In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate
Assalaamu alaykum
Dear Friends
I pray that you are well.
It is an inescapable fact that we are approaching that Day, which begins with our death. On that Day, only those who come to Allah with a sound (healthy) heart will be saved.
يَوْمَ لَا يَنفَعُ مَالٌ وَلَا بَنُونَ ﴿٨٨﴾ إِلَّا مَنْ أَتَى ٱللَّهَ بِقَلْبٍ سَلِيمٍ ﴿٨٩﴾ وَأُزْلِفَتِ ٱلْجَنَّةُ لِلْمُتَّقِينَ ﴿٩٠﴾ وَبُرِّزَتِ ٱلْجَحِيمُ لِلْغَاوِينَ ﴿٩١﴾ وَقِيلَ لَهُمْ أَيْنَ مَا كُنتُمْ تَعْبُدُونَ ﴿٩٢﴾ مِن دُونِ ٱللَّهِ هَلْ يَنصُرُونَكُمْ أَوْ يَنتَصِرُونَ ﴿٩٣[Qur'an, Ash-Shu'ara 26:88-93]
The Day when neither wealth will be of any use (to any one) nor sons, (88) Except to him who will come to Allah with a sound heart, (89) And the Paradise will be brought near to the God-fearing (90) And the Hell will be fully uncovered for the perverse, (91) And it will be said to them, ‘Where is that which you used to worship (92) Beside Allah? Can they help you or help themselves?’ (93)
Just as the heart maybe described in terms of alive or dead, the heart maybe regarded as healthy, dead or sick.
The Healthy Heart
In defining the healthy, the following has been said, it is a heart cleansed from any passion that challenges what Allah commands, or disputes what He forbids. It is free from any impulses which contradict His good. As a result, it is safeguarded against the worship of anything other than Him, and seeks the judgment of no other except that of His Messenger (Allah bless him and grant him peace). Its services are exclusively reserved for Allah, willingly and lovingly, with total reliance, relating all matters to Him, in fear, hope and sincere devotion. When it loves, its love is in the way of Allah. If it detests, it detests in the light of what He detests. When he gives, it gives for Allah. If it withholds, it withholds for Allah.
Nevertheless, all this will not suffice for its salvation until it is free from following, or taking as its guide, anyone other than His Messenger (Allah bless him and grant him peace).
A servant with a healthy heart must dedicate it to its journey’s end and not based his actions and speech on those of any other person except Allah’s Messenger (Allah bless him and grant him peace) He must not give precedence to any other faith or words or deeds over those of Allah and His Messenger (Allah bless him and grant him peace),
يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ لَا تُقَدِّمُوا۟ بَيْنَ يَدَىِ ٱللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِۦ ۖ وَٱتَّقُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌ ﴿١[Qur'an, Al-Hujurat 49:1]
O you who have believed, do not put [yourselves] before Allah and His Messenger but fear Allah. Indeed, Allah is Hearing and Knowing. (1)
The Dead Heart
The dead heart is the opposite of the healthy heart. It does not know its Lord and does not worship Him as He commands, in the way which He likes, and with which He is pleased. It clings instead t o its lusts and desires, even if these are likely to incur Allah's displeasure and wrath. It worships things other than Allah, and its loves and its hatreds, and its giving and its withholding, arise from its whims, which are of paramount importance to it and preferred above the pleasure of Allah. Its whims are its imam. Its lusts is its guide. Its ignorance is its leader. Its crude impulses are its impetus. It is immersed in ts concern with worldly objective, It is drunk with own fancies and its love for hasty, fleeting pleasures. It is called to Allah and the Hereafter from a distance but it does not respond to advice, and instead it follows any scheming, cunning Shaytan. Life angers and pleases it, and passion makes it deaf and blind to anything except what is evil.
To associate and keep company with the owner of such a heart is to tempt illness: living with him is like taking poison, and befriending him means an utter destruction.
The Sick Heart
The sick heart is a heart with life in it it, as as illness. The former sustains it at the moment, the latter at another and it follows whichever one of the two manages to dominate it. It has love for Allah, faith in Him, sincerity towards Him, and reliance upon Him, and these are what give it life. It also has a craving for lust and pleasure, and prefers them, and strives to experience the. It is full of self0-admiration, which can lead to its own destruction. It listens to two callers: one calling it to Allah and the His Messenger (Allah bless him and grant him peace) and the Hereafter; and the other calling it to the fleeting pleasures of this world. It responds to whichever one of the two happens to have most influence over it at the time.
The first heart is alive, submitted to Allah, humble, sensitive and aware; the second is brittle and dead; the third wavers between either its safety or its ruin.
Sincerity
It has been related a man used to praying in the first row in the masjid. One day he was late for the prayer, so he prayed in the second row. Feeling embarrassed when people saw him in the second row, he realized that the pleasure and satisfaction of the heart that he used to gain from praying in the first row were due to his seeing people seeing him there and admiring him for it. This is a subtle and intangible condition and actions are rarely safe from it. Apart from those whom Allah has assisted, few are aware of such delicate matters. Those who do not realize it only come to see their goods appearing as bad ones on the Day of Resurrection; they are the ones referred to in the Qur'an,
وَلَوْ أَنَّ لِلَّذِينَ ظَلَمُوا۟ مَا فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ جَمِيعًا وَمِثْلَهُۥ مَعَهُۥ لَٱفْتَدَوْا۟ بِهِۦ مِن سُوٓءِ ٱلْعَذَابِ يَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَـٰمَةِ ۚ وَبَدَا لَهُم مِّنَ ٱللَّهِ مَا لَمْ يَكُونُوا۟ يَحْتَسِبُونَ ﴿٤٧[Qur'an, Az-Zumar 39:47-48]
وَبَدَا لَهُمْ سَيِّـَٔاتُ مَا كَسَبُوا۟ وَحَاقَ بِهِم مَّا كَانُوا۟ بِهِۦ يَسْتَهْزِءُونَ ﴿٤٨
And if those who did wrong had all that is in the earth entirely and the like of it with it, they would [attempt to] ransom themselves thereby from the worst of the punishment on the Day of Resurrection. And there will appear to them from Allah that which they had not taken into account. (47) And there will appear to them the evils they had earned, and they will be enveloped by what they used to ridicule. (48)
قُلْ هَلْ نُنَبِّئُكُم بِٱلْأَخْسَرِينَ أَعْمَـٰلًا ﴿١٠٣﴾ ٱلَّذِينَ ضَلَّ سَعْيُهُمْ فِى ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنْيَا وَهُمْ يَحْسَبُونَ أَنَّهُمْ يُحْسِنُونَ صُنْعًا ﴿١٠٤[Qur'an, Al-Kahf 18:103-104]
Say, [O Muhammad], "Shall we [believers] inform you of the greatest losers as to [their] deeds? (103) [They are] those whose effort is lost in worldly life, while they think that they are doing well in work." (104)
Sincerity is a condition for Allah’s acceptance of good deeds performed in accordance with the sunnah of the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace). Allah commands us in the Qur’an:
وَمَآ أُمِرُوٓا۟ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ مُخْلِصِينَ لَهُ ٱلدِّينَ حُنَفَآءَ وَيُقِيمُوا۟ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَيُؤْتُوا۟ ٱلزَّكَوٰةَ ۚ وَذَٰلِكَ دِينُ ٱلْقَيِّمَةِ ﴿٥[Qur'an, Al-Bayyinah 98:5]
And they were not commanded except to worship Allah, [being] sincere to Him in religion, inclining to truth, and to establish prayer and to give zakah. And that is the correct religion. (5)
Sincerity is the freeing of one’s intention from all impurities in order to come nearer to Allah. It is that intentions behind all acts of worship and obedience to Allah are exclusively for His pleasure. It is the perpetual contemplation of the Creator, to the extent that one forgets the creation.
It has been related tat a righteous man used to say, "O self, be devout and you will be pure." When any worldly fortune, in which the self finds comfort and towards which the heart inclines, intrudes upon our worship, then it impairs the purity of our efforts and ruins our sincerity. Human is preoccupied with his good fortune and immersed in his desires and appetites; rarely are his actions or acts of worship free of temporary objectives and desires of this kind. For this reason it has been said that whoever secures a single moment of pure devotion to Allah in his life will survive, for devotion is rare and precious, and cleaning the heart of its impurities is an exacting undertaking.
In fact, devotion is the purifying of the heart from all impurities, whether few or many, so that the intention of drawing nearer to Allah is freed from all other motives, except that of seeking His pleasure. This can only come from a lover of Allah, who is so absorbed in the contemplation of the next world that there remains in his heart no place for the love of this world. Such a person must be devout and pure in all his actions, even in eating, drinking and answering the calls of nature. With rare exceptions, anyone who is not like this will find the door of devotion closed in his face. The everyday actions a person who is overwhelmed by his or her love for Allah and the Hereafter are characterized by this love and they, in face, pure devotion. In the same way, anyone whose soul is overwhelmed by love for and preoccupation with this world, or stats and authority, will be so overwhelmed by these things that no act of worship, be it prayer or fasting, will be acceptable, except in very rare cases.
The remedy for love of this world is to break the worldly desires of the self, ending its greed for this world and purifying it in preparation for the next world. This will then become the state of the heart and sincere devotion will become easier to attain. There are a great many actions where a man acts thinking that are purely intended for Allah's pleasure, but he is deluded, for he fails to see the defects in them.
Ya'qub said: "A devout person is someone who conceals things that are good, in the same way that he conceals things that are bad."
As-Sousi said: "True devotion is to lose the faculty of being conscious of the your devotion; for someone who identifies devotion in his devotion is a person whose devotion is in need of devotion."
To contemplate devotion is to admire it, and admiration is an affliction; and that which is pure is whatever is free of all afflictions. This means that one’s deeds should be purified from any self-admiration concerning the actions they entail.
Ayyub said: "It is much harder for people of action to purify their intentions than it is to execute any of their actions."
Some people have said, "To be devout for a short while is to survive forever, but devotion is rare.”
Suhail was asked: "What is the most difficult thing for the self?" He said: "Devotion, when the self does not have the good fortune of being endowed with it."
Al Fudayl said: "Forsaking action for the sake of other people is to see their aspiration. To act for the sake of their admiration is to associate others with Allah; Devotion is when Allah frees you from both of these states."
May Allah purify our hearts and grant us sincerity in worship. Ameen.
Allahumma salli 'ala Muhammad wa 'ala aalihi wa sahbihi wassallam
Please don't forget us in your night prayers. Jazakallahu khairan.
And Allah knows best.
Wassalaam
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