Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

raḍiya Allāh ʿanhu
) apologized, let him go and
walked away.
He’s the head of the state, he could have said, ‘Oh oh, you got a mouth too,
huh?’ ‘You come with me I’ll give you special treatment’. No, no, no. He left. A
few weeks go by and Umar (
raḍiya Allāh ʿanhu
) is giving the 
khuṭbah
and this
guy walks into the masjid, same guy. Umar ends the 
khuṭbah
and he calls the
guy over and privately says to him, ‘Hey, ever since then, I never told anything
about you’; and the guy says to Umar (
raḍiya Allāh ʿanhu
), ‘Ever since then, I
stopped drinking’—that’s 
tawāṣī
. Even though he is in a position of leadership,
he is willing to listen. He is not going to dismiss somebody, even the guy who’s
drunk, Umar (
raḍiya Allāh ʿanhu
) is taking advice from a guy who smells of
alcohol. They understood what 
tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
means.
As I near the conclusion, I want to highlight some more things about 
tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
. What does it mean for you and me to live by it? One dimension is the
bā’
, when you say 
bi-l-ḥaqq
, it can actually be looked at in multiple ways; it can
be looked at as a 
mafʿūl bihi
, or it can be looked at as a 
ḥāl
. What that means in
simple English is, when you give somebody counsel be honest in your counsel.
Be sincere in your counsel, no strings attached. I am not giving you advice
because it will benefit me in some way. I’m not giving you counsel because I’ve
got some other agenda that will support something that I’m looking to get done.
I am only giving you advice because I care about you. My motives are pure. I am
truthful in the way that I give you counsel, that is a condition.
So sometimes we only give advice to people that, if we don’t give them that
advice, the business will get hurt; or if we don’t give them that advice some of
our other relationships might get messed up—there’s some other agenda. There
is something else tied to this advice, otherwise you don’t care. Otherwise you
would never call this person. You only call them because calling them has some
benefit to yourself. That isn’t 
tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
. 
Tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
is you call
people, you follow up with them, you ask them questions—when you actually
care about them. Now here’s for example a situation just to put this in practical
terms. You have a friend but you never call him. You know he is going through

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a divorce, you know he’s going through some trouble; but you never call him,
you don’t care. Then you found out that he has something of yours or he has
some contact that you need. He has a phone number for somebody; you need
that phone number, so now you call him. ‘How’s it going? How’s your
situation? Any better? By the way I need a phone number.’ You don’t really care
about his situation, all you care about is your phone number. That’s not 
tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
. 
Tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
is when you call someone because you care. Not
because of some other reason, that’s part of the sincerity inside the words 
bi-l-
ḥaqq
.
And finally, the last bit in 
tawāṣī
bi-l-ḥaqq
, if you look at it as a 
mafʿūl
, then
it means: ‘using the truth they advise each other’. In other words, a lot of
Ṣaḥābah
interpreted 
al-ḥaqq
here as 
al-Qur’ān
, i.e.