When you are trying to understand an āyah and you know that there is a treasure trove right at your finger tips, yet you cannot seem to access it. When you are frustrated, you are upset, you have done all that you can, yet you end up at a closed gate–a figurative one, but one that keeps you from getting to that treasure.
That block that you experience is the darkness of the heart that prevents you from understanding the āyāt of the Qurʾān.
We talk about the hardness of the heart as if we are immune from it, yet we do not realise that it is as real as that which is tangible; and that we are as susceptible to a diseased heart as we are to a diseased body, and perhaps even more.
It is caused by a glance at what you were not supposed to glance at, by hearing what you were not supposed to hear, by that drive to gain popularity and praise, by that misplaced angry retort, by that arrogant stance earlier in the day when someone corrected you, by that flirty joke casually typed because it is online and you are behind a screen so it does not matter, by those endless pictures and videos that pop up on your timeline and they have got music, uncovered ʿawrah, filthy words… but you still indulge because it is just Facebook and Twitter and… it does not quite count.
And now you have blocked your sensory system. You cannot understand what your Lord wants from you. What He expects from you. You cannot understand what He is guiding you towards or why He is doing it. You cannot decipher the events in your life, so you do not know how to act or how to gain Allāh’s Pleasure through those events.
You recite the Majestic Words of your Rabb, but they fail to penetrate the hardened shell around your heart. You are not moved by them, you cannot reflect on them, you struggle to memorise them; you cannot understand them.
Yet you think you are immune.
A purified, sound heart requires work and requires sacrifices and first and foremost, it requires waging war against your desires.
Allāh tells us in the Qurʾān that it is *only* this pure heart and all that it guided you towards that will benefit you on the Day of Judgement, and so it would not be an exaggeration to say that the most important lifetime project you can undertake starting right now is purifying your heart,
﴾The Day when there will not benefit [anyone] wealth or children But only one who comes to Allāh with a sound heart.﴿ ash-Shuʿarāʾ:88-89
ʿAfānā Allāh wa iyyākum.
No Comments