Reclaim Your Heart: Personal insights on breaking free from life's shackles

and to deprive of blessing Those that resist Faith. Did ye think that ye
would enter Heaven without Allah testing those of you who fought hard (In
His Cause) and remained steadfast?" (Qur’an, 3:140-142)
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Here, Allah describes the purpose of hardship as being tamhees.
Tamhees is the same word used to describe the heating and purifying of
gold. Without heating it up, gold is precious metal—but it’s full of
impurities. By performing tamhees, a process of heating, the impurities are
removed from gold. This is what God also does with the believers. Through
hardships, believers are purified—just like gold.
And so too, are the Egyptians being purified. Only days before the
uprising, the world had considered the Egyptian youth a lost cause. We
believed they had lost their direction and their purpose. We believed that
they had chosen to live their lives on the streets, catcalling girls, or at
internet cafes smoking hookah. Through this hardship, the Egyptian youth
have been brought back from the dead.
Now, these youth are standing on the streets in defiance of tyranny, on
their knees praying, and with their hands facing the sky, calling on their
Lord. The same people who just days before barely prayed, stand today in
front of military tanks to bow down to their Creator. Only days before the
uprising, the tensions between Egyptian Muslims and Christians had grown
to an all-time high. Today the Christians and Muslims stand side by side in
defense of each other and their country. The same people who did not trust
each other the day before their ‘heating’, have come together as brothers
and sisters, as one body, to defend their streets, their homes, and their
neighborhoods. And through this hardship, a person who only days before
lived for his cell phone, sheesha, and cigarettes, has become willing to
sacrifice his own life to give freedom to his people.
Allah tells us in the Qur’an:
"Say: ‘Who is it that sustains you (in life) from the sky and from the
earth? Or who is it that has power over hearing and sight? And who is it
that brings out the living from the dead and the dead from the living? And
who is it that rules and regulates all affairs?’ They will soon say, ‘(Allah)’.
Say, ‘Will you not then show piety (to Him)?’" (Qur’an, 10:31)
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It is Allah who brings the living out of the dead. He has brought us back
from the dead. Don’t think for a moment that a single moment of this is not
happening with a purpose—a deep, profound and beautiful, liberating
purpose. For decades the Egyptian people have lived a life of fear. But
when you let fear control you, you are a slave. Allah has liberated the
Egyptian people from this slavery, by making them face–and overcome–
their greatest fear. Allah has liberated the Egyptian people by allowing them
to look their oppressor in the eye and tell him, and the whole world, that
they will no longer live in fear. And so whether Mubarak stays or goes,
lives or dies—it doesn’t really matter. The Egyptian people have already
been liberated.
They have been liberated.
Hosni Mubarak is irrelevant. He is nothing but a tool—a tool by which
God carries out His plan for the Egyptian people and for the entire Ummah.
A tool to carry out His plan to purify, beatify and liberate the Egyptian
people and the Ummah. And whether we are in Egypt today or not is
unimportant. Egypt is just one limb of our body. The purification of Egypt
is a purification of the whole body of our Ummah. It is the purification of
you and me. It is our chance to ask ourselves to what are we attached. What
are we afraid of? What are we striving for? What do we stand for? And
where are we going?
When a body is in a deep, deep slumber—a coma—it is only out of His
infinite mercy that He sends us a wakeup call. It is only from His infinite
mercy that He sends to us life where there was once only death. We were
heedless, so He sent us a sign. We were asleep, so he woke us up. We
worshiped this life, and preferred our material possessions to the liberation
of a soul attached to, and afraid of nothing but Him—so He freed us.
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How many people will experience something like this in their lifetime?
How many people will experience the opening of a Sea, the humbling of a
tyrant? Shouldn’t we ask ourselves why we were chosen to see it? Shouldn’t
we ask ourselves what we were intended to learn, change, transform?
Because if we think for a moment this is all just about the people of Egypt,
then we have desperately missed the point. We were asleep, and Allah
chose to wake us.
We were dead and Allah wants to give us life.
We were conditioned to believe that our enemy was outside of
ourselves. That he had power over us. This is also an illusion. The enemy is
inside of us. All external enemies are only manifestations of our own
diseases. And so if we want to conquer those enemies, we must first
conquer the enemy inside ourselves. This is why the Qur’an tells us:
"Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they first
change what is in themselves." (Qur’an, 13:11)
We must first conquer greed, selfishness, shirk, ultimate fear, love, hope
and dependence on anything other than Allah. We must conquer hubbad-
dunya (love of dunya)—the root of all our diseases, and all our oppression.
Before we can defeat the Pharaohs in our lives, we must defeat the Pharaoh
inside ourselves. So the fight in Egypt is a fight for liberation. Yes. But
liberation from what? Who is truly oppressed? Are you and I free? What is
true oppression? Ibn Taymiyyah (ra) answers this question when he says:
"The one who is (truly) imprisoned is the one whose heart is imprisoned
from Allah and the captivated one is the one whose desires have enslaved
him." (Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Wabil)
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When you are free inside, you will never allow anyone to take away
your freedom. And when you have inner freedom, you can look through
tyrants and thugs to the Lord of the tyrants and thugs. When you are free
inside, you become unenslaveable, because you can only enslave a person
with attachments. You can only threaten a person who is afraid of loss. You
only have power over someone when they need or want something that you
have the ability to take away. But there is only one thing which no person
has the power to take away from you: God.
And so when we fight to free Egypt, on a grander and realer scale it is a
fight to also free ourselves. It is a fight to free ourselves of the tyranny of
our own nafs and desires. A fight to free ourselves from our own false
attachments and dependencies, from all that controls us, from all that we
worship—other than Him. It is a fight to free us from our own slavery.
Whether we are slaves to the American dollar, to our own desires, to status,
to wealth, or to fear—the purification of Egypt is a purification of us all.
That is why the formula for true success given to us in the Qur’an
consists of two elements: Sabr (patience, perseverance) and Taqwa (fear of
God alone):
"O you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain stationed
and fear God (alone) that you may be successful." (Qur’an, 3:200)
So if we watch Egypt today as if it is only a spectacle happening outside
of ourselves, without cleaning, examining, and really changing ourselves
and our lives, then we have missed its purpose.
After all, it isn’t every day that a sea is opened before our very eyes.
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