Reclaim Your Heart

Allah’s object also is to purify
those that are true in Faith and to deprive of blessing

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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
)
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

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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
)
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

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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,

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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.
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:

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“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
)
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

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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: 
S a b r 
(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,

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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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