place that you get to: a destination at the end of a long road.
They are those hearts moved by the movement of hearts. Those hopeless romantics, the sucker for a love story, or any sincere expression of true devotion. For them, the search is almost a lifelong obsession of sorts. Most of all, this path can bring its own lessons about the Creator of love. Those who take this route will often reach the knowledge that the human love they seek was not the destination. Some form of that human love, can be a gift. It can be a means, but the moment you make it the End, you will fall.
And you will live your whole life with the wrong focus. You will become willing to sacrifice the Goal for the sake of the means. And the one, who runs after a mirage, never gets there; but keeps running. And so too will you keep running, and be willing to lose sleep, cry, bleed, and sacrifice precious parts of yourself—at times, even your own dignity. The type of perfection you seek cannot be found in the material world. It can only be found in God. That image of human love that you seek is an illusion in the desert of life.
But no matter how close you get to a mirage, you never touch it. It ends at the finding, the joining, and the wedding. It is found at the oneness of two souls. And everyone around you will make you think that your path ends there: at the place where you meet your soul mate, your other half—at the point in the path where you get married.
Then and only then, they tell you, will you ever finally be complete. This, of course, is a lie because completion cannot be found in anything other than God. The building of selflessness. The building of love. And the building of your path back to Him. However if the person you marry becomes your ultimate focus in life, your struggle has just begun.
Now your spouse will become your greatest test. Until you remove that person from the place in your heart that only God should be, it will keep hurting. Ironically, your spouse will become the tool for this painful extraction process, until you learn that there are places in the human heart made only by— and for—God.
Among the other lessons you may learn along this path—after a long road of loss, gain, failure, success, and so many mistakes—is that there are at least 2 types of love. There will be some people you love because of what you get from them: what they give you, the way they make you feel. This is perhaps the majority of love—which is also what makes much of love so unstable. Your response to what you are given is also inconstant and changing. No feeling is ever constant.
If love is dependent on this, it too becomes inconstant and changing. And just like everything in this world, the more you chase it, the more it will run away from you.
But, once in a while, people enter your life that you love—not for what they give you—but for what they are. The beauty you see in them is a reflection of the Creator, so you love them. This is unselfish love.
This second type of love is the rarest. And if it is based in, and not competing with, the love of God, it will also bring about the most joy. To love in any other way is to need, to be dependent, to have expectations—all the ingredients for misery and disappointment.
So for all those who have spent their life seeking, know that purity of any thing is found at the Source. If it is love that you seek, seek it through God. Every other stream, not based in His love, poisons the one who drinks from it. And the drinker will continue to drink, until the poison all but kills him. He will continue to die more and more inside, until he stops and finds the pure Source of water. Everything and everyone you love will be for, through and because of Him.
The foundation of such love is God. So what you hold onto will no longer be just an unstable feeling, a fleeting emotion. And what you chase will no longer be just a temporary high. What you hold, what you chase, what you love, will be God: the only thing stable and constant.
Thereafter, everything else will be through Him. Not by your nafs. It will be for Him. Not for your nafs. This means you will love what He loves and not love what He does not love. And when you do love, you will give to the creation—not for what you can get in return from them. You will love and you will give, but you will be sufficed from Him. And the one, who is sufficed by God, is the richest and most generous of all lovers. Your love will be by Him, for Him, and because of Him.
That is the liberation of the self from servitude to any created thing. And that is freedom. That is happiness. That is love. Or is it? Most of us would agree that there are few things harder than letting go of what we love. Sometimes we want things that are not good for us. And sometimes we love what Allah does not love. To let go of these things is hard. Giving up something the heart adores is one of the hardest battles we ever have to fight. Could there ever be an easy way to let go of an attachment?
There is. Find something better. Any empty space must be filled. The pain of emptiness is too strong. It compels the victim to fill that place. A single moment with an empty spot causes excruciating pain.
In the quest to free the heart, we speak a lot about breaking our false dependencies. Often it feels too hard. Even when they hurt us. Even when they damage our lives and our bond with God.
Even when they are so unhealthy for us. We are too dependent on them. We love them too much and in the wrong way. Why does that happen? Why do we have so much trouble sacrificing what we love for what God loves? When a child falls in love with a toy car, he becomes consumed with that love. Every time he walks by, he would feel pain. And he may even struggle not to steal it. Yet, what if the child looks past the store window and sees a Real car?
What if he sees the Real Ferrari? Would he still struggle with his desire for the toy? Would he still have to fight the urge to steal it? Or would he be able to walk right past the toy—the disparity in greatness annihilating the struggle? We want love. We want money. We want status.
We want this life. And like that child, we too become consumed with these loves. We are struggling not to commit haram for the sake of what we love. We are struggling to let go of the haram relationships, business dealings, actions, dress. We are struggling to let go of the love of this life. This whole life and everything in it is like that toy car. The Real version. The Real model.
But verily the Home in the Hereafter- that is life indeed, if they but knew. But, when describing the next life, Allah here uses the highly exaggerated term for life,. The next life is the Real life. The Realer life. If we could see the Real thing, we could get over our deep love for the lesser, fake model. No matter how great what we love in this life is, it will always have some deficiency, in both quality imperfections and quantity temporary. This is not to say that we cannot have or even love things of this life.
As believers, we are told to ask for good in this life and the next. But it is like the toy car and the real car. While we could have or even enjoy the toy car, we realize the difference. But how does that realization help us in this life? Rather it makes our relationship with the lesser model dunya one in which if and when we are asked to give something up for the sake of what i s Real, it is no longer difficult.
If we are asked to refrain from a prohibition that we want, it becomes easier. This focus also transforms what we petition for help or approval. We will never waste effort appealing to the servant for our need, while the King is the One in control.
This knowledge comes only from knowing and seeing the King. And this knowledge completely transforms how we interact with the servant. Seeing the Real thing transforms the way we love.
No one leaves his beloved except for another one he loves more, or for fear of something else. The heart will give up corrupt love in favor of true love, or for fear of harm. And anytime you are in love, it becomes next to impossible to get over that love or separate from it—until you are able to fall in love with something greater. It is next to impossible to dislodge this destructive love of dunya from our hearts, until we find something greater to replace it. Having found a greater love, it becomes easy to get over another one.
When the love of God, His messenger and the Home with Him is really seen, it overpowers and dominates any other love in the heart. The more that love is seen, the more dominate it becomes. Fall in love. Fall in love with something greater. Fall in love with the Real thing. See the Mansion. Only then, will we stop playing in the dollhouse. By no means, should the concept of respect mean condoning abuse physical, emotional or psychological.
It is not sabr patience to accept abuse against yourself or your family. Allah swt says He does not approve of injustice. And neither should we. But how many have actualized it? How many of our marriages really embody that love and mercy described by Allah? What is going wrong when so many of our marriages are ending in divorce? According to Dr.
He explains how the two reinforce and cause one another. In other words, when a wife feels that her husband is acting unloving, she often reacts with disrespect, which in turn makes the husband act even more unloving.
This means that a wife should not say that first her husband must be loving, before she will show him respect. By doing so, she will only bring about more unloving behavior. And a husband should not say that first his wife must be respectful before he will show her love. Every heart can heal, and each moment is created to bring us closer to that transformative return.
Reclaim Your Heart is about finding that moment when everything stops and suddenly looks different. It is about finding your own awakening. And then returning to the better, truer, and freer version of yourself. Many of us live our lives, entrapped by the same repeated patterns of heartbreak and disappointment. Many of us have no idea why this happens. Reclaim Your Heart is about freeing the heart from this slavery. It is about the journey in an out of life's most deceptive traps. This book was written to awaken the heart and provide a new perspective on love, loss, happiness, and pain.
Providing a manual of sorts, Reclaim Your Heart will teach readers how to live in this life without allowing life to own you. It is a manual of how to protect your most prized possession: the heart. Pain is real. And so is loss. Sometimes it's hard not to let the weight of what we carry-or the memory of what we've lost-take over. And so I wrote, in hopes of helping myself and others survive and thrive inside their storms.
There is hope. There is beauty. And there is also love and happiness. A selection of beautiful and practical pieces of advice from the Quran, the Prophet PBUH and Islam's great scholars on repentance, guidance and purification. This book is designed to serve as a source of hope and strength for those going through difficult times, while providing numerous important pieces of knowledge and guidance for all readers and all times.
This new edition presents hundreds of Franklin's maxims, along with selections from the Letters, Autobiography, and Franklin's Way to Wealth. An ideal resource for writers, public speakers, and students, this practical, charming little book will delight all readers with its folk wisdom" The translation, notes, and commentary of Imam al-Harith al-Muhasibi's "Risala al-Mustarshidin Treatise for the Seekers of Guidance " serves as a layman's guide to Islamic spirituality.
Named by Time magazine as one of the most important innovators of the century, Tariq Ramadan is a leading Muslim scholar, with a large following especially among young European and American Muslims. Now, in his first book written for a wide audience, he offers a marvelous biography of the Prophet Muhammad, one that highlights the spiritual and ethical teachings of one of the most influential figures in human history. In the Footsteps of the Prophet is a fresh and perceptive look at Muhammad, capturing a life that was often eventful, gripping, and highly charged.
Ramadan provides both an intimate portrait of a man who was shy, kind, but determined, as well as a dramatic chronicle of a leader who launched a great religion and inspired a vast empire.
More important, Ramadan presents the main events of the Prophet's life in a way that highlights his spiritual and ethical teachings. The book underscores the significance of the Prophet's example for some of today's most controversial issues, such as the treatment of the poor, the role of women, Islamic criminal punishments, war, racism, and relations with other religions.
Selecting those facts and stories from which we can draw a profound and vivid spiritual picture, the author asks how can the Prophet's life remain -- or become again -- an example, a model, and an inspiration?
And how can Muslims move from formalism -- a fixation on ritual -- toward a committed spiritual and social presence? In this thoughtful and engaging biography, Ramadan offers Muslims a new understanding of Muhammad's life and he introduces non-Muslims not just to the story of the Prophet, but to the spiritual and ethical riches of Islam. Nouman Ali Khan offers insights on how to reorient our lives for success in both this world and the next. Islam has been one of the most powerful religious, social and political forces in history.
Over the last years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities and later empires expanded to control territories and peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France to East Africa and South East Asia. Islam has been one of the most powerful religious, social and political forces in history.
Over the last years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities and later empires expanded to control territories and peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France to East Africa and South East Asia.
Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists and theologians, not to mention rulers, statesmen and soldiers, have been occluded. This book rescues from oblivion and neglect some of these personalities and institutions while offering the reader a new narrative of this lost Islamic history. The Umayyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans feature in the story, as do Muslim Spain, the savannah kingdoms of West Africa and the Mughal Empire, along with the later European colonization of Muslim lands and the development of modern nation-states in the Muslim world.
Throughout, the impact of Islamic belief on scientific advancement, social structures, and cultural development is given due prominence, and the text is complemented by portraits of key personalities, inventions and little known historical nuggets. The history of Islam and of the world's Muslims brings together diverse peoples, geographies and states, all interwoven into one narrative that begins with Muhammad and continues to this day. This book encompasses the journey and steps that have been truly helpful in my own life.
I pray you will read this so you can reach total health and fulfillment in your own lives. Read it carefully, but put into practice the insight that was given to me to share through years of a constant process. Know that everything I wrote in this book comes from the heart — they are words given through journey that never made sense to me up until this past year. The Lord has brought me through, and He will do the same for you if you allow Him to. He provided me with the curiosity that allowed me to alleviate all the confusion in my own journey by getting educated and believing in the possibilities.
I pray you will do the same. Each day is a journey, but if you are willing to become aware of things in your life that are holding you back, you may be amazed at what and how much you can accomplish. Sometimes the truth hurts. Sixteen years ago, Tyne Whitlock cut all ties to her past and left town under the shameful shadow of a teenage pregnancy. Now her fifteen-year-old son is in trouble with the law, and she is desperate for help.
But reaching out to high-powered attorney Lucas Silver Hawk will tear open the heart-wrenching past in ways Tyne never imagined. Forced to return to the Delaware Indian community where Lucas was raised, Tyne and Lucas are tempted by the heated passion that consumed them as teens. Tyne rediscovers all the reasons she found this man irresistible, but there are scandalous secrets waiting to be revealed, disgraceful choices made in the past that cannot be denied. Love is a powerful force that could heal them both--if the truth doesn't rip them apart.
Sacred cross-cultural images of the Goddess combined with myth and meditations are the perfect empowerment tool for all generations in this MeToo Moment. Skip to content.
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